Fodor's Australia

While I gleaned much useful info. from Fodor's guide, I wish that they had either given a better overview of lodging, or left it alone entirely. How does a hotel/apartment receive a review? What is the criteria? A bit more info. would have been helpful. Overall, a good tool for planning a trip to Oz.

This book is pretty thorough. I haven't gone on my trip yet, but I feel much more confident traveling with this book in hand. I'm very pleased and the information is all relevant to this year. Written clearly and concisely and something for every budget.

I've been ploughing thru Oz guides lately researching and planning a possible trip, and this one is comparable to the Frommer's guide. A good guide, less photos than the Dorling-Kindersley, Nat'l Geog., and Insight Guides, but then you're getting two to three hundred pages less of info for five to seven dollars more in those books. I have a suggestion on how to use these two different types of guides, which is these beautiful, lavishly illustrated, glossy guides are great for looking at the photos of the sights and doing basic research, and for zeroing in on where you want to go, then you can pick up the Frommer's and Lonely Planet and Fodor's guides to get more information. For a country as big and as diverse as Oz, one guide really isn't enough, so you could buy one of each, and you'd probably do quite well. (The only problem was, after I'd looked at all the spectacular photos in the Insight, DK, and N.G. guides, I felt like I'd almost been there, and was reluctant to spend several thousand dollars on an actual as opposed to an armchair trip :-)). Overall, a well written, detailed, and enjoyable guide on that mysterious and fabled land Down Under. ***Nerdy paleontological footnote. I have to say one more thing about Australia, which is that millions of years ago, I once read in an Encyclopedia Britannica article on Australia that there were 10-foot high, 600-pound carnivorous kangaroos that could probably have made short work of us puny humans. Fortunately, they all died out long before the arrival of the first Aborigines 60,000 years ago. :-)

The book was usefull and it's a good guide, but the overall quality of the book itself is really bad. And the layout and size of the book also. It looks as, it's a travellers book, but they don't have the traveller in mind when they have to do the paperback.

When researching my honeymoon to Australia, I first borrowed this book from the library. It had a good deal of information and also great website addresses for me to search for more information. Since it became useful, I did purchase a copy which we took with us on our honeymoon. We went to Sydney and the Great Barrier Reef areas and this book helped us with ideas of things to see and do and more options on lodging. On the planes in between our destinations, we would read what places there were to see and activities to do and then we discussed where we had to go and what we read about that didn't seem interesting to us. Also, I would refer anyone to fodors.com before they travel anywhere because on their message boards you can ask Australians and past travelers about anything you can think of and not have to search any book. That was truly the most useful planning tool. All-in-all, not a bad choice as a guide for all of Australia and it gave a good deal of information about where we were going, but for specific city information...get online!