Frommer's Cancun & the Yucatan Day by Day [With Foldout Map]

This is a good book to give you a quick overview on hotels, food, and places to go around cancun. Handy size makes it easy to keep on-hand for reference. It was published a couple years ago, so don't expect it to be current on prices. Other things may change, such as hotel and restaurant names. Information is "recycled" from one section to another. What might be listed in one area under "beaches" may pop up on other pages under "snorkeling" or "eco tours". If you want to purchase only one book to help you plan your trip to cancun and the yucatan, you may want to buy the regular version of fromers or foders that is updated yearly. Otherwise, this book is great to give you an idea of things available to you. You can loosly plan your trip with it and carry it along while you're traveling. I always buy more than one type of travel guide to get more than one view of an area. A nice thing about this travel guide is that it gives you ideas on how to get the most out of your vacation depending on if you stay a few days, week, or two weeks. It also gives opinions on the best tours, including eco and all day, places to snorkel, eat, and more. This book has a removeable map which is very convienent. I used this book to find out about all the places in the area, and then looked up each place online that sounded interesting to me to get more specific details and see pictures other people have taken (by searching images). Some places that sounded good in the book did not look interesting online once I saw other peoples' pictures and reviews. One thing that I found difficult was choosing between the regular frommers and fodors books. This is what I noticed between the two: FROMMERS is more popular. It is written by two people, and all opinions belong to them. Some things give more details, such as the bay of sleeping sharks does not have many sharks anymore, so you will most likely not see any. Fodors leaves this out. But this is only relivant to experinced suba divers anyway. Frommers has handy removable maps. FODORS includes many quotes inside their book that were submitted to them from the average joe traveler. They want to hear your opinions, and may even include them in the next book. Fodors has much more information on restaurants and hotels. It may seem like info overload if you are trying to sort through it all and choose only one, but it was nice to see that the hotel I booked in the "hotel zone" was in Fodors. It was not listed in Frommers. Frodors does have maps, but they are not removable from the book. Another good guide is Eyewitness Travel. It lists the top ten of everything, and is the most recently published book (so far) out of all the cancun travel guides I have come across.

I was hesitant to buy this guide as many Frommers are mostly text (although detail intensive) without pics of the places I may want to visit. However, this pocket-sized guide has a good balance of written info and photos of the places to tour. It is set up with 10 Best lists and also "If You Only Have X Days" intineraries that I found especially helpful on our 4 day trip to the Mayan Riviera. There is enough detail to get around with some inside tips as well. Tulum, Chichen Itza, cenote Zaci in Valladolid (amazing), and the surprisingly interesting eco-park Xcaret (the evening show is a must-see)were the highlights of our trip. All of these were covered in the guide. We also had a Frommers Yucatan guidebook that was mostly text but it had maps of Chichen Itza and other mayan ruins as well as greater detail throughout. But the Day by Day guide is more than ample for the short-stay casual tourist.

this guide was very helpful and informative about the region especially in finding good places to eat at

Small enough to carry around and very useful! The authors write clearly and make it sound fantastic. Can't wait for my trip to start, Will carry this with me everywhere.