Hawaii

Whenever I am planning on taking a trip, one of my first courses of action is to consult the DK Eyewitness Travel Guides for that location. I love the layout and the visual feel to the guides. The size of these books makes them ideal for carrying with you on vacation, while still packing in tons of information. The Hawaii Eyewitness Travel Guide is no exception. The book is divided into sections on each of the islands and covers a variety of activities. After searching on the internet for hours, I was able to find the most reliable and precise information in this book.

This book is easy to read, concise and to the point. Seems to contain all of the sites a first time visitor would want to see. I purchased two other books on Hawaii but this will be our main guide. The others will serve if we want more details about the sites. I know others who have used this book in Hawaii and they highly recommend it.

I am a fan of the DK travel guides, and particularly like the color photography that allows readers to visualize the area more than most other travel guides. In reality I would like to give this guide 3.5 stars, but will have to settle for four. The photography is generally good, and the information is generally correct in my experience. This book features some excellent pointers that are especially good for those new to Hawaii. The book has a brief background section on the islands as a whole, and has decent island by island coverage of all the major Hawaiian Islands (certainly all the ones a tourist would visit.) My only real critique of the book is that with a length of just over 200 pages, it is not terribly complete given the diversity of the Hawaiian Islands. The hotel (and restaurant) listings are generally accurate, but are not complete, resulting in the situation where some fairly well known and sizeable properties are overlooked, which can be extremely annoying if you happen to be booked in one of those properties. This is by far the biggest drawback to this book. My take on the situation is that this is a good book for finding things to explore further in Hawaii, but when it comes down to detailed planning, I recommend that you consult other guidebooks; I particularly like the Lonely Planet series of guides, which has offerings for all the islands that you will be interested in visiting, albeit with less captivating photography.

This book is great even though I've never read a single word the cover is very fasinating. I love Hawaii and I would really like to do to France sometime. However this book seems rather superfluous really compared to others. I mean I like kangeroos, but do I like them THAT much. I'm not sure. Oh well. This is a wonderful book because it's sixteen dollars cheaper here than at this other store where it was thirty. It's not very concise like this other book I read about Hawaii. In that book the words were garbled so it was very difficult to read...I think it might have been written in Spanish. Anyway I love Hawaii.

I always use the Eyewitness travel books when I travel to new places. These books are concise and very reader-friendly. The Hawaii guide was extremely useful in planning our honeymoon in Hawaii: we used it to plan all of our activities and were very pleased with the results. Some things are outdated (such as times of Lu'au on Kauai), but overall this book is great.