Rick Steves' France, Belgium, and the Netherlands: Covers Paris, the Loire Valley, Provence, Brussels, and Amsterdam

This book was great. I recently went to Paris for the first time and found this book to have invaluable information and to be extremely accurate with pricing, timetables, etc. Not only did it save me about 2 hours standing in line for the Louvre by enlightening me to the underground entrance, but the walking tour had all the necessary places to stop in a great and easy to follow order. I also found the book extremely useful when traveling to Beaune for the winery tours. The hotel, winery tour and restaurant I selected were straight from the book and they were everything he said it was.The only thing that disappointed me was the lack of information on Dijon. It's a fairly large city and easy to inlcude with a trip to Beaune, but there wasn't any information at all.One other useful piece of information would be a holiday schedule. France closes entirely down on certain holidays and as a tourist that would be useful information when planning a trip.

While I only visited the French Riviera, Rick's guide was some valuable but overall no slim. He recommended the best restaurant I have ever eaten in, L'Authentica in Nice but really didn't cover the cities I was visiting very well. For a country guide I would have expected a little more information - and better maps. It's still a great choice and probably would be even better for those staying in Paris.

This was a good guide to this area of Europe. Most of all, I found that it had the most up to date information which I was looking for. I have now been able to plan my trip to Europe with a little more confidence. The book reviews the different places to see in this region with good background information. Its only shortcoming would be that I would have preferred more information relevant to visitors outside the EU and US, but we can't have everything!

We used this guide last year on a trip through France, Belgium and the Netherlands and found it to be indispensable. Since this was our first trip to Europe, we were very nervous about making train and hotel reservations on our own. Rick's book made it a breeze. It was also very accurate on hotel and restaurant prices. Overall the book made our trip much more enjoyable and I have recommended it to a number of people.

We spent three weeks bouncing around France, and constantly used this book. I particularly recommend his suggestions for a hotel in the town of Chennonceaux, inexpensive, courteous, lovely; the most gorgeous place I've ever stayed in (also cheap), the Hotel de Poste in Beynac (Dordogne) which we would never have found without this book; and in Carcassonne, the chambre d'hote across from the Hotel des Ramparts, which also we could never have found without Steves' help. (We've used his books for other parts of Europe as well.) I couldn't recommend this book more strongly