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Phileas Fogg and Passepartout approach the Swiss Alps

Travel Topics

Travel Guides
What a sunset! Wish you were here. These travel guides, websites, and directories are some of the most popular out there.  Most offer comprehensive travel and destination information. We have also included some guides covering special areas, such as backpacking.  Country guides usually include information on cities, while city guides usually only cover cities.  They are listed in alphabetical order.
 

Click on the appropriate letter-group to find a travel guide by name. 

Index

A-E F-J K-O P-T U-Z
 
Country Guides  P-T
  
PlanetWare    * * *  
This is another beautiful, comprehensive travel guide website that is easy to navigate.
 
Professional Travel Guide  * * *

Destinations

They say they are the "world's most comprehensive online travel planning resource." With over 7,000 comprehensive destination guides, they are certainly an excellent source of information.  (This information used to be accessible only by travel agencies. It is a beautiful website with excellent worldwide coverage.
 
Realtravel  
A beautiful website with excellent worldwide coverage based on real travelers reporting on the places they have visited. They have a free travel planner, special travel deals and a travel blog.
 
Rick Steves' Europe Travel Guides  * * *

 

Buy at Amazon.com
An excellent site for the independent and budget traveler or backpacker. Practical and up-to-date advice on traveling in Europe. He also has a phrase book series you can buy.
 
Rough Guides  

Buy at Amazon.com

This is a well-known travel guide series with an attitude! They have an excellent on-line site. Besides covering basic tourist information on over 4,000 countries and cities worldwide, they have information on things like bars, discos, nightclubs, etc in a city.  Besides travel, they also have Rough Guides for music, the internet, and reference. Click here to go to their overall home page where you can link to any of these topics.
 
Sacred Places Travel Guides (not a travel guide series) Buy Guides to Sacred Places at Amazon.com
A beautiful series of online guides with comprehensive coverage of sacred places throughout the world. Includes not only background and history, but also tourist information on how to get to the location, where to stay and how to visit or explore the sacred site. Sometimes sacred sites are a single location and sometimes it encompasses a wide area.
 
Schmap

The Schmap Player is a small, easy-to-use piece of freeware that you can download and install on your Windows PC.  Then download interactive Schmap Guides:  dynamically explore a city, island or region. Play virtual tours of recommended hot spots. Find restaurants and bars. Print your own destination guides.
 
Sierra Club Guides

Buy at Amazon.com

The Sierra Club is known for their excellent hiking, backpacking and outdoor guides with extensive United States coverage, including national parks, but also other countries and regions of the world.  The guides include details on accommodations, including booking offices, hostels, hotels, campgrounds, and mountain huts and words of interest to hikers in the languages of the countries covered.
 
Simple Guides

Buy at Amazon.com

The Simple Guides focus on customs and etiquettes of countries of the world.
 
SoftGuides Network  
Here's the way it should be done!  Although they only cover one country now (Ireland), they cover several cities. (See City Guides at the bottom of this page.) Their guides rely on local input and feedback from users and tourists to the area. They also have online reservations. Check them out and check for more SoftGuides as they become available. 
  
SuperTravelNet.com  * * *  
This is the way a world traveler expects to start exploring. Besides the option of entering a city, country, company or resort name, you can start with their world map.  But what a map! They are the only website we have found that as you zoom in on a country map and then a part of a country, they have tourist information for that particular area -attractions, etc.  And you can go down to very small areas in a country.
 
The Big Blue Marble.com

If you want to travel like a local instead of a tourist, this is a great website to visit. You can learn how to find restaurants, accommodations, entertainment and sights that are used by locals rather than tourists.  Become a participant instead of a spectator in the daily life of people living in the global village.  Do you want to escape the rat race and live, work, or retire in another country?   If so, this is the site for you. 
 
The Civilized Explorer - Travel Information Page

This is the Travel Information Page of the Civilized Explorer.  Click here to go to their home page. They cover first class travel in the world.
 
The Directory of Travel

This is Travel.Org's "The Directory of Travel", a very comprehensive travel information site with links to everything from airlines to travel agents to tour companies including tour companies and travel agencies serving regions of the world. This is a real smorgasbord of travel information. It's one of the top travel web sites in number of visitors.
 
Tourist Offices Worldwide
This is our travel topic page that lists several good sites with comprehensive lists of government tourist offices in the United States (by state), Canada (by province) and worldwide.
 
Travel & Leisure - Destination Guides

This is the Travel & Leisure magazine's online destination guides. They are just as beautiful and complete as the magazine.
 
Travel Classics- The Magazine

This is a travel magazine with articles by great travel writers covering over 100 destinations worldwide. You can search by author or region. 
 
Travel Channel

This is the Discovery Channel's on-line version of their Travel Channel with a lot of good articles and information, as well as, links to other sites.  We can drop you off at their Destination section if you are in a hurry.
 
Travel.com

One of the most comprehensive and beautiful travel sites on the web compliments of the Discovery people.
  
Travelnotes.org

This is an excellent site that is less commercial than some of the other travel guides. It has very comprehensive travel information and a nice, clean layout with an easy-to-navigate user interface
 
Travelers Digest

This is a comprehensive site that has a nice, clean layout with an easy-to-navigate user interface.  You can click on a city, or region of a country, on the country map and go to a page about that city or region.
 
Travellerspoint

This is a great travel site with a clean interface.  They have a good collection of travel tools, guides, blogs and photographs provided by travelers.
 
Travelnow

This is an excellent site with very comprehensive travel information and a nice, clean layout with an easy-to-navigate user interface.
 
Travelocity.com

This is an excellent travel agency site that has very comprehensive travel information for places and cities of the world. This link takes you to their Destinations Guide.
 
Travel Resources On The Web

The Morton Grove Public Library in Morton Grove, Illinois, USA maintains a nice list of travel resources on the web.  It's not as extensive as our list, but we take our hat off to them for a job well done.  You will appreciate their simple categories which lead you directly down the same page to the topic and then all the web resources for it. We use the same approach.
  
TravelShop

An excellent, comprehensive, clean and easy to navigate site. We take you to the English version but they also have a German version.
  
TravelWise

This is a beautiful and comprehensive websites that includes information on countries of the world as well as travel articles.
 
TripAdvisor

This is an excellent combination search engine and directory of travel information.  One of the top-rated travel sites on the web.  They have unbiased vacation reviews and recommendations.
 
TripSpot

This is an excellent, very comprehensive, travel website packed with worldwide travel information with some interesting additional topics such as travel as articles on travel magazine's best lists.  No fancy artwork, just straightforward, well-organized information with direct links to many subjects.  
 
 
City Guides  P-T
  
SoftGuides Network

Here's the way it should be done! Their city maps are exceptionally detailed and interactive.  "The SoftGuides Network brings you the very best in unbiased city guide information compiled from contributions by locals in each city and continually modified and updated by feedback from users, both resident and tourist."   They currently cover the following cities: Dublin, Ireland / Pisa, Italy / Madrid and Barcelona, Spain / and Tokyo, Japan. They also have online reservations.  If you are planning a visit to any of these cities, check them out and check for more SoftGuides as they become available.
  
Time Out City Guides

Buy at Amazon.com

The online Time Out City Guides do an excellent job of covering over 30 cities of the world.  They have excellent, one-click categories and topics that make it easy to get around. They have a lot of practical advice for not only visitors, but also people living in the city.  They also publish weekly Time Out magazines for London and New York. They also publish paperback city guides that cover 33 cities of the world including major United States cities.
 
TripAdvisor

This is an excellent combination search engine and directory of travel information. Information is well organized and ranked for relevancy.  They have great city coverage.
  
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