Travel to Cities

Fodor's Toronto 2004 (Fodor's Gold Guides)

Format: Paperback
Author: Fodor's
ReleaseDate: 02 March, 2004
Publisher: Fodor's
Rating:

decent, but not great
The Toronto guidebook is no different. Fodor's guidebooks are decent in that they provide short, simple facts and info on destinations. The big complaint is the lack of good maps (though i can't be too picky, you can't really rely on maps in a paperback guidebook!). I tend to prefer frommer's guides, as i find their recommendations to be more bang on, and to my budget. I recommend using a combination of good guidebooks like frommers and Let's Go, in addition to the traveler-submitted hotel review sites like www. zoomandgo. com, or the ones on travelocity.

A fine book and great for first time travelers
However, I do have to admit that the maps could be more detailed. I mainly use and still buy Fodor's series for most of my traveling for ease of use of the book and familiarity. For budget or more seasoned travelers who prefer a detailed map of the walking tours and do not need the section about how to pack and where to keep your passport try the awesome Lonely Planet or something else. On the historical stuff, I would say this book is just fine. On my next travel (not to Toronto) I'll try Let's Go and Frommer's, heard lots of goody stuff about them and never use them before.

Reasonable city guide but mildly bland for Toronto.

Probably quite useful to someone who has never been to Toronto before but not the stimulating read the present-day "Megacity" deserves. This book begins with a short yet reasonable first orientation to the city with much of its bulk devoted to simple data in categorized lists.

My personal impression was that while the guide does explicitly note the excitement of this new, diverse first city of Canada, it doesn't go far enough to actually capture or express it.

Yes, it is a fine book for what it is -- a city guide with lots of basic information -- but even there I had a couple of points of contention.

For one thing, as soon as I opened the book and saw the map of Toronto's location between Michigan and New York state, which I did like, I wondered, however, why one of the major freeways -- the 402 from Port Huron -- was left off.

Another example was the piece of information connecting Canada's federal official French-English language policy and highway signs. One has nothing to do with the other since traffic signs, regulations and highways are totally under Provincial not Federal jurisdiction. What concerned me here was the thought of visiting drivers getting the impression that driving regulations might be consistent throughout Canada.

It seems like the book is primarily targeted to Americans. If I am correct, Americans already know that Toronto is a new, big and exciting city before they even bother to pick up a book on it. The city guide which describes Toronto deserves to be a lot more motivating than that level of excitement which Fodor's standard format relegates to it's run-of-the-mill city guides.

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