Top Tour Guides Rated by Travel Purpose

When you travel, a tour guide is very helpful to provide insight on how to select a restaurant, hotel, and to determine what the most fun thing to do is. But not all tour guides are built for the same purpose. This list provides insight into where to find terrific information on hiking, geology, road side things to do, restaurants and hotels, and just your average tour guide. We use most of these before we travel to plan our trip; often the books are too bulky to take along. When selecting a general purpose travel guide, we often go for the one with the best pictures and best general information about duties, climate, health requirements, often finding Fodor's our first choice although Lonely Planet Guides are often helpful for finding out about National Parks and sports activities and Moon Handbooks has been an alternate.

Best Tour Guide for Locating Hotels, Restaurants and Things to Do Inside the United States

Our first resource we pick up is an AAA Travel guide for the region. For the cost, a year's membership in AAA, you get the travel guides free as well as help if your tire goes flat or need a tow. The information in the travel guides is concise and usual on target. And almost free is good.

Best Tour Guide for Locating Hotels and Restaurants Outside the United States

Michelin makes a green guide and a red guide to travel that are both great tour guides. The red guide has been the best resource for finding hotels and restaurants. The information included is very concise and tells you price, address, phone number and website and number of rooms and a bit of a review. The green guides are a good compliment but not perhaps as good as others.

Best Tour Guides to Finding Wildlife in the United States

Falcon Guides puts out a series of wildlife finding guides for every state in the United States. These guides are often the best view into the National Park, Wildlife Reserves, State Parks, National Memorials and free space that are available. The information includes mammals, fish but not a fishing guide, birds, butterflies, and reptiles. Many times we found a gem unlisted anywhere else that led to a good hike.

Best Hiking Guides

Mountaineers Press puts out a large collection of hiking, climbing and mountaineering books that are first rate. These are the guides to pick up when you want to go hiking. We've bought many for the Northwest where they are located and found reliable information including hike lengths, maps to buy, pictures, and unusual sights along the hike.

Best Golfing Guide

Fodor's puts out "Golf Digest's Guide to Where to Play". This one golf guide has been indispensable when planning our trips in the United States since my husband and I both golf. The information about golf courses arranged alphabetically by state with a city index includes price, address, phone number and general information about golf course condition.

It may seem like we buy too many travel guides, but you never know what is possible until you have food to fuel your dreams.