Trying out a new holiday destination this year? You're probably going to need a travel guide to point you towards the best beaches, sightseeing and nightlife.
There are a number of on-line book sites with excellent travel sections, which will help you pinpoint relevant titles in a matter of minutes and then deliver your chosen pre-holiday reading direct to your door in a couple of days.
Amazon, one of the first web shops to open, has internet retailing down to a fine art. In the book department, select Browse Categories and click on Travel and Holiday for an enormous range covering atlases and maps, countries and regions, guide books, speciality travel and travel writing.
The guide book section has 42 series, catering for a wide range of tastes, from shopaholic spending sprees in major worldwide cities to getting away from it all off the beaten path. There's plenty of diversity among the speciality travel options, too, with books on budget travel, cruising, adventure holidays, pensioners' getaways and ecotourism.
When you've created your short-list, you'll find comprehensive information on each title, with front-cover photo, back-cover blurb, Amazon's own review and customer reviews and availability details and price savings. I won't bore you with the complicated system of multi-layered shipping charges, which will add £2.74 for a one-book delivery.
Blackwell's online version of its conventional bookshops is another good place to look. There are 92,784 titles in the travel section, so I suggest you narrow things down by selecting one of the sub-categories, which cover both holiday types (bed and breakfast, family travel) and destinations. All the books are initially displayed in list format with photos, in some cases, and details of country of origin, publication date and availability.
You then click for further information, some of which is quite technical, and a brief content summary.
With that amount of choice you're bound to find something suitable. Books published in the UK will be sent out to you free of charge in around four days but any printed in the United States incur a delivery charge of £4.11 and can take up to six weeks to arrive.
Finally, a freebie. Expedia is not only a good place to search online for a holiday, it has an excellent guides section covering major cities and hundreds of countries.
Pick up tips on health, money, the climate and social conventions, read about places to go and check out the travel information and weather forecasts free of charge.
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