You”ve been saving and looking forward to it all year – two spectacular weeks in Europe will be the leisure travel adventure of a lifetime. You know you should really take a look at a guide book of some sort and your brother-in-law has a three-year old copy from his trip he”s glad to loan you. Mission accomplished. You”re ready to roll, right?

Reality check!

If you”re too cheap to spring for an up-to-date version of a quality travel guide, you don”t deserve to even go on vacation. In fact, your passport should be rescinded immediately. Think of it like this. A quality travel guide is a $25 tool that can save a $4,000 vacation. Otherwise, expect to find yourself lost on a corner in Paris, hemorrhaging April 29, 2014: More Opportunities to Succeed for Aboriginal StudentsApril 7, 2014: A Renewed Vision for Education in OntarioApril 4, 2014: High driving school chicago Graduation Rate Stays StrongAugust 28, 2013: Education Test Scores Continue to RiseCurriculum documents, exemplars and other policy documents spanning kindergarten to Grade 12. money at the seams, disgusted, afraid, hating the entire continent. Seriously, this misadventure of leisure travel could be easily avoided by a single trip to Barnes and Noble for a quality guide.

But here”s the rub. Not just any guide book will do. The only thing worse than no guide book is one containing bogus information. It seems that everyone and their cousin sells some sort of guide to the part of the world you”re heading to. How can you separate the good from the bad from the plain ugly? Over the years, the Jetsetter Show”s resident Renaissance Man and world traveler, Jason Hartman, has thumbed the pages of a guide or two whilst rambling through 64 different countries. Here are his favorites.

When it comes to spending more than a few days in a country, you need comprehensive coverage, which is exactly what you get with the Lonely Planet series of travel guides. Full of no-nonsense facts, low to middle budget options, and accurate on-the-ground information, you can”t go wrong with this choice. Since they”re not updated annually in all places, check out the printing date before purchase.

Other solid choices are Rough Guides, Let”s Go, and Frommer”s. You can”t go wrong with

any of these, though some are weighted more towards the visual (lots of pictures), and others toward facts. The great thing is that you can trust the information in these tomes. Do you really want to risk messing up your trip because you were too cheap to buy a single book? We didn”t think so. Good luck!

The Jetsetter Team

Flickr / malias

Tags: leisure travel