About the Author

Marco Polo Travel Publishing offers a wide range of highquality cartographic products and travel guides. Marco Polo Pocket Guides are known for theirhandy, compact format and Insider Tips. Our Travel Handbooks are the first to include infographics and ourSpiral Guides feature unique lay-flat spiral binding. Marco Polo Maps are famous for the highquality of cartography in their Country, City and Holiday Maps.

Reviews

Wanderlust Magazine: You've got to applaud Marco Polo's chutzpah to launch 30 new city/island guidebooks into an already pretty crowded market. Aiming to occupy the middle ground between the context-heavy luggage fillers and the context-free thinner volumes, the main USPs of these user-friendly guides are the plentiful 'Insider tips' dotted around each edition, the maps they're packaged with, and the pocket cheering price. Complete with near-magazine style features, they're certainly a less intimidating proposition than some of the big wedges on offer. Burton Mail: Before we look closer at this Florida guide, we first need to look at the Marco Polo range of travel guides. Marco Polo is new - brand new - and will be publishing a whopping 55 travel guides this year. This Florida title is among the first 30 titles in this new series of full-colour guides which range from Stockholm to San Francisco and Mallorca to Thailand. The front inside cover folds out to reveal 15 of the best Marco Polo tips for visitors to Florida while the back cover features two maps of Miami. Having visited Florida last year, I have read many travel guides on the destination ranging from the text-heavy through to the bright and colourful. What strikes me most about the Marco Polo guide is that it has escaped the Disney bubble. Admittedly, Disney is a very important attraction in Florida, however, it is just one (large) family of attractions in a very big state and so the Marco Polo guide reminds you of what else is on offer. The book is split into districts and so you have chapters on Miami, The Keys, Everglades, West Coast, Panhandle and Central Florida. Each chapter contains a multitude of colour photographs and a few paragraphs explaining the highlights of the area. The chapters always include a low budget fact box for those travelling on a shoestring and they always include a Marco Polo insider tip. Top attractions and the best hotels are then listed with a key indicating a rough price bracket and ideal sightseeing vantage points. These low-budget books complete with maps are certainly worth their weight in gold. I expect these Marco Polo guides will certainly give the more established brands a run for their money. I'm very impressed and look forward to more titles becoming available.