Vienna Unwrapped Inspiration and Planning For Independent Travellers who are visiting Vienna
Do you want to dig deep or wide when searching for the best travel tips in Austria’s capital? Picking the right Vienna Tourism Guide is essential if you’d like a complementary print guide, too. Ideally, it provides an overview, then details the most rewarding places to see. If you want a ‘second voice’ to Vienna Unwrapped, buy a good city guide. I have researched a few guides on Amazon that complement the insight shared on this site.
Best Classic Vienna Tourism Guide Books
1. National Geographic Traveler
The book includes guided walks and drives and a TravelWise section with practical information. Definitely worthwhile.
2. Lonely Planet City Guide
Vienna Tourism Guide. This Vienna tourism guide balances historic with contemporary facts about Vienna well. On the first pages, you receive an update on social, political and cultural highlights of the year.
The book is well structured and has good chapters on Arts And Architecture and Local Neighbourhoods. Many of the recommendations made for eateries and shops could have been from my local friends or myself.
3. DK Eyewitness Travel Guide
Vienna Tourism Guide. My husband and in-laws, who visited Vienna for the first time a couple of years ago, found this Vienna tourism guide highly informative while easily digestible because of its many coloured images and short snippets of information about Vienna’s most popular landmarks, neighbourhoods, public transport and restaurants. I think it’s a good guide for first time visitors who want to cover off Vienna’s main attractions in a few days. This guide is reasonably up to date though make sure you stay on top of things as Vienna’s museum and restaurant landscape, and public transport have been changing considerably.
4. Time Out Vienna
Vienna Tourism Guide. Like Lonely Planet, this guide balances out Vienna’s Imperial heritage with a contemporary update of the city. I like the occasional quotes from locals in the guide, and the short essays about noteworthy cultural observations. For example, it mentions the Vienneses’ continuing love for smoking in public places. Most of the recommendations made would pass the ‘locals test’. There is a separate chapter on the trendy Leopoldstadt neighbourhood. City maps provided are average and would need to be completed by a separate map of Vienna.
5. Indagare Mapped Out City Guide
Vienna Tourism Guide. This is a well done blend of city guide and city map. It traces 3 day itineraries in the city for the sophisticated traveller. I am delighted that some of my favourite places have been selected for this eight pages leporello fold, such as Meierei at Stadtpark or the Museumsquartier.
6. Cadogan Guides: Vienna Prague Budapest
Vienna Tourism Guide. Most overseas travellers cover these three cities when they travel to Central Europe. They are usually challenged on how to divide their time among those cities.
This book combines three city guides in one, with lots of easy visual navigation, photographs and practical information. Great guide for first time visitors to the area who want to make sure they don’t miss out on the key landmarks in each city.
Best Contemporary Vienna Tourism Guides
7. Wallpaper City Guide
Vienna Tourism Guide. This guide is written by editors of eponymous art and design bible Wallpaper Magazine. It exhibits the best of local art and architecture, places to stay, eat, drink, exercise and relax. The Wallpaper Guide is updated annually. Large beautiful images of recommended spots dominate the slim guide, which enables you to see Vienna like a design oriented local thirty-something. Historic references are almost completely cut out. The book’s discrete cover allows you to leaf through it in public without being recognised as a tourist.
8. Cool Vienna
Vienna Tourism Guide. Let author Hubertus Hohenlohe ‘talk’ and you get a feel for the worldly pleasures of the city. Certainly, Hubertus is the most illustrous of Vienna travel guide writers I know of. The Austro-Liechtenstein-Mexican aristocrat does photography, writing, singing and professional ski racing. He is well connected with Europe’s jet-set and aristocracy.
Cool Vienna describes cool hotels, shops, bars, clubs and restaurants with beautiful images and informative copy. A Vienna city guide for those who never thought of travelling to Vienna.
Best Special Tourism Guides
9. Vienna for Music Lovers
Vienna Tourism Guide. I haven’t personally screened this Vienna tourism guide but thought it may be a useful start for further investigation for travellers who love music. The book was written by Dr. David L. Nelson, US professor of music, owner of the Medal of Honour by the City of Vienna, and walking lexicon of musical Vienna, as the director of a Vienna museum called him. The guide slices and dices Vienna into an exciting mix of musical topics: from the best local orchestras, institutions and buildings of operas, musical theatres and concerts, to to music related museums, following the footsteps of key composers(Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Strauss, Schubert) to a vast directory of musical addresses and a Who is Who in musical Vienna.
10. City Guide for Children
Vienna Tourism Guide. Great English language Vienna guides for children are rare. In a museum shop in Vienna I first found this guide which is definitely the best and most up to date. In the meantime, Amazon stocks it as well.
The book aims at children aged between eight and twelve years. Three book characters, a girl, a boy and their dog, lead the children through Vienna in six different walks. The children also learn enough about Vienna’s key attractions to write a report about Vienna when back at school. Throughout the book you will find cute and colorful illustrations.
11. A Doctor’s Guide. 15 Walking Tours Through Vienna’s Medical History
Vienna Tourism Guide. This unusual Vienna tourism guide will appeal to medical doctors, dentists, nurses, pharmacists and other health professionals. It rolls up Vienna’s reputation as a centre for medicine in 15 beautifully illustrated walking tours. You will follow in the footsteps of Sigmund Freud, Ignaz Semmelweis, the ‘saviour of mothers’, pioneering surgeon Theodor Billroth and other famous physicians. Other tours include visits to the Fools’ Tower, the world’s first special building to host the mentally Ill, the Botanical Gardens of the University of Vienna, and the New General Hospital(where US singer George Michael was saved from a life threatening type of pneumonia in December 2011).
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