Hotel Guidebook Picks: LUXE City Guides Recommend Only the Hotels du Jour

May 15, 2008 at 3:47 PM | by juliana | Comment (1)

LUXE city guide: Don't leave your cab ride without it!

There's a new guidebook on the scene called LUXE City Guides. Ok technically, it's not brand-spanking new as the LUXE guides (yes, all-capped) were a little-known secret amongst travelers headed to Asia.

But now LUXE has gone mainstream and they have just released city guides to London, Los Angeles, Chicago, Barcelona, Berlin and Florence. The plan is to have a total of 28 city guides available online and in stores by the end of the June.

LUXE guides are different from your usual travel guidebooks. For starters, we wouldn't call them a book. These guides are sleek and compact with an accordion-style pull-out of information. They were designed to fit inside your purse or pocket so you don't look like a typical tourist. Each cover is also artistically designed instead of using a photo of a well-known city landmark that was taken in the 1980s.

There's also no maps or pictures of any sort throughout this guide--just witty prose that appeals to hipsters and fashionistas alike. As their tagline reads, "If it's 'in', it's in here."

For instance, here's the kick-off to the New York edition:

Iconic, majestic, grand, kitsch, the tops, the bottoms, the kit and the kaboodle, NY is one huge and mercurial melting pot. Fashion forward, status conscious, food and culture epicentric, exasperating, exhilarating and never out of vogue; welcome to the fabulous Wintour Wonderland.

The guides are separated into different catgories: Accommodations, Restaurants, Bars, Spa and Beauty, Activities, Very Useful (a hodgepodge of services from hospitals to dream car rentals) and Shopping Itineraries. Plus it sums up the must-see and do in each nabe.

As far as hotel picks go, we're impressed with the list that LUXE came up with. There's the old UES standbys like the St. Regis and the Carlyle but also thrown into the mix is the Bowery Hotel, the Mercer, GPH, London NYC and Thor.

Plus, they even list the "Goss" on hotels to come. In this edition it was Six Columbus "running later than every fashion week show combined"), the Standard and a new hotel in Tribeca by he who should not be named.

In fact, we couldn't help thinking to ourselves that if HotelChatter were to put out a paper guide, it would sound very much like this.

There are some downsides to jaunting around Dubai with the oil princes or strolling the boutiques of fashion-conscious Melbourne with a LUXE guide stuck inside your shirt pocket or tucked away in your limited-edition Prada fairy bag. For starters, the print is a little small. Nothing too problematic for 20-somethings with corrective lenses. But grandma and grandpa will definitely gripe about this.

Also, the aforementioned lack of maps and pictures mean you should probably have a good handle on the layout of the city before you go and consult a LUXE guide.

Lastly, we kept having trouble sticking the LUXE guide back into its plastic case. This made for a mishap when we were trying to exit a cab and gather our belongings. Although, don't read into that too much as we are notoriously clumsy. Bridget Jones would pity us.

The LUXE guides are available online and in select Borders stores. Prices range from $9 for a single guide to $16 for a three-book travel set to $110 for a swanky box set.

Comment (1)

Return to » Hotel Guidebook Picks: LUXE City Guides Recommend Only the Hotels du Jour

I got into a debate of sorts with someone when I went to review the Wallpaper City Guide at Amazon. A Luxe lover had written how little he thought of the "WCG Bangkok". I responded:

Reviewer "Ikat" has a valid point: the Wallpaper City Guides (WCG) are not comprehensive, and there is a bit of an extended travel magazine article aspect to them: however, I like WCG's differences from Luxe City Guides. Luxe engages in snarky comments and its prose (rather like a slick, smug club kid writing for middle-aged wannabee hipsters with bottomless pockets) is of a sort that I've always found grating. I tossed my Luxe Tokyo guide for this very reason.

The WCG style is meant to whet your appetite and give you a few ideas about what to see if you have but a few days to check Bangkok out. I like its brevity. The WCG gives hotel and restaurant options both expensive and reasonable, making it worthwhile for the traveller on a more modest budget, whereas Luxe covers only the most expensive places to stay, eat, etc. Luxe has no pictures and a tiny, crammed-to-the-rafters typeface: WCG has attractive photos and great layout that's easier to read. I, for one, prefer it.

I hate the "If you have to ask you can't afford it!" smugness of Luxe. In writing about the "WCG Tokyo" guide:

Luxe assumes you'll be paying the $700 Mandarin Oriental or Grand Hyatt rate, and that nightclubbing and shopping is all you're interested in ... WCG has a servicable fold-out map of the Tokyo subway system inside its back cover: Luxe has a list of taxi, limo and private car-hire companies.

Enough said.

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