Most people would agree that France, with its wonderfully diverse scenery, culture, cuisine an architecture, can offer something to suit all tastes-if you know where to go. With this in mind, Walks and Tours in France has been designed to help travellers find their way around, either by car or on foot, and to discover its many different faces at their own pace. This combination ensures you will see all the major sights in any given area, but it also enables you to search out the less well-known corners and to reach the heart of the country and its people.

The Automobile Association (Great Britain) has been publishing travel guides since around 1910; and by 1929 they were issuing 239,000 routes a year. In 2003 this number had risen to a staggering 32 million. The AA (Great Britain) has always produced routes and travel guides, a business activity that has grown rapidly in recent years - AA Publishing is now the UK's largest travel publisher, producing more than 8 million books in 2003. Begining in 1912 the AA also started to inspect hotels, and those receiving the AA's famous star classification were included in subsequent editions of the Members' Handbook. Today the association inspects and rates more than 8,000 hotels and bed and breakfast establishments each year and review almost 2,000 restaurants, publishing the results in a series of annual guides.