We began as book publishers and currently have seventeen titles in the Karen Brown Series. This year, 2008, celebrates thirty years in publishing for Karen Brown’s Guides.
We pride ourselves on bringing you recommendations for both places to stay and suggestions for regional countryside itineraries. Our responsibility is to you, the traveler. We see everything we recommend and offer you selective and honest evaluations.
Now with the launch of our new website, we are pleased to be able to enhance what we have offered you through our published guides and previously on our website.
Karen Brown (and her guides) might just be the perfect travel companions. She knows the best places to stay and the sights to see in the world's most delightful places.
- Larry Bleiberg, Travel Editor, Dallas Morning News
An unbeatable combination of good taste, accurate descriptions, and travel savvy make these guides indispensable.
- Martin Rapp, Travel & Leisure
Books to dream over, but also to use.
- The Washington Post
About Our Guides:
Savvy travelers have come to depend on Karen Brown's recommendations. Our Guidebooks now include 17 titles covering Western Europe, The United States and Mexico. These guides combine a warm personal tone, line drawings, color maps and itineraries to enable independent travelers to plan their own vacations.
Contact Information:
Karen Brown's Guides
PO Box 70
San Mateo, CA 94401 USA
Phone: 650-342-9117
Fax: 650-342-9153
Send us an Email
About Our Properties:
Every property that Karen Brown recommends is one that the Karen Brown team have seen and enjoyed -- our personal recommendation written with the belief that where you lay your head each night makes the difference between a good and a great vacation. Our recommendations include mills, castles, pubs, inns, farms, houses, chateaux, villas, cottages, palaces, hotels, from the simplest to the most divinely luxurious. There is no charge to be included in a Karen Brown guide.
Only properties recommended in Karen Brown's Guides are eligible to participate on the main Karen Brown website. For an annual fee they receive an enhanced online presence which includes color photos of their property, direct links to their website, email address and online booking service (where appropriate), and inclusion in the individual itineraries as ordered from our online store.
In addition, Karen Brown's World provides you with information about quality places to stay that are not in our guides. We include properties from hotel associations whose selection criteria we trust.
About Our Research Team:
Karen Brown and her husband Rick Herbert live in Moss Beach, a small town on the coast south of San Francisco where they have their own superb hideaway, Seal Cove Inn.
Clare Brown was a travel consultant for many years, specializing in planning itineraries using small countryside hotels. The focus of her job remains unchanged, but now her expertise is available to a larger audience-the readers of her daughter Karen's guides. When Clare and her husband, Bill, are not traveling, they live either in Hillsborough, California, or at their home in Vail, Colorado.
June Brown's love of travel was inspired by the National Geographic magazines that she read as a girl in her dentist's office. June hails from Sheffield, England and lived in Zambia and Canada before moving to northern California where she lives in San Mateo with her husband, Tony, and their daughter Clare.
Nicole Franchini was born in Chicago and raised in a bilingual family, her father being Italian. She received a B.A. degree in languages from William Smith College and the Sorbonne, Paris and has been residing in Italy for the past 17 years. Currently living in the countryside of Sabina near Rome with her family, she runs her own travel consulting business, Hidden Treasures of Italy, which organizes personalized group and individual itineraries.
