SAS Airlines offers a free downloadable Amsterdam mini-travel guide

Someone recently told me about some mini-travel guides for 25 different cities on the SAS (Scandinavian) Airlines website so I checked out the Amsterdam one. By far the best thing about these guides is that they are downloadable PDF files so you can keep them on your laptop and/or print them out. The information is fairly basic, but there are some features that make them worth having a look (although I must admit my second favorite thing about the Amsterdam one is its only full-page ad is for Hewlett Packard and features a lovely photo of Gwen Stefani).

The first page offers some help general information and then you get to what appears to be a 3-month concert and events calendar. After that you get some basic info about the city, the museums, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, shopping, and hotels. There are only a few listings per topic, but you can tell it was done by someone who knows the city pretty well.

After that you get some more basic information about public transport and such, followed by 3 pages of maps (with the Gwen ad mixed in), but only the final map is of much use to someone visiting the city. The final page is a street-name index for the good city map, and that could really come in handy locating attractions if you’ve got those printed out.

This is obviously a cool idea and hopefully these things will get better over time. I like traveling with things like this because they list all the museum hours and prices and also offer some interesting ideas for things that many people don’t know about. And the map and the index at the end could really come in handy, although getting free city maps upon arriving in Amsterdam is not much of a struggle.

We’ll keep our eyes on this and let you know if these add new features, but in the meantime you can download the Amsterdam one directly here. It’s only 1.8 MB, so it should take long if you’ve got a decent connection.