The cities covered by Fleming were Hong Kong, Macau, Tokyo, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, New York, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva, Naples and Monte Carlo.

[6] Fleming stayed just three days in Hong Kong, before he and Hughes flew to Tokyo where they were joined by Torao Saito—also known as "Tiger"—a journalist with the Asahi Shimbun newspaper group.

[7] Fleming spent three days in Tokyo and decided there would be "no politicians, museums, temples, Imperial palaces or Noh plays, let alone tea ceremonies"[8] on his itinerary; he instead visited a judo academy, a Japanese soothsayer and the Kodokan, a local gymnasium.

[9] Fleming left Tokyo on Friday the 13th to fly to Hawaii; 2,000 miles into the Pacific one of the Douglas DC-6's engines caught fire and the plane nearly crashed, although it managed to make an emergency landing on Wake Island.

[12] By the time Fleming got to New York he was fed up with travelling and his biographer, Andrew Lycett notes that "his sour mood transferred to the city and indeed the country he had once loved".

[15] Roy Thomson, the chairman of The Sunday Times, enjoyed Fleming's articles and suggested a number of other cities, including Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Havana, New Orleans and Montreal.

Terry took Fleming into East Berlin and told him many of the details about Operation Stopwatch, the Anglo-American attempt to tunnel into the Soviet-occupied zone to tap into landline communication of the Soviet Army headquarters.

[26] John Raymond, in The Sunday Times, wrote that "Mr Fleming's prose arouses the voyeur that lurks in all but the best of us",[30] and considered that the book remained "supremely readable" throughout.

[30] Writing for The Times Literary Supplement, Xan Fielding found the title of the book to be misleading, noting that apart from a very small win at the casinos of Las Vegas, "his personal experience of thrills seems to have been just as limited everywhere else on his itinerary.

[33] The critic for The Financial Times, James Bredin, declared that Thrilling Cities "can—and will, compulsively—be read at a sitting",[34] although he found that overall "it is an unsatisfying report" because of the brevity of the subject.

[36] The reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, Robert Kirsch, did not enjoy the book and considered Fleming to be "a second-rate reporter, filled with the irritating prejudices and pomposities of a middle-class English traveller.

[37] Writing the review for The Boston Globe, Marjory Adams thought Thrilling Cities to have "an acid gaiety in its descriptions",[28] which contributed to her overall summary of the book: "it is fun!