Whether you’re traveling for business or pleasure, one of the most important decisions of your trip will be where to stay :).

Since you’ll be spending your sleeping hours there, a good hotel will give you a good night’s rest and that will make the trip easier, whereas a bad hotel can ruin the whole experience. This is even more obvious if you’re going to be spending longer periods working from the hotel as we have done.

1) Trip Advisor - Most seasoned travelers will already be familiar with this site. It’s a great resource as you can read reviews about different hotels which are written by fellow travelers.

In theory this should give an unbiased opinion on the hotels. In reality though, some unscrupulous hotels create multiple accounts and give excellent reviews of themselves. “The Field Village” hotel which we stayed at in Chiang Mai, Thailand is one that we strongly suspect of doing that. On some days it seemed there were more good reviews than guests staying there, and the good ones were all over the top, praising the staff and owners by name. The bad reviews were all terrible though, and when we got there we could understand why. We’ll give more details when we review this hotel ourselves.

A tranquil paradise?

 

Or a noisy, out-of-town trap?

So while we do use this site a lot, all reviews should be taken with a grain of salt, and if the rating difference between the good and bad reviews is too high, one should be suspicious.

2) Octopus Travel - This is one of the first places we go to look for a hotel. Rates shown are the entire rate you pay, no hidden fees or taxes, and they are usually competitive.

One downside is the lack of boutique hotels in the system.

3) My Travel - Using some major travel providers as a backend, this site guarantees the lowest hotel rates. Sometimes though, there aren’t as many hotels as in other systems.

4) Hotel Club & Rates to Go - While both of these sites are owned by Orbitz, each can yield different results with different availability. That’s why in our experience it’s best to search both of them and then compare.

5) Venere - Although they don’t have as many hotels as other sites, they provide an excellent amount of information on the hotels they have. They also allow you to select hotels on a map, which makes it a great resource!

Having the hotels on a map is really very helpful, especially for travelers like us who like to walk around cities and explore them at our own pace. Being situated in the center of town or the outskirts can make a big difference in transport time and cost and we’ve found some great hotels in the center of major European cities through this site. One confession, even when we found a hotel in a great location through this site, we sometimes booked it on another site that offered a better rate!

There are many, many more sites that offer great information about hotels around the world. One good way to find them is a simple google search

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 12:47 am and is filed under Travel Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.