With any trip, I always book my flights first. Get over that first big hurdle, swallow the price tag which is likely to be your single biggest expense, and start figuring out your itinerary. If you know you're staying in one city and therefor one hotel the whole time, picking the perfect hotel for your stay should be your next step. If you are city hopping, after you map you're route, you then need to decide your mode of transportation between cities before you can book your hotels. Will you rent a car? Take trains? A combination of both? This is key before you look at hotels. I dedicated another post to which foreign countries I've driven in vs those where I've relied completely on public transportation. Check that out here: To Drive or not to Drive...
Say you have your plane tickets and know what cities you're visiting and how you're getting there. You're ready to start researching hotels, but where to start? First and foremost, know your budget. I make it my goal to never spend more than $200/night in any foreign city hotel. As I said before, my idea of a budget is an amount to not go over (Budget Planning: Foreign vs. Domestic Travel)....not a speed limit where I always go as fast as the posted sign or sometimes 5-10 mph over. I would say that on average, my hotels range from $120-$175/night.
Now that you have your itinerary, mode of transportation and budget, start making a list of hotel contenders. I always start with trip advisor. On trip advisor you can put in lots of different search parameters including price, hotel class, and reviews. This is a great starting tool. I am currently planning my trip to Southeast Asia, and the last few days of my trip will be in Singapore. I pulled up trip advisor, entered my travel dates, and saw immediately that hotels in Singapore are very expensive. But on closer look, I was able to find at least 6-7 hotels that were all under $200/night, were at least a 4-5 star hotel and all averaged 4.5/5 on customer reviews.
I cannot stress how important it so to read customer reviews. They will give you such good inside information that you usually cannot find anywhere else like if there is construction going on inside the hotel or right nearby. Other times they'll give you good tips about the hotel services, etc. Be sure to read the positive reviews and the negative reviews as well as the reviews of people who stayed there most recently. In the negative reviews, are people complaining about petty things or things beyond the hotels' control or are there serious flaws that should make you cross this hotel off of your list? If the hotel has good overall reviews but all of the ones recently are poor, did the hotel recently change management and become crap? Or are the older reviews negative but recently the hotel has made and effort to improve these things? It also helps to see how the hotels respond to the negative comments. This will tell you about the hotel management. Are they apologetic? Defensive? Arrogant?
Now, once you have a list of hotels in your price range, at the hotel class you want (I always recommend at least a 4 star hotel overseas), with decent reviews, I recommend one small step before checking out the hotels location. Trip Advisor will give you prices if you put in your travel dates, but they are prices provided by third party booking sites like hotels.com, and booking.com. Not that there is anything wrong with these booking sites (I've used them myself on many occasions), but they often post nonrefundable, super saver rates. This might be ok for you (I've booked the cheapest, nonrefundable rates before) but before I book that rate, I always go to the hotels' actual website to see what kind of rates they offer. They're almost never cheaper, but you can often get the same deal or for just few extra dollars you can have your pick of other options like free cancellation or a deal that includes breakfast or a king bed. This all comes down to your comfort level and what you're willing to pay for. I'll give you an example. When my husband and I traveled to Berlin in August 2013, we traveled with another couple. We agreed to stay at the Radisson Blu hotel in based on all of the aforementioned criteria including location (that I'll get to next). We found a super saver discount rate online that was non-refundable but it didn't guarantee the room type. It just said, "best available". This meant we couldn't choose the bed type, or really anything. After confirming that the entire hotel was non-smoking (because that would have been a deal breaker for us) we decided to chance it and went with the lower rate. The couple that we traveled with, however, weren't as comfortable taking the risk. Rather than risk getting 2 single beds in a teeny tiny room, they paid a little bit extra (maybe $15-$20 more per night) for a guaranteed king deluxe room. As it turns out, we ended up in identical rooms and in this particular instance my husband and I made the better decision to save a few bucks and take a risk, but other times it might not have worked out that well. You just have to determine the worst case scenario and decide for yourself if you would be ok with that.
Finally and arguably most importantly, when picking a hotel it's all about location location location! Obviously an ideal location means different things to different people. When we traveled to Japan, we relied completely on public transportation, so it was very important to us that all of our hotels be within a 10 min walk of a major train station. On the other hand, when we traveled to Germany, we drove everywhere so our overnight stop in Nuremberg was outside the city center where parking was free and the rates were cheaper. In Paris, we opted for a small boutique hotel that was both within walking distance of the metro but also within reasonable (1-1.15 miles) walking distance to major sights like Notre Dame. Here are the key things to remember about location:
How are you going to get there? If by car, make sure the hotel has parking. In some cases when the hotel advertises parking, it's very limited so the parking space itself needs to be reserved in advance. If by public transport, make sure it's close to a station, so you're not schelping your bags halfway across town. If by taxi, really do your research on where to get one, and the legal rates. A huge foreign scam is to overcharge unsuspecting tourists for transportation.
What location means to you? Do you want somewhere within walking distance to things you're going to see? Do you want to save a few $$$ by finding something a little less expensive but further away from things? In Dubai, we chose a 5-star Hilton that was a short walk from the new metro. It was a little cheaper than the hotels right in the middle of the city, but since it was on the metro we thought the location would be ok. Boy were we wrong! The neighborhood was so scary and the metro while brand new and very clean, really wasn't convenient for sightseeing. We found ourselves taking taxis everywhere. Taxi's were cheap and plentiful, so it worked out, but lesson learned. Just because it was near public transportation didn't mean it was all that convenient. It also helps to know your destination. Dubai is not a walking city which we didn't realize at the time. Paris, on the other hand, is a easy walking city.
Bottom line, you can survive anything for a night. Right? Almost! When you get to your hotel, make sure that you feel safe. Safety above all else is the most important thing. Second, make sure that your room is clean enough. Always (and I mean ALWAYS) check the bed for bedbugs. It doesn't matter whether you're staying in a hostel or a 5-star hilton, bedbugs are a nightmare that could ruin your trip. The best way to check for them is immediately upon arrival when your bed is still freshly made. Bedbugs like the dark, so pull off the covers and top sheet quickly and look as close to the bed as you can. Bedbugs are tiny and black and will scatter to find darkness the minute you lift the covers. They are very hard to see unless you can see them moving. If you even slightly suspect bedbugs, request another room immediately. Just because one room has them, does not mean the entire hotel has them. If your hotel room has them and you didn't notice, you'll start to see little bites on your legs. These will look very similar to mosquito bites only they will be scabs instead of bumps. If this happens to you, don't panic. The most important thing to do is get rid of them before going home. The last thing you want is to bring bed bugs back into your house (you'll need to get it fumigated). As painstaking as it might be, you'll need to wash everything before you leave, and find a way to clean your luggage. This is the absolute worst-case scenario. I have personally never found bed bugs in a hotel room (even the horrid hotel we stayed at in Copenhagen that had every other type of bug!).
That being said, my system isn't fool-proof. I follow my own rules for every hotel I book, and I am usually very happy or at least not surprised by the unpleasantries that I knew to expect from reviews. At the same time, I've read reviews, price compared, etc. and I've never been more appalled by the hotel we stayed at during our last night in Denmark. What can you do? If we stayed at that hotel for more than 1 night, I would have left immediately. If that happens to you, determine exactly what is bad about it and whether or not your can deal with it. Then as soon as you get home, hit the hotel review sites and tell the truth about your own experience to help unsuspecting travelers avoid making the same mistake.
In future posts when I get into some of the details about specific trips I've been on and cities I've visited, I'll be sure to give you an overview of the hotels we chose. In the mean time, I've rated almost all of them myself on trip advisor.
Thanks for reading!
- Foxy the Traveler
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