How Do You Choose a Hotel When You Travel?

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that the process of choosing a hotel has gotten really complicated. Technology has brought us so many different hotel booking and review websites and apps, not to mention new alternatives like private guest room rentals and houseswapping/housesitting, the task of finding a place to stay can be really time-consuming.

It doesn’t help that I’ve gotten a bit more picky about where I stay as I’ve gotten older, now usually traveling with my spouse and toting loads of gadgets. Private rooms, en suite bathrooms, and in-room wifi, formerly luxuries, are now generally requirements.

A room in a private home we rented using AirBNB. Sebastopol, CA

I’ve spent hours doing hotel research in the past month for our recent and upcoming trips and wanted to share how I usually choose a hotel when we travel.

Here are some of the accommodation options available and our experiences with each, including some of our favorite research and booking sites.

Hostels:

There are a handful of websites you can use to search for and book hostels, the largest of which are HostelWorld and HostelBookers. Both sites include a lot of different properties and I’ve always fund it to be a huge hassle to browse both of them. I recently found a hostel booking aggregator called Hostelz.com, that searches both sites along with a third I’d never heard of before. The first time I used Hostelz.com (when planning our recent trip to London), I was pleased to see two search alternatives, search for “dorm rooms” and search for “private rooms”. So by doing the private room search I know it’ll only bring up hostels that have this type of facilities.

Most importantly, this site showed me that the prices were actually different for some hostels on the different sites! That’s not something I ever thought of before, for some reason (though I know thats the case on hotel booking sites) I always assumed the hostels were priced the same regardless of site.  Once I realized this, I was sold. This is the only way to ID the lowest price, without having to search all three.

The user interface of Hostelz.com is a little more text-heavy than a lot of booking sites, but I still found it very easy to search private rooms, not to mention it being the fastest way to find the lowest price.

Hotels/Guest Houses:

This is the area where I’ve long known the value of the search aggregator. For years I’ve used Kayak to search all the main booking sites and hotel chain websites. Then, once I’ve checked out what the prices are I go directly to the hotel site (or to a site like Expedia or Hotels.com) to book the room there.

Hotel Acoma in Otavalo, Ecuador, reserved using the website Booking.com.

Occasionally we’ll bid for hotels using Priceline’s Name-Your-Price feature and doing research on a Priceline-bidding forum like BiddingForTravel.com. This has scored us amazing deals like a weekend at the Westin Boneventure in Downtown Los Angeles a few years back for as low as $45 a night.

When I’m looking at options outside of the US, I always use Booking.com. It is very easy to use, has loads of reviews, and has icons to tell you the capacity of the room. That is something that I find difficult outside of the rooms room for two people is called a double room, a matrimonial room, etc. When traveling solo, the site also lets you know whether the price is for one person or for two, because sometimes these booking engines expect that a single traveler will book both spaces in a two person room.

Even though Kayak says they search Booking.com’s listings, I just did a test search for a coastal town in Mexico, and Kayak didn’t pull up all the small, independently operated properties that Booking.com did.

Resorts:

The Travelzoo Weekly Top 20 email newsletter (that I’ve subscribed to for nearly a decade!) often has resort vacations in popular destinations. Also, newer group buying websites like Groupon offer frequent deals on resort vacations, if you are a bit flexible and open to going anywhere.

Bookit.com offers resort deals (most of which are all-inclusive) at destinations that are popular with US travelers. I used it a few years back to book an all-inclusive stay on Mexico’s Riviera Maya.

Apartment Rentals:

AirBNB is our current favorite for giving us the opportunity to stay in a home in a real neighborhood. I like that it lets you browse either rooms for rent in private apartments (shared with the owner) or entire apartments, depending on what you are looking for. This makes apartment rental more accessible and affordable for solo travelers.

I’ve browsed some other sites like HomeAway and some regional services in Europe, but they all have a less intuitive interface, don’t include the fees into the total price, and because most of the properties are full-time vacation properties (with spartan furnishings and decor), they don’t give you the feel of community that you get from staying in someone’s actual home. The downside is that AirBNB doesn’t have many listings in places that are known for their vacation properties. There were only two or three listed in the beach vacation town of Cape May, NJ, where we are going this summer for my sister’s wedding. I believe my brother-in-law used HomeAway to rent the house we are staying in there.

At the BlueBay Grand Esmerelda near Playa del Carmen, Mexico. Booked using Bookit.com

Housesitting:

We hare big fans of having housesitters come watch our pets when we travel, and know there are loads of people who do this as their primary means of staying for free when they travel. While we haven’t tried to housesit yet, I plan to try the next time we have an extended stay somewhere. TrustedHousesitters is the site we’ve been using with great success, though there are a few others.

Homeswapping:

Because our most recent trip to Paris was longer than we usually stay in one place, I decided to experiment with homeswapping. Because we’ve had such great luck finding housesitters interested in coming to our home in the San Francisco Bay Area, I figured someone would be interested in coming to stay at our house in exchange for a stay at their place in Paris.

Starting more than four months prior, I signed up at a handful of home exchange websites that had free trial periods (because these subscription services were very expensive) and put up profiles. I spent a few hours emailing users on the various sites and nothing worked out. I decided  homeswapping was not worth the hassle and expense.

Couchsurfing:

From the people I know that have done it, Couchsurfing offers much more than a free place to stay. Their huge online community includes a really remarkable group of travel-loving people and offers a easy way to get to know locals and make new friends. Though I’ve browsed the members offering spare rooms several times, I haven’t tried it yet but intend to one day soon. Here’s a lovely post my friend Kimi wrote about the friends she’s made Couchsurfing in Japan.

Other resources I use to narrow down the finalists:

I generally don’t trust guidebooks to have the most updated information on lodging and restaurants, so I rarely start there, but once I’ve identified a few lodging options from my online research, I’ll see what my guidebook suggests.

Then I look at TripAdvisor which generally has a large number of reviews of properties.

I use Google Blog Search to search for in-depth reviews from bloggers. I also often regularly stumble upon hotel recommendations from bloggers I read, and flag them for when I visit that  place one day.

I sometimes ask for recommendations on Twitter (adding the hashtag #cityname or #countryname, as relevent).

We used Hostelz.com to book our recent stay at RestUp London, and they discounted our stay to thank us for trying them out. But I’d recommend them even if they hadn’t. Searching one site is so much better than searching three!

How do you choose a hotel when you travel? What websites and resources do you use?