Eating That Elephant

I wrote this for a group that we’re meeting in OH, and thought I would share it here.  Please let me know any thoughts on how to improve this 🙂

I thought I would share my process to find a good hotel, which for the most part I’ve had good luck with.

Once I find an area that people recommended or that I had researched, I look it up in google maps, and then type “hotels” in the “search” or “search nearby…” boxes.  Then I look at the reviews in the popup for each of entries on the first 1-2 pages (by clicking on the name in the list).     You have to take the review ratings with a bit of a grain of salt.  People are rating the hotel based on what *they* paid – so often more expensive places will get worse reviews than they would merit for the price you might find, or vice versa.   Plus one negative score can pull the average way down for a silly complaint, or there can be out of date reviews.  (E.g., reviews from 2005 complaining about renovation noise or dirty/old furnishings when the hotel has been renovated since and later reviews are great).    So I actually read the reviews of each place.  Despite all this, the reviews mainly are very helpful and spot-on.

Finally once I have narrowed it down to a few, I pop the names of places I am considering into TripAdvisor and have it check all the online reservation systems (Orbitz, Expedia, Travelocity, etc) for the best rates, which vary greatly by service.   Don’t just look at the nightly rate – look at the final rate.  The trick is that each service adds in it’s own search fee into the “Taxes and Fees” category (they don’t break it out, but you can see the difference when you compare two that have the same “nightly rate” but different total cost listings).

Note that sometimes (esp midrange hotels, I found) the best rate will be from the hotel’s direct website if they have one, because they don’t usually add internet booking fees.  I believe it used to be that the internet services were cheaper, but I’m guessing that now the hotels themselves want to be competitive so they have online booking as well.  Also, it’s well worth looking at the hotel’s site for package deals.  For $10 more/night, I got the full breakfast buffet for our family.

Lastly, be sure to look at whether it is non-refundable.  It is usually a huge difference in price between non-refundable and standard (e.g., $79/night vs. $119 or $129/night), because you pay the entire cost up front and can’t change it.  Given the possibility of weather issues in the winter, when I found two hotels that were similar in what I was looking for, but the first was non-refundable and only $5 cheaper, I chose the latter.  I considered the $5 to be insurance.