- Understand how the market works to get better lodges, rooms and prices — All the businesses trying to sell you a room —individual lodges, hotel chains, OTAs and aggregators — know more than you do. And, while the lodge and rooms are literally cast in concrete, the deals shift almost daily. If you know a bit about how it all works, you’ll get better at ferreting out quality rooms and lower prices.
- Don’t obsess: be happy with “good enough” — We won’t promise to help you get the best room in the best lodge at the best price. But we can help you get a good room in a good lodge at a good price. You can spend a lot of time and effort exploring many websites, trying to get that perfect room and saving that last dollar. But effort should be related to the length of your stay. Don’t sweat it for a 1-3 night stay: you can find something that’s good enough at a reasonable cost. If you’re staying for two weeks or a month, it’s worth extra effort — or better yet, our BIASOA method — to find a better lodge, better room and better price.
- Decide what amenities (quality features) you need — Your accommodation must meet your minimum requirements for location, comfort, services and security. Better location, comfort and services cost more. While you can experiment with “going cheap,” you shouldn’t make yourself miserable.
- Know the range of accommodation types — There are many types of accommodation besides hotels, almost all of which will give you a more authentic experience of people and places. Most will also save you money. You will no doubt find some types more to your liking and learn to look for them in each new destination.
- Find a lodge & a room — Everybody uses the internet, but it’s not the only way. And if you do use the internet, how do you seek the best lodge and room and get a decent price without spending hours every time?
- Know how to assess the neighborhood, the lodge and the room on offer — When you arrive at your new lodge, you need to decide whether the neighborhood is okay, whether the lodge is acceptable and whether the room you are offered is good enough. Have a checklist to appraise the lodge and inspect your room. Know what to do for check-in and check-out.
Once you’ve left home, you have to find a place to stay every night. You must be able to rest well enough each night to enjoy your activities the next day or cope with the next leg of travel.
Travel accommodations cost is No. 3 of the Big 5 expense categories in your Travel Budget. For many travelers, accommodation will be the largest of the five. So, to conserve money for great activities or to lengthen your trip, it’s crucial that you have a strategy to control accommodation cost.
Most travelers spend too much time bouncing around 3 – 7 websites, trying to find the best lodge in the best location for the best price. That’s the wrong approach. You want a faster search for a good balance of quality, location and cost. For short stays, “good enough” will do. For longer stays, you’re better off using our “BIASOA” method to find a better place for a better price.
The Laid-Back Way
The low-effort way to get a good room in a good lodge for a good price… as long as you’re willing to book your entire stay at a new destination in advance. If you want to refine your search for better lodges, rooms and prices, see down the page for more guidance.
- Select your approximate location — You want to be near to your activities and/or transportation.
- Estimate your arrival & departure dates — You might not be too clear on departure, but give it a go. Learn how to estimate.
- Open a private or incognito browser window — You don’t want the booking site to track your search history. Leave the apps for later.
- Go to Trivago — While not ideal for every task, it’s the best general purpose aggregator. Hostels? Use TripAdvisor. It has more listings than dedicated hostel sites. Do not use Trivago for hostels if looking for a dorm bed, as Trivago lists only private rooms in hostels. Private rentals? Use Tripping or Airbnb
- (Optional) Adjust currency & language — Currency will default to your current location.
- Start search — Enter your destination and dates. Trivago will supply the entire list of lodges in that location that have rooms available for your dates.
- Select essential amenities — Under the “Extra Filters” tab, choose only those features that you cannot do without. Keep it to one or two, if possible. You may have a chance to pick others later.
- Find your price band — Back under the “Top Options” band, use the price slider to reduce the maximum you want to pay. This will be a standard double room, not including taxes and fees. This is just to get you in your approximate price range. The final price hunt comes later.
- Sort by price — This will put the cheapest at the top, even if those lodges are below your minimum standard.
- Focus location — Back under the “Top Options” tab, select a distance from the town center (in smaller locations) or a major landmark (in cities).
- Consult the map — See what is on offer inside the location and distance you selected. If the choices are too few, you can increase the distance or price. If there are still too many, you can reduce the distance or price.
- Narrow your options — If you still have lots of choices, you can decrease the top price using the slider, click the top two Rating smiley faces or add another amenity under the filters.
- Pick possible lodges — Select a few candidates from the remaining results in the list.
- Open TripAdvisor in a separate browser tab — Type the name of your first choice lodge right into the search bar. If you don’t see the lodge in the dropdown, start typing the name of the location. Pick the lodge.
- Check the reviews — Ignore the “Excellent” and “Very good” reviews and check the “Average” and “Poor” ones for problems with the lodge. Never mind the “Terrible” reviews — they’re mostly rants about one-time service issues. If there are not enough reviews in English, try the Google Translation button for a ponderous, but maybe still informative review. Pay more attention to recent reviews by reviewers who have 10+ hotel reviews and lots of Helpful votes. If necessary, repeat with other lodges from your Trivago shortlist.
Rest well: choose your amenities
A major part of your personal travel style is the minimum quality of accommodation you need, where quality includes location, comfort, services and security.
“Amenities” are the building blocks of quality. We use the dictionary definition, where an amenity is “a desirable or useful feature or facility of a building or place.” This includes all aspects of location, comfort, services and security, far beyond what you’ll see listed as amenities for lodges on OTA websites. For example, an OTA or hotel will never tell you that there’s a noise problem or that the lodge is in a derelict neighborhood.
Check out the amenities list and decide which ones are important to you before you start looking for a room. Don’t forget that travel is not about spending time in your room. Except during pauses for rest & relaxation, you will be out and about most of the time. The view from your window and other optional amenities don’t matter very much, as long as you can rest well.
There’s nothing wrong with shifting your preferences during your travel, choosing fewer amenities to save money or more amenities to improve comfort.
Sleep anywhere: types of lodging
Some travelers only think in terms of hotels and resorts, but there’s much more selection out there: hotels, hostels, guest houses, vacation homes, private apartments, houses, campgrounds, couch surfing and even airports. At any destination, there are a lot of lodges where you can spend the night. Obviously, not all types are available in all destinations. A small destination might have just one place to stay.
It’s likely you’ll find that one or two types of lodging consistently fit your travel style. Young budget travelers often favor hostels and couch surfing. Mid-range travelers may choose private rentals (like Airbnb), guest houses and modest hotels. Those staying longer in a place may rent apartments or house sit.
There’s a significant cost element attached to your choices. And there’s nothing stopping you from switching from big hotels to family-run guest houses or from hostels to couch surfing.
Such changes are also dependent upon destination. The lodging quality you could easily afford in a poor country could be too costly in a rich country.
What are your options and what are the Pros and Cons of each?
Find your next room: online or on arrival
In ancient times, before Online Travel Agents (OTAs), travelers wandered the world clutching worn copies of Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, Fodors or some other guide book. On the pages of those guides were very short lists of travel accommodations options for major cities and popular attractions. The rest of the world was darkness.
Now travelers have the opposite problem — there are too many sources of information. There are hundreds of OTA booking sites, some of them specialized to a certain type of accommodation. There are aggregators that bundle dozens of OTAs. Lodges themselves run websites where you can check their offerings and often book a room. What about ratings and reviews? Can you trust them? How do you choose?
Learn how to get a room online without getting bogged down for hours and hours. Or, if you’re a traditionalist, do it the old-fashioned way and find your lodge on arrival. Better yet, combine the two techniques for the best lodges at the best prices.
Stay or go? Inspect your lodge & room
Before you accept the room you found online, you should find out whether it will meet your minimum requirements. In fact, take a few steps back: even before viewing the room, you should assess whether the lodge, the street and even the neighborhood are acceptable.
You have the option to ask for another room or to reject the lodge altogether.
Check-in and check-out are not just picking up and dropping off the key. Understand how to check-in and check-out to your best advantage.