Essentials
A restful room in a decent lodge in a prime location at a fair price.
1 ➔ Research the location — Find out where you want to spend your time at your new destination. Use that approximate location as the center of your search.
2 ➔ Estimate your arrival & departure dates — Calculate how many days you want to stay.
3 ➔ Run a search for lodges — Get a raw, unfiltered list of lodges available at your destination on the dates you specified.
4 ➔ Filter for price range — Reduce the list by specifying the range of prices up to your maximum. (Prices on most sites do not include taxes and fees.)
5 ➔ Filter for core amenities — Choose only one or two amenities that you must have.
6 ➔ Reduce geographic search area — The default area is a 20km radius from your chosen epicenter. That’s much too far. Reduce it to limit time and expense on local transport.
7 ➔ Check vacancy rates for your dates (SOA & BIASOA only) — With filters in place on a one night search, check vacancy rates at the location for the subsequent nights of your proposed stay.
8 ➔ Adjust filters & select lodges — Too few or too many choices? Adjust the filters until you can choose 1-3 prospective lodges.
9 ➔ Re-do search on another website (optional) — If you are unsatisfied with your choices, run the search again on Kayak. If you want to check private rentals, use Tripping or Airbnb. If hostels are your thing, check TripAdvisor. Filters aren’t as good on these alternate sites, but you’ll find something.
10 ➔ Validate your choices with reviews — Current and credible reviews from other guests are the only way you can find out what the booking sites can’t or won’t tell you.
11 ➔ Find the best price & book the room — Use different sites to get the best price. BIA and BIASOA travelers book now. SOA travelers will have a baseline price for negotiation.
the Big Picture
Cool Idea — Do you feel overwhelmed by the number of websites trying to sell you a room? Do you spend hours checking a bunch of them, reading reviews and comparing prices? The average traveler will visit three or more and still not feel confident about the results. The internet is supposed to make travel cheaper and easier — and it does, if you know how.
Regardless of the method you use — BIA, SOA or BIASOA — you need an online search technique that gets you acceptable results in the shortest time possible.
- BIA search — You need to find and book a lodge for your entire stay.
- SOA search — You need to identify 2+ lodges that you can scout upon arrival.
- BIASOA search — You need to book a lodge for your one or two nights.
Effort vs. duration of stay
Before plunging into a search for accommodation, realize that you don’t need to spend ages online to save a dollar, a euro or a pound. If you are staying only a night or two, then it’s not worth hours of effort to find the very best room at a super discount when a good enough room at a fair price will do. If the room ends up being below your expectations or you paid a bit too much, it’s no big deal.
But what if you’re staying a week, two weeks or longer? You don’t want to be stuck in some over-priced, sub-standard room the entire time, so you may want to spend a bit more effort to identify and validate your lodge and room. (That’s why we recommend the BIASOA method to get the best accommodation and best price.)
Find, validate and book a room in 15 minutes
It seems obvious, but first you have to be clear on what you want: specific location, a ceiling on price and “must have” amenities.
Then you need to search websites with lots of listings that will filter accurately for those needs. There are a few clear winners that will make your search easier.
Next, you should validate your shortlist of lodges by checking reviews for what the lodge listings don’t or won’t tell you. But reviews on most sites are junk, just some guest with limited experience ranting or raving. Or worse, some sites have reviews that are essentially reputation management for the lodges — they’re not on your side. Only 2 generalist and 2 specialist websites have reviews worth checking. Still, you can get bogged down reading too many reviews. We show you how to zero in on the best ones.
Finally, after you’ve chosen and validated 1-3 lodges, it’s time to go on a treasure hunt for the best price and — if you’re a BIA or BIASOA traveler — book your room. While your original search helped you identify lodges with an acceptable price, that’s not the same as getting the best deal when booking. There are a few tactics, such as paying less for a non-refundable booking. For commercial lodging there’s one OTA that is clearly superior on price because their loyalty program has a built-in 9.1% discount.
Ready to start? It sounds like a lot, but (depending on bandwidth), you should be able to find, validate and book a room in as little as 15 minutes.
What you need to search for
Accommodation websites will bombard you with marketing pitches: most popular hotels, discounts, “deals” and, if you register with them or let them place a cookie, lodges that they’ve selected for you based on your search history.
Forget all that. With the raw list of lodges for a location, you need just three filters. But all of them must be precise or you won’t get the results you want.
1 ➔ Price filter
We’re not looking to book yet, so we’re not searching for the best price on an individual lodge. That comes later.
Your first consideration is always price, because accommodation cost is the largest budget line for most travelers. If you start to spend too much on a consistent basis, your travel budget will be consumed fast and it’s Trip Over. You have to keep your accommodation cost under control, even if you have to compromise on other stuff.
- Adjust price by one currency increment — You need to adjust price by the smallest increment possible ($1, €1 or the smallest increment of whatever currency is on display). This is required when your initial search doesn’t include enough lodges in the results. If you can’t find anything in your first price range, bump the top price up one unit and see if a good lodge appears. But it works only with a price slider, not price bands. Sites that provide a price slider are so far superior that we reject sites with price bands.
- Minimum price slider — A minimum price on the slider is helpful for travelers who aren’t interested in the most basic lodging. For example, if you’re going to see Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the nearby town of Siem Reap has hundreds of very cheap lodges. Not your style? Then it’s good if you can slide the minimum price up to eliminate all those $6 rooms from your search. Be careful with that technique though — you might scratch a low-cost lodge that’s otherwise excellent.
- Price sort low-to-high OR high-to-low — The final feature to assist your price search is sorting the results. You can always show “sort by price” as cheapest to most expensive. But, if you’re having to bump up your maximum price by tiny currency increments, sorting from most expensive to cheapest will show any new results on top.
Best site for price filters = Kayak
There’s no comparison here. Kayak has other sites beat by providing all 3 features for precise price filtering.
2 ➔ Amenities filters
Besides, aren’t we independent travelers are hardier than tourists and business travelers? We don’t need a TV, a room safe and chocolates on our pillows.
We have identified 12 “core” amenities that are commonly used by independent travelers. Some have monetary value, while others are essential (at least for some travelers) to get good rest or manage logistics.
The real problem here is that most search websites are not precise enough about amenities. Is that “breakfast” free or not? Is the “free WiFi” in the rooms or only in the lobby?
- Free WiFi in the rooms — Better than free WiFi not in the room, or paid WiFi or some antique form of internet connection.
- Free breakfast — You may not always want the “free breakfast” and there’s no telling quality without checking reviews. But you would otherwise have to pay for breakfast, so factor it into your price comparison against lodges without free breakfast.
- Free airport shuttle — A paid shuttle will cost $5 – $20.
- Free parking — If you have a private vehicle in a city center, parking could come at a fee of $10+ per day.
- 24-hour reception — If your transport gets you in to town late at night or early in the morning, someone has to let you in.
- Air conditioning — Some travelers can’t rest without it, especially in the tropics. Quality is sometimes bad a the low end of the market.
- Private bathroom — At the lower end of the market, cheaper often means a shared bathroom. It’s is less common in rich countries, but standard in hostels everywhere.
- Kitchen or kitchenette — Both a money saver and a boon to healthy eating, although rooms with cooking facilities are more expensive. Hostels often have shared cooking facilities.
- Laundry service — Expensive in lodges compared to alternatives, but sometimes desirable when traveling fast with so few clothes.
- Self-laundry — Washers and dryers, better and cheaper. Cheaper still is doing it yourself in your room.
- Accessibility — If you’re traveling with a wheelchair, you need to get through the doors. Filtering for other accessibility aids is rare.
- Free cancellation — If there’s a chance you could cancel your reservation, it’s helpful to get this during filtering. Otherwise, you have to dig to each lodge’s booking page to see their cancellation policy.
There are many other amenities, but ask yourself whether you really need them.
Best site for amenities filters = Trivago
Trivago has 9 out of our 12 core amenities and is the only generalist site with free WiFi in rooms and private bathroom. It also has 7 accessibility filters, where it’s nearest competitor has just 2.
3 ➔ Location filter and map
When you do your initial search, the website will return results from a default radius of your specified location. That distance is almost always too far to meet your need to be near to activities or transport hubs.
To narrow the geographic area, use a slider filter to reduce the distance from your preferred location. Some sites use a drop down list of pre-determined distances, but these are inferior.
It’s best to use the filter in the map display, so that you can see the distribution of lodges. Since the distance is a straight line, you need to know if there’s a river or mountain the way or where the transit stations are.
Best site for location filtering = Trivago
Trivago allows you to set distance in increments of 0.1 km down to a minimum of 0.5 km. It also shows the user rating and quoted price for some lodges right on the map. Even better, you can change the price and amenities filters in map view. Finally, if you don’t get enough results, you can type in another center for your search (maybe the next district over) right there on the map. You’ll have to reset the price and distance filters, but the amenities filters are retained.
Don’t be tempted to pick more than the necessary amenities. If you use star ratings or user ratings, you will slice huge slabs from your search results. If you have way too many results after you complete the important filters of price, amenities and location, then you could try filtering for the top level of user ratings.
What accommodation sites should you use?
Accommodation websites come in 4 levels and multiple types within each level. To complicate matters at bit, we use different websites for different tasks.
- Search — One general website and up to 3 more, depending upon the difficulty of finding some good lodges.
- Reviews — Only 2 general sites, 2 hostel sites and 1 private rental site have reviews worth reading.
- Booking — By now, all that’s left is finding the best price. There is one outstanding site and a few specialists.
Don’t worry: you won’t spend much time on any of the sites.
The 4 levels of accommodation websites
There are 4 levels of website in the accommodation food chain.
- Individual lodges — Often have a website or Facebook page.
- Hotel chains — All of them have websites, where you can join a loyalty program and book rooms.
- Online travel agents (OTAs) — Sites that sign-up individual lodges and hotel chains to sell their rooms to the public. Examples: Expedia, Hotels.com, Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda and many others.
- Aggregators — Sites that scrape OTAs and hotel chains to present the broadest selection of lodges and booking options to the public. Examples: Tivago, Kayak, TripAdvisor, HotelsCombined.
11 steps to the best accommodation
If 11 steps sounds like a lot, it’s not. Some are optional and none is a huge amount of work.
1 ➔ Select an approximate location
Location! Location! Location! Before you arrive and regardless of which method you use, you need to know approximately where you want to stay: what district of the city, what stretch of beach, even what neighborhoods to avoid.
Below, in step 6, you’ll see whether there are too few lodges in your chosen district and what to do about it.
2 ➔ Estimate arrival & departure dates
Maybe you know precisely how many nights’ accommodation you’ll need in a new destination, but independent travelers are notoriously flexible about their movements.
It’s common to decide on short notice that you’re done in a place and are ready to move on. Factoring in transport, that gives you an arrival date at your next destination. But your departure date from there? Who knows?
Vacancy Check, Part 1
It’s okay to start with an arrival date only, as long as there will be vacant rooms that fit your location, price and amenities requirements. BIA travelers don’t have to use the Vacancy Check, unless there’s a chance you might extend your stay beyond your booking. If you’re a SOA or BIASOA traveler, you must do the Vacancy Check. If you don’t, might arrive to discover that all the good and affordable rooms are booked up. Then all your options are bad.
For now, either precise arrival and departure dates or an approximate estimate will do.
- BIA travelers only — You need the date range for your entire stay. If you want to minimize your committed booking or think you might need to extend, use the Vacancy Check.
- SOA & BIASOA travelers — To get started, you need the first 1-3 nights only. In Step 6 below, you’ll check potential vacancy for the entire stay.
3 ➔ Run a raw search
- Go to Trivago.com — Or any Trivago national site. They all work from the same database.
- (Optional) Change default currency & language — The website will present you with the currency of the country you’re in. If you’re checking from outside the destination country or if you’re not familiar with the relative value of the destination currency, you can change it. You can also change the interface language.
- Enter your destination — Type a specific location right into the search box. Trivago will anticipate you. For example, “6th arr…” (arrondissement) already offers “6th district, Luxembourg, Paris”.
- BIA travelers only — Based on your estimate from the previous step, enter the dates for your entire stay. If you need to extend, we’ll deal with that below.
- SOA travelers only — Enter the date of your arrival, checking out the next day (default on search sites).
- BIASOA travelers only — Enter the first 1-3 nights that you expect to book in advance.
Similar searches can be done on Airbnb or Tripping.com for private rentals. For hostels, type “hostels” into the Find box on TripAdvisor.
4 ➔ Set your price range
While you will hunt later for the best price, you want to search now for lodges that approximately fit your budget.
- Use the slider to pick your top price — In the left side bar, move the price slider down to your maximum price (Trivago has no slide for minimum price). These prices do not include taxes and fees.
- Check number of choices — If your price ceiling yields few results, any further filters you apply could take you down to zero. If you can afford more, bump the price slider up one currency unit at a time. If it’s really too much, look to private rentals, hostels or social exchange lodging.
5 ➔ Select your amenities
Travelers have different “essential” amenities, but we urge you not to pick too many — maybe one or two. Too many now could remove otherwise great lodges from the list. Stick with what’s important. You may have the chance to add more amenities later.
- Select your amenities — While there are 5 buttons on the Top Filters tab, the full list is under Extra Filters. Don’t pick more than one or two unless you must.
- Free breakfast — In the left side bar, you can choose the “Breakfast” filter, since it means free breakfast. Oddly, there are no filters for breakfast, free or paid, under Extra Filters.
- Free WiFi — Don’t choose the “Free WiFi” button under the Top Filters tab if you want free WiFi in your room, because it also includes free WiFi in the lobby. Instead, under the Extra Filters tab, choose Room Facilities. About half way down, you’ll find “Free WiFi in the rooms.” Do not select “WiFi in the rooms,” some of which are paid, much less “Internet,” which could even mean wired internet.
- (Optional) Check the number of choices — If the results are unsatisfactory, remove one amenity and see what becomes available.
6 ➔ Refine your search
By now you have a selection of lodges that approximately meet your location, price and amenity requirements. In a smaller destination or a popular spot in high season, you may have too few choices. Often, you’ll still have too many.
So now you adjust the filters to find fewer or more.
bullet offset doesn’t work unless there are at least three lines of text on the page. Or maybe four lines
Your initial search results may not be clustered as close to your preferred location as you like. Or there may be too many or too few results.
In the raw search (Step 3), you chose a location that’s close to your activities, local transport or a transport hub. Now you get to see whether you’ve succeeded in finding a lodge in a prime location. Or not.
- “Go to map” to check distribution of lodges on the list — Here you’ll see all the lodges left in your list after price and amenities filtering.
- If the map area is too big — Trivago sometimes shows a wide map, with lodges from your search bunched so tightly in the middle you can’t make any sense of them. Use the “+” button in the lower right to zero-in.
- If some of the lodges are too far — Use the “Distance from” slider on the left to reduce the search area. Keep in mind that the distance is a straight line and not the distance you will walk or a taxi will drive. Rivers, lakes, hills and the restrictions people place on the landscape (airports, parks, military installations…) can add a lot of actual distance.
- If there aren’t enough lodges in your search area — You have three options:
- Increase the search area — Use the distance slider to increase the search area 0.1 km at a time. See what new lodges pop into view.
- Switch your focus to a neighboring district — For example, if you can’t find anything in the 6th district of Paris, you can look at the map and choose the next district over, “Invalides” perhaps (7th district). You will have to reset price and distance filters, but amenities filters are retained.
- Increase your price filter or remove an amenity filter — These changes will be reflected on the map.
Unless you have mobility issues, don’t be too strict on distance. In expensive cities, the most desirable locations are costly for the quality you get. Even a few blocks away, you might get a superior room for the same price. Experiment with that slider and see what you get.
With a filter to set distance from center, synchronized with a map of your destination, you can toggle the balance between lodge location and other filters.
Tighten them up until you have 1-3 options left. Bingo! You’ve found your lodge or a short list of lodges.
Optional — Register with Trivago to save favorites
Each lodge in Trivago listings has a little heart logo in the photograph. Clicking it will save the lodge in your personal list of favorites. You have to register with Trivago to use this feature.
It’s handy. Otherwise, you’ll have to write down the names of your top choices and retrieve them later.
You can also use Trivago registration to set price alerts, although that’s not very useful if you’re searching for your next lodge only days or a week before you need it.
We don’t know yet whether Trivago uses your search history to sculpt the results it feeds to your new searches. We hope to find out!
9 — Redo search on other sites
Decent lodges in prime locations are often expensive because of their location alone. Other features aren’t necessarily good. If this occurs, there are some alternatives:
- Hostels — Hostels are often well-located and inexpensive compared to the alternatives. And they’re not just for young travelers.
- Private rentals — While full private units usually cost as much as a hotel room (or more), bedroom-only private rentals in good locations can be affordable.
- Social exchange lodging — Couch surfing can get you well located, although it’s mainly a young traveler thing. Other types of social lodging (house sitting, home exchange…) are usually farther away from prime locations.
- Farther out — You may have to choose a lodge farther away from the action. If so, try to be near fast and cheap public transport. Urban rail is best.