It's just four walls, a bed, some curtains and occasionally a mini-bar. Sounds simple enough, but trying to book a hotel room, and making sure you've chosen the right property at the best possible price can be as complex as doing a Rubik's cube or setting your VCR. Prices bounce up and down like a demented kangaroo, and just when you think you've found the perfect hotel at the perfect price, you find out that your niece's college roommate's mother stayed there, and was plagued by noise from the elevator, or waterbugs, or an unfriendly staff, or sheets that just couldn't seem to stay on the bed—the list of what can go wrong on a hotel stay is endless. So you rebook, feeling like you've made a narrow escape.
Of course, you can't always count on getting the lowdown from someone in the know. And you certainly can never guarantee that you're going to get the best price. But there are now a number of websites out there that can actually make searching for and booking lodgings a whole heckuva lot easier. There's also a sale on right now that may make you want to drop the searches altogether, and simply book a $32/night room with this one company (to scroll down to that, simply click here).
A nice price on a good bed
Cost first. It used to be that finding a good hotel online required multiple searches. You surfed over to Orbitz and Expedia, found a property and then rebounded to the hotel's own site. Then you double-checked at a specialty site such as Quikbook.com or Hotels.com, and you still couldn't be sure you'd found the best rate; or worse yet, by the time you returned to the place that had the lowest prices, the rates had changed.
Then about two years ago a number of "bot" search engines flooded the internet, promising to search all of the major sites in one fell swoop. For all practical purposes, all but one of these sites is now gone (either subsumed into larger sites or adding user fees that make their services not worth it) and that one site—the fiesty Sidestep—has improved dramatically, transforming itself from a tool bar that had to be downloaded into a genuine website that anyone can now access.
Its new site (for hotels at least) debuted yesterday at http://www.sidestephotels.com/. Like its predecessor, the pop-up tool bar, it's partnered with a number big name companies including Orbitz, Holiday Inn, Hotels.com, Fairmont Hotels, InterContinental and more.
We took the site for a spin, and found the following low prices. We used the night of Apr 7 on all of our searches:
- New York City: From $65/night (at budget-priced Hotel 17) to $110 (at the positively chic little Hotel Belleclaire on the Upper West Side) to $269 (not bad for the famous Plaza Hotel)
- Los Angeles: From $54/night (on Hollywood Blvd at the Downtowner Inn) to $152 (at the historic and grand Biltmore hotel) to $239 (at the swanky, beachfront Fairmont Miramar in Santa Monica)
- Paris: From $76 (for the Hotel Beaunier near Paris' garment district) to $82 (for the Hotel High Tech Calais, which looks just like its name) to $111 (for your own Citadines apartment with full kitchen).
The key to using the site, at least for now, is patience. It takes about 30 seconds to a minute for all the hotels to appear (an eternity in Internet time), but once they're all up, the breadth and depth of the search is impressive.
Getting the scoop
With hotels it's not just about price, sometimes it's about ambiance and amenities. For opinions on those elements, one of our favorite spots on the web is TripAdvisor.com, a site that aggregates web reviews (from guidebook series, top magazines and newspapers) with user comments both from its site and other message boards 'round the 'net. The advice offerred is usually straightforward and to the point with headlines like "Hated It!!" and "Best vacation of my life" for folks who like to scan quickly through a site. And while the vast majority of the site concentrates on hotels, there's also some good commentary on sightseeing and transportation within the professionally authored reviews.
Recently, TripAdvisor.com added its own search capability to its user reviews and it's quite simple to use: you pick a hotel and click on "Quick Check". That brings up a simultaneous search of Expedia, Hotels.com, Orbitz and Travelocity only for the hotel in question. It's quite useful, and the prices can vary greatly between the four.
To see the site, surf over to www.tripadvisor.com.
