How not to make a mistake when choosing a hotel, or what booking services are silent about

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Julia Mikeda, Marketing Director of the Netology online course service, shares her very rich experience in hotel booking in different countries.

Have you ever experienced a situation when, having decided to become an "independent" traveler, you arrive at the hotel you have booked, open the door of your room in anticipation … and see something completely different from what you expected?

Having visited dozens of hotels around the world, “hitting the bumps” and gaining invaluable experience, I came to the conclusion that hotel reservations are not a “game of the lottery”, as it might seem at the beginning, but just a matter of technology.

Below are nine tips from my personal experience on how not to be confused by booking services and get exactly the level of comfort you expected

Tip 1. Never make a decision on photography

The most important thing to know when working with booking services is that the photos presented on the booking site will always or almost always be far from reality. Therefore, your task is to evaluate a room or hotel not by pictures, but by other, indirect indicators, which will be discussed below.

Tip 2. Always pay attention to the total area of the room

Only this figure gives a true understanding of the size of the room. If comfort and "freedom of movement" are important to you, your option is from 35-40 m² and more.

However, there is one little trick here. The presence of a balcony or patio allows you to visually expand the space and get rid of the feeling of being pinched in four walls.

An example from life.

Tip 3. Always pay attention to the total number of rooms in the hotel

As a rule, this information goes immediately after the description of the hotel in the form of a small postscript (photo below). If the feeling of peace and quiet is important to you, your option is a hotel with 200-300 rooms.

If you are planning to stay in a hotel belonging to well-known chains such as Mariott, Hilton, Hyatt, etc., the number level can be raised to 400-500 rooms. Anything from above - the risk of being in an "anthill": queues at the reception, a crowd of people at breakfast, lack of attention from the staff, endless road to the room through the floors and corridors.

An example from life.

Tip 4. Beware - boutique hotel

A boutique hotel is usually marketed as a stylish and luxurious hotel that does not belong to any hotel chain. However, be vigilant - the quality can be either dramatically better or dramatically worse than expected. At the same time, the cost of living will be guaranteed to be higher.

The main thing to pay attention to when booking rooms in a boutique hotel is the date of renovation (hotel renovation). If the renovation was done recently (1-2 years ago), boutique hotels are especially proud of this and display this information on the first lines in the description. If there is no information about the date of hotel renovation, this is already a reason to think about it.

Quoting from Wikipedia:

Recently, the concept of "boutique hotel" has been blurring, it is used for marketing purposes to improve the attractiveness of hotels.

An example from life.

In search of an alternative to the very "densely populated" Hilton San Franisco - I examined several adjacent boutique hotels. As a result, I saw small rooms, with a bad smell, old furniture and small latticed windows and room rates approaching an incredible $ 250-270 per night.

Photo - boutique hotel room from Booking.com:

And the number I saw is small and shabby.

Tip 5. Love to sleep in silence - study the noise factor

If you are sensitive to sounds from the street and you need complete silence for sleeping - you definitely need to understand how loud the noise level in the room will be. There are two factors to consider here:

1. The proximity of the road and other noise factors (busy streets, tourist centers). Calculated using Google Maps or other maps. If the road is closer than 100-150 meters, then there is a high probability that the hum from the road will constantly be present in the background in the room.
2. Soundproofing quality of windows. It is found out by the novelty of the hotel or the year of renovation, in extreme cases - you can just call the hotel and find out how well the windows block the noise from the street.

An example from life.

Tip 6. Don't be misled by the term "beach hotel"

If your goal is a beach holiday, carefully study the location of the hotel on Google Maps. See if the road separates the hotel and the beach, build a walking route to the nearest vacation spot, make sure that the hotel is not "silent" about anything.

An example from life.

Tip 7. The final price for a room is highly likely to be higher than the price indicated on the booking site

When planning the cost estimate, do not forget that in addition to the cost of the room itself, you will also need to pay taxes, access to wi-fi (if you need internet), breakfast, parking (if you plan to rent a car).

Taxes can be immediately included in the price or paid separately, and then you have a chance to find out about them only during check-out from the hotel, when paying for the stay.

Here is an example of taxes from one of the hotels in the United States that were not included in the price shown on the booking service:

• Tax (about 16%)
• Resort fee ($ 20 per night)
• City tax (2%)

The peculiarity of Booking.com is that the real cost of the reservation, including taxes, can be viewed only at the second step, after the room type is selected and the "book" button is clicked. Information about the real cost, after reloading the page, will be located in the upper right corner. In the second step, attention is focused on clarifying the billing information at the bottom of the page, so the eye does not get into the upper right corner.

The presence of wi-fi and the zones where it operates - in the entire hotel, in the room, only in the lobby - are usually indicated on the hotel page, this information is easy to find. True, if wi-fi is paid, be aware that, as a rule, access to only one device is paid for. Therefore, if the two of you are together, feel free to multiply the figure by two.

The quality is also non-linear. There were times when free internet worked much better than paid internet. Therefore, if you have an important meeting or Skype conference scheduled, it is better to clarify the real Internet speed and its cost in advance in order to avoid unpleasant surprises.

If breakfast is not included in the price of the room, its cost can usually be easily found on the hotel page or in the room description (usually excluding taxes). Anyway, if breakfast is not included, budget for this event at least $ 15-20 per person.

Parking can range from free to $ 15-50 per day. Please check the availability of parking lots near the hotel and consider these additional charges if you are planning to rent a car.

Thus, if price matters to you, considering all these factors can seriously disperse the orderly sorting of the booking service by price, so Excel will help you.

An example from life.

Pay attention to our article "How to buy cheap flights and book a hotel cheaper: the tricks of booking systems"

Tip 8. In reviews, pay attention only to what the majority writes

Studying the reviews on the pages of hotels, you must always remember - how many people, so many opinions. If you read everything and focus on it, the desire to go to the hotel disappears immediately. It's no secret that negative reviews are more readily written. On the other hand, not reading the reviews means driving blindly - after all, "knowledgeable means armed."

A bit of math to help you navigate this "stream of consciousness". Hotel reviews can be divided into two types:

The first type is what most people write, that is, it repeatedly points to a certain advantage or disadvantage. It is to these reviews that I recommend listening.

The second type is what the minority writes and this does not correspond to your personal opinion.

Therefore, in order not to be misled and to save time, always consider two factors:

1. Reviews that are found many times, that is, those that are written by the majority.
2. The overall rating of the hotel, which, in my personal opinion, is usually overestimated: if the rating is “amazing”, then in reality it is “good”, if the rating is “good”, then it is usually satisfactory, and so on.

Everything else is noise and error.

Tip 9. What else should you pay attention to when booking a hotel?

Below I will list other, in my opinion, important factors that should be considered when booking a hotel.

• The room category name may not be what you thought. Due to the fact that the names of room categories can vary from hotel to hotel, it is better to immediately look at all the available room categories in the hotel, so to speak, study the entire list in order to find out which rooms are higher and which are lower in the lineup. On Booking.com, you just need to click on the hotel name without choosing dates. Thus, for example, you can find out that "junior suite" is worse than "deluxe", but better than "superior room". Or, for example, that in addition to the rooms "with an ocean view" there are also rooms with a "frontal view of the ocean". Unexpected, right?
• The booking fee (guarantee) can come as an unpleasant surprise. Be especially careful and carefully study the cost of the booking itself. These are such small subscriptions and subprints that appear during the booking process. Sometimes a certain amount can be blocked as a guarantee of the reservation, sometimes nothing can be withdrawn, sometimes payment is blocked on the card for one day, sometimes for two. Sometimes the amount is refunded upon cancellation of the reservation, sometimes not. Sometimes they return, but only up to a certain date. With all my attention, it often happened that I did not notice the information that the amount on the card would be blocked, say, in the amount of several days of stay, and this was an unpleasant surprise. It also happened that when I tried to cancel my reservation for free before a certain deadline, I found out that the deadline had already passed, since the countdown was on a different, local time for the hotel and the “X” date had already arrived there.
• The written comments to the order are not yet a guarantee that they have been received. If you want to inform the hotel about something very important about your trip - for example, you have special requirements, or a special event, and you want to emphasize this - it is better to do it directly, by sending an email or a call to the hotel. In my experience, in 4 out of 5 cases, the information that I communicated to the hotel through the comments on the order on Booking.com, for some reason, did not reach. However, later I found out that the information confirmed by the hotels was posted in the section: “Reservations” - “Updating Reservations”. I advise you to check it out if you have posted any comments on your reservation.
• The higher category is not always better by definition. Here we will continue the topic of room categories. Thus, a cottage with a garden view may be without a “sea view”, but close to the sea, while a “sea view” room may be far from the sea and next to, say, the same noisy road in a multi-storey building. In the process of my "trial and error", I came to the conclusion that if the location of the room (cottage), relative to the sea or the beach is very important for you, the best solution is to call the hotel and clarify which room category, taking into account your requests and needs, will be for you optimal.

What to do if the trouble still came from where you did not expect, and you are faced with the above problems?

• If you don't like it - go for it! If you are not satisfied with the appearance of the room or its location, feel free to ask for an upgrade or replacement of the number. As a rule, if not today, then tomorrow there will be numbers.
• No places is not a sentence yet. Even though the hotels on Booking.com have the “all sold” status, as a rule, there are always several available replacement rooms.
• What's in the neighborhood? If the proposed options are categorically not satisfied, go around or call the neighboring hotels. I repeat, even if, according to the information on Booking.com, they are completely sold, it is highly likely that they will still have vacant rooms.
• You can move without a fine. If you decide to change the hotel, please specify the amount of the cancellation penalty. Often, it is enough to warn the hotel a day in advance that you will leave and you will not be charged a fine. Thus, find a suitable place to move, notify the hotel that you are leaving tomorrow, for example, and you will avoid financial losses.
• The reservation service is in a hurry to help! If the above methods did not help, call Booking.com and ask for help. In my experience, the Russian-speaking support service handles incoming requests quite efficiently and my problems were always resolved peacefully.

What problems have you faced? Write in the comments tips that can also make life easier for "independent travelers".