10 August 2011
Choosing the ideal holiday hotel is a subtle art but luckily anyone can learn it. In this post I’m going go through some of the finer aspects that I think will help you make a better and cheaper choice of hotel.
Unless you have money to waste and the luxury of time you won’t be visiting each candidate hotel before you make your choice, what you will be doing is using the internet to search and making your decision based on the results of a hotel search engine. Luckily good search engines are packed with technology that help you make an informed choice. For example interactive maps show you where the hotel is in relation to an important landmark like the beach, advanced searching will allow you to choose accommodation that has wheelchair access, and there are countless other useful features.
More importantly hotel search technology can help you get a better deal, here’s how. First you have to realise that there are hotel search engines and hotel comparison search engines. The first will find results from a single on-line travel company and the second (like the one at the bottom of this post) will find the results of many on-line travel companies.
You may be forgiven to think that a comparison search will drown you in a deluge of information however you would be mistaken. Comparison search engines actually give you the same results as a regular search engine except that they automatically find you the best available price. So you don’t need to put in any special effort and you will find the cheapest deal. It’s a no brainier which is why any hotel searches you do on Bulgaria Sea View are comparison searches.
That’s great but how can you determine the best hotel for your needs? Apart from your specific requirements like your budget, the location and any must have services you have chosen for your stay, there are two pieces of information related to reviews submitted by hotel guests, that you need to pay attention to: the number of reviews and the review ratings.
The number of reviews is important because there need to be enough of them to make the review rating meaningful. If there is one reviewer that rates a hotel as being excellent, it’s just the opinion of a single person so you shouldn’t give it much weight. However if there are 100 reviews that rate it as excellent then the rating is credible. Another great feature you get with a comparison search engine is that the reviews are aggregated across all the on-line travel companies which makes them much more reliable. On a comparison search I expect at least 20 reviews before I really trust the rating.
Another tip is to actually read a handful of the reviews instead of just looking at the rating because they will give you a feel for the atmosphere at the hotel. From the reviews you can tell if a hotel is family friendly, if it’s a place to party or if it’s a good place to socialise with fellow travellers. By the way the same rule applies here, don’t just stop at the first review, read enough reviews to get a meaningful picture.
I just want to add a final word about personal recommendations by someone you trust. In my experience they take priority over everything, that’s how these travellers found a great family friendly hotel in Tenerife and also why people who find the perfect hotel go back again and again.
To recap here are my tips on finding a better and cheaper hotel for your holidays:
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