The sweet kiss of threadbare cotton on your cheek. The delicate
and soulful scratch of unclean polyester on your legs. All that
is available at a hotel of your choosing. If you’d prefer
something a touch more upscale at the best price read on.
Thing No. 1 For buying rooms we recommend some of the same sites as for air travel.
• There are a number of free travel meta-search
engines (that’s what these sites are called). Check out sidestep.com for travel in the U.S. and mobissimo.com for international
travel. They check all the discount sites like hotels.com, Orbitz or
Expedia and tons more. The meta sites don’t actually sell tickets, they
provide connections to the places where you will buy. They do an
amazing job getting the best price across all the sites.
• Use groople.com if you’re traveling as a
group. It has some nifty group organization features for taking
care of all the rugrats heading to Mickeyland or your college
goon-buddies getting your Swingers thing on in Vegas.
Thing No. 2 For reviews of hotels check tripadvisor.com .
It has good complete consumer reviews, a pretty simple design and they
also sell rooms. An alternative is HotelChatter.com which has
no-nonsense reviews but a messy system of getting at the reviews.
Thing No. 3 Remember to doublecheck.
• High-speed Internet in particular wireless.
• A good gym
• Deals for the kiddies
• Remember to pick the best room. Rooms along the
exteriors are usually noisier due to noise from the road. Rooms
near restaurants, elevators, or ice machines can also be noisy,
although they are convenient.