10 tips for booking a hotel online

booking hotel tablet
Not all of us are used to booking hotels online . Older people still do it by calling the establishment in question, or at most by writing an email to the address that appears on the website.

The best is not that, since it is not the most practical, but it is an option at least respectable. The ideal is to visit hotel reservation portals such as Booking or comparators such as Trivago. Of course, you have to take into account a series of questions to find the best hotel at the best price and without surprises.

The Decalogue of the Good Seeker

1- Enter all the information you are looking for: city, date of entry, date of departure and number of people who will sleep in the room. That is the basics. From there you can play with the filters to fine-tune your aim.

2- The most used filters are usually those of price (you can set a cap depending on what you want to spend), distance (so as not to be too far from the city center or the beach), stars (it measures the quality of the establishment) and rating (better or worse based on the experiences of other customers.

great hotel
3- With all that, we can click on «search» knowing that there are more filters . For example, if it has a spa or not, if the beach is nearby, if there is a swimming pool, if it includes breakfast, if it has parking, if there is an elevator, if pets are allowed … I always recommend not opting for those filters unless it is an indispensable requirement. Otherwise we will be narrowing the search too much and fewer results will be displayed.

4- Once the results are shown, it is a matter of sorting them by order of popularity (the search engine decides which ones are most popular based on its criteria), by price (from lowest to highest or highest to lowest) or by distance ( from greater to less or from less to greater distance than what we have considered key when establishing the filters).

5- If you have searched for Trivago, you will see that there are usually several options . Rooms in the same hotel may be available through different portals, such as Expedia or Atrápalo. Click on the cheapest option (or the cheapest option with breakfast and free cancellation if that is important to you) and you will be redirected to the portal in question. That if you have not done the search through a portal, I repeat. In this portal, all the characteristics of the room that you are about to hire will be displayed. Take a good look at everything, because sometimes they even cheat with the price that appears in the comparator results. You can get a nasty surprise if you don’t even stop to look at the price, although luckily it is not the most common.

hotel with views
6- Keep in mind the maximum number of people per room and see if the payment is made at the moment or at the hotel. You should also bear in mind that some hotels offer you the possibility of canceling the reservation up to a few days before the date of entry. That is very positive, since there can always be some last minute unforeseen event.

7- The most important factor, in my opinion, is the one that has to do with the opinions of other people who have already been there. If there is a considerable amount of comments, you can get an idea of ​​the good and the bad of the hotel. You will know if the employees are friendly, if the location is good, if the rooms are clean … It is something that goes wonderfully.

8- When you go to pay, if it is the hotel in a country where the euro is not the official currency, take a look at the payment conditions. The price may appear in euros, but you can be charged with the currency there if they specify it. In that case, if the payment is made before arriving at the hotel, the bank will charge you a commission for the currency exchange . In addition, the amount paid may not coincide with the one contracted, since sometimes they take the exchange rate on the day of payment as a reference and it always fluctuates.

hotel reservation card
9- When you have read all the conditions of the reservation and make the payment, do not forget to print the reservation . The most normal thing is that they send it to the email address that you have provided, so it is not something you should do at that moment, although it is highly recommended in case the flies. In certain portals such as Booking they allow you to always carry the reservation with you thanks to their application, where all the reservations are stored and they even send you guides of the cities you are going to visit (only major cities).

10- It should not be mandatory because today everything is computerized , but it never hurts to carry the printed paper of the reservation. That or use the application that I have commented previously if you reserve by Booking, although it is always better to carry the paper in case the mobile runs out of battery.

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