Hotel Research

We're almost done booking our hotels for our spring trip, and it occurred to me during this process that this is the first time in 2.5 years that we haven't used Priceline to book hotels during our vacation. It's a completely different thought and research process than what we usually do.

Even though you can only choose location/star level on Priceline and have no choice of which hotel, we still do a fair amount of research. Through bidding sites, you can find out which hotels are likely to come up (based on other users' history), and then look up the current room rates for those hotels for your dates. This helps you figure out a good bidding price (especially with the number of rebids you have) and a bidding strategy. You can also read reviews on the possible hotels and see if you might want to try a different star level to get what you want. Once you bid, it's all out of your hands and what Priceline delivers is a surprise. But bidding, to me, is fun.

Choosing a hotel on your own is so different. You need to check recommendations, reviews, exact locations of hotels. There's a lot more research involved. I can't even remember the last time we did this type of research. Maybe we never did, since the only other trips on which we've chosen hotels, it's been through travel agents or we booked directly and knew where we wanted to be. (I'm not counting wedding hotels in any of this.) Thank goodness for the helpful folks in the forums on Fodors because over the years, they have given so many suggestions that it helped narrow things down a little bit. There are just so many hotels that the research can get a little overwhelming without someone to point you in the right direction based on their past experience.

We did think about Priceline for this trip, but there were very limited options and it was only available in 1 out of the 4 places we were going. It's going to cost us a little more this way (and we're paying in Euros) but we know what we're getting and where we're going. Priceline was the first place we looked since we had previously used it in Germany with no problems, but this time, it just didn't fit with what we needed to do. I can't wait to see what the hotels look like and cannot wait to finally be on vacation!