How to choose the hotel for your trip

Choosing a hotel could be a daunting task for a lot of people, because often times there are too many hotels to choose from. Here’s my strategy for choosing a good value hotel.

Hotel Booking Site
First, you have to decide on which hotel booking website to use. I mainly use booking.com and Agoda. When searching for the same hotel on various hotel booking sites, you will have to read the fine print carefully. Some sites include all taxes and service charge in their rates while some do not. booking.com and Agoda’s price tends to be more or less the same (after factoring in service charge and taxes). The hotel is probably obligated to offer the same rate when they signed up for listing with the booking sites. The exception to this is when a website offers a special discount. Agoda sometimes offer a special non-refundable option, while booking.com sometimes has a 10% discounts.

The choices of hotels available from hotel booking websites are largely the same for the more popular sites like booking.com and Agoda, but sometimes hotels.com may have additional choices. Some countries have booking sites that cater specifically to that country (e.g. travelking.com.tw in Taiwan) and more choices can be found on these, so for such cases you should go with the local booking sites. Chain hotels like Accor hotels have their own booking websites and are worth a look, though these are usually more expensive.

Cashback
These days, the cashback scheme has also infiltrated hotel booking sites. A cashback scheme is one that gives you cashback when you complete your booking by going through another website. I’ve written about one such site before – ebates.com. They offer cashback for many hotel booking sites, including expedia.com, agoda.com, booking.com, hotels.com, Hotelclub, Accor Hotels and many more. Shopback.sg is another cashback site (homegrown in Singapore). I found out that hotel booking sites (specifically booking.com) may not be all reliable when it comes to paying you cashback for your hotel bookings. Even though booking.com is supposed to pay 2% cashback, i have only received the cashback a few times, for probably more than 30 bookings done (Update: this was likely due to booking more than 80 days ahead). Expedia, on the other hand, is reliable in paying the cashback (for flights in my case, though i suspect it will be so for hotel bookings also). Hotel booking sites are forced to offer cashback since everyone else is doing it – or risk losing business to competitors. When booking hotels, keep in mind that the cashback could make one hotel booking site cheaper than another even if they have the same hotel rates. Agoda pays S$10 (S$15 when they run a promotion) cashback for bookings above US$50 through Shopback, which is a very significant discount to your overall booking rate. The catch is, Agoda charges the hotel payment to your credit card about a week before your stay there, so you won’t enjoy any credit card related cashback (ANZ gives you 5% cashback for expenses at a hotel), unless you use a credit card that gives you cashback for online transactions (e.g. Bank of China Shop! card). Don’t be misled by those sites that give you 6%-10% cashback – most of the time, their hotel rates are higher.

If you have a rental car
Often times, if you have a rental car, you can choose to stay in the middle of nowhere, where the accommodation is likely to be very cheap (with free parking too). I still recall staying in a remote place outside Amsterdam for 20 Euros per night (inclusive of 2 Euros tax). In many European cities, you can use park and ride (i.e. park at special rates at a car park at the edge of the city centre and take the metro) to tour the city without actually having to stay in the city itself. I do this when i don’t plan to spend more than one day in that city.

Use the map
For a city destination where I am going to use the metro to get around, i look for hotels near a metro station, and you can really only do this using the map. So when viewing the hotel details page, i would click the “Show map” link that points out the location of the hotel and check out the other hotels marked on the map that are also near a metro station. I usually don’t mind staying a little further away as long as the hotel is no more than 30 minutes away by metro to the city centre.

When i have a rental car, for those days when i just need a place to stay for the night while on the way to the next destination i am going to visit, i would use the map to find a hotel that is along the way (or not too far off the path) and is the cheapest. Use Google Maps to help estimate the driving time.

Read the reviews
Reviews offer you the first hand account of someone who has stayed in the hotel. You will have to read beyond the words and take into account if the reviewer is an overly fussy person, which is often the case. It is the norm for people to exaggerate the negative aspects of their experience. Look out for things in the reviews for things you absolutely cannot tolerate, such as a hard bed, sleezy neighbourhood etc.

Update 14/11/2015: I have just discovered why i am not getting my cashback for hotel bookings on booking.com, now that booking.com is also on Shopback. The terms and conditions for booking.com cashback states that no cashback is awarded for bookings done 80 days or more in advance. That applies to most of my bookings, so, i guess the trick is to re-do the booking if there is still vacancy in less than 80 days to date of reservation, or book with Agoda, if the price is comparable. No such condition is stated for Agoda.

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