Tips for Finding a Great Hotel

Can You Find a Great Hotel in a Place You’ve Never Been?

Booking the perfect hotel for your vacation might seem difficult when you’ve never traveled internationally or a great distance from your home. However, you can find the perfect hotel for your vacation by following some simple and straightforward steps that will help you narrow down your options and choose the ideal place to stay. If you want room service, luggage storage, and blackout curtains, there’s probably a hotel in every city that will meet your needs.

If you’re traveling to a country where familiar hotel brands aren’t present, who knows what kind of experience you might have when you arrive. If you’re used to choosing something simple, easy, and familiar when you travel, you might seem nerve-wracking to book a hotel stay halfway across the world. Will you find a Howard Johnson’s in Pretoria, South Africa? (actually, can you find a Howard Johnson’s anywhere these days . . .?)

Fortunately, there are a bevy of websites exist that offer tons of details on properties around the world and also house extensive repositories of reviews. How do you figure out which hotel is best for your international vacation? I’ve created a list of priorities that you’ll want to follow as you start and begin to narrow your search. Here are the steps you’ll want to take for finding a great hotel (with examples included!).

(note: some of the links here are to websites with which I am an affiliate, and your purchases help fund my website!)

Narrow Down Your Hotel Location

Your location within a town might not seem like a vital part of the equation, but you might find it more difficult to enjoy your activities if you’re too far away from their starting point. For example, when I traveled to Colombia, one of the towns we visited was Cartagena, which is spread out over more than 200 square miles.

As I looked at different activities and restaurants we would visit, I soon decided that staying in the “Walled City” area would offer us the best location for seeing the historical buildings, going on our walking tour or Cartagena, and staying within walking distance of tons of places to eat. With my location figured out, I was ready to start conducting searches for different hotels.

Tip: When you conduct a search on a website that offers lots of listings (like expedia.com or a similar site), you’ll notice that the search results will usually include the neighborhood, which is helpful when you’re trying to stay in a specific place. Most websites also let you examine available places to stay on a map, so you can concentrate on a specific area.

Take a look at a map here of Cartagena and take note of the location of our hotel, which is right in the middle of the walled city, the same location where we would take our walking tour and just a few minutes walk from one of the major points of interest we’d see:

Take a Read Through the Hotel Reviews

Yes, online reviews can amount to simple spam from fake accounts, but that doesn’t mean all the reviews are fake or written by bots. It’s actually pretty easy to tell when a review is fake, not worth reading, or composed by a mindless computer. It won’t have specific details or it will just say “great” in the description. These brief reviews aren’t what will give you the best information anyway about a property.

I normally rely on aggregate websites when searching for reviews about various hotels. An aggregate website is one that lists all of your possible hotels, cars, or flights within one search. It’s easier to find different hotel options with one of these larger websites than conducting a Google search on “Amsterdam hotels,” for example, and visiting each of those websites individually.

Tip: Don’t just rely on the overall rating or score for a hotel when deciding whether to stay. Read through the reviews and figure out what exactly annoyed people that they would give the property a low score. Is it the variety of the breakfast options that people frequently complain about? If you’re not eating breakfast at the hotel anyway, you can ignore those reviews in order to pay attention to the details that matter to you (maybe a quiet room is high on your list).

Choose a Few Options in Your Price Range

Yes, I actually look at the prices of the hotels where I might stay as the third determining factor (unless I’m particularly keen on saving as much money as possible on a trip). I feel like putting too many constraints on your options before you settle on just a few potential places means you might miss out on an amazing place to stay that’s just a little above your price range. Sometimes, paying that $20 extra each night is incredibly worth it!

You can also choose to write down a few options for your hotel stay and finalize which place you want after your itinerary is more solidified. You might choose a less expensive place to stay in one town so that you can enjoy a bit of an upgrade in the next town. Try keeping a list of a few hotels in each town as you start to craft each day or major section of your itinerary.

Tip: Consider staying in the best hotel you can afford at the conclusion of your travels. When I booked that trip to Colombia I mentioned above, the final town we stayed in was Cartagena, and I splurged on a really nice hotel for those final nights. I knew we might feel a little exhausted by the time we reached Cartagena, so I wanted to give us the best chance at a sublime night’s sleep at the end of our journey. So, so worth it.

This is the hotel we stayed in at the conclusion of our Colombia trip:

When we visited Cartagena, it was June and the temperatures were in the 90s (that’s about 32 for Celsius folks). I chose a pretty swanky hotel called the Hotel Casona del Colegio, as you can see from the picture above (that’s our actual room and a photograph I took during our stay), and the air conditioning was GLORIOUS!

I can’t say enough about how important it is that you choose your hotel carefully, so it offers all the attributes you want (perhaps you require a quiet room). Your main focus when traveling to see a new country will often be the sights, sounds, and experiences you’ll have outside the hotel. However, you can’t enjoy those amazing vistas and unforgettable experiences when you can’t get to sleep. Even the most adventurous travelers need a few hours of shuteye.

Test Out Your Itinerary With the Hotel Locations

When I start crafting an itinerary, I don’t look for hotels until I’ve already made a list of all the cities I want to visit and the activities I want to experience in each of those places. By the time I start searching for hotels, I have a good idea about how many nights in each place I need to book, which means I can accurately search for hotel costs in each town.

At this point, you’ll want to use Google Maps (or something similar) to gauge the distance between each of your hotels and activities. If you’re keen on going on a walking tour by yourself or with your partner but without a tour guide, you might want to make a list of all the sites you’ll want to visit during your walking tour. Is your hotel close to where you’ll walk, or will you need to take a car, bus, taxi, or train to begin your journey?

Tip: Nothing is set in stone at this point, which means you might end up switching one of your hotels out for another, based on the availability of your activities or additions you end up making to your trip. In some cases, you might end up reversing the entire itinerary (I did this when we visited Vietnam), but having all the names and details of your hotels and activities makes it relatively easy to rearrange things.

Make Your Final Hotel Choice & Reserve If Possible

Sometimes, I spend the most amount of time choosing hotels, especially if there are quite a few options in one or two of the towns I plan to visit. Unless I’m very certain about my overall travel itinerary, I usually try to opt for hotels that allow you to book with a credit card but which offer free cancellation until just before the travel begins.

As a side note: I generally stay in traditional hotels during my travels rather than AirBnBs simply due to my personal preferences. You can use absolutely all of these steps and techniques to find a great place to stay with a short-term-rental website just as easily as you can with regular hotels. In some cases, most of your options might be short-term-rentals, especially if you’re going to a tiny town without any hotels.

Tip: Sometimes you can score a discount on the price of a hotel if you pay in advance. If you’re ready to book all of your travel plans (flights, activities, hotels, other travel), consider lookin at whether any of your hotels offer discounts for early payment. I’ve seen prices that knock as much as $40 off each night’s stay, so it’s worth considering immediate payment if you’re on a tight travel budget and want to save as much as possible.

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