Tag Archives: Hotels

How to Find the Perfect Hotel Room

Brundholme, Keswick, England

Brundholme B&B, in the Lake District (Keswick), England

(Update: The Chase Ultimate Reward portal no longer offers bonus points for booking hotels through Hotels.com)

As full-time travelers we live our lives out of hotel rooms and other rented spaces. Sometimes we’ll sleep in as many as three different cities in a single week. That adds up to a lot of hotels over the course of a year. As a matter of necessity, we’ve become pretty good at finding the best places to stay.

And by “best” we don’t necessarily mean cheapest. While we definitely consider ourselves budget travelers we focus at least as much on value as on absolute cost. Some things, like private rooms and central locations, are worth paying a little more for, in our view. So this article won’t teach you how to find the cheapest bed anywhere within commuting distance of your chosen destination. But if what you’re looking for is a great room, in an awesome location, at a terrific price then the process we outline below should work as well for you as it has for us.

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B&B Amateur Hour

Nice view but nobody is home

So far this year we’ve slept in sixty-three different beds. That’s a lot of sleeping around. Naturally, not all of those places were winners even though most were perfectly adequate for our needs and some were even stellar. We don’t really ask for that much. Give us a clean room at a decent price in a good location and we’re pretty much set.

Lately, though, we’ve hit a string of pretty annoying bed-and-breakfasts that have made us wonder whether they’re really the right kind of accommodation for our current style of travel. It wasn’t always that way. We used to prioritize quaint, family run B&B’s over soullessly homogenized hotels. Now we’re not so sure.

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