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 a less respectable option. The ideal is to visit cheap hotels in Tokyo specially their hotel reservation portals such as Booking or comparators. Of course, a series of issues must be taken into account to find the best hotel at the best price and without surprises.
The Decalogue of the good search engine
1- Enter all the data of what you are looking for: city, check-in date, check-out date and number of people who will sleep in the room. That’s the basics. From there you can play with the filters to refine your aim.
2- The most used filters are usually those of price (you can set a limit depending on how much 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 evaluation (better or worse depending on the experiences of other clients.
3- With all that we can click on “search” knowing that there are more filters. For example, whether or not it has a spa, whether the beach is close, whether there is a swimming pool, whether it includes breakfast, whether it has parking, whether there is an elevator, whether pets are allowed… I always recommend not opting for those filters. Unless it is an essential requirement. Otherwise we will be narrowing the search too much and fewer results will be displayed.
4- Once the results are displayed, it is about ordering them in order of popularity (the search engine decides which ones are most popular based on its criteria), by price (from lowest to highest or from highest to lowest) or by distance (from greater to lesser or from lesser to greater distance than what we have considered key when establishing the filters).
5- If you have searched for cheap hotels in Delhi, you will see that there are usually several options. The rooms of the same hotel may be available through different portals, such as Expedia or Atrápalo. Click on the cheapest option (or the cheapest with breakfast and free cancellation if that is important to you) and you will be redirected to the portal in question.
That is if you have not carried out the search through a portal, I repeat. This portal will show all the characteristics of the room you are about to hire.
Take a good look at everything on cheap hotels in Rome, because sometimes they even cheat with the price that appears in the comparator results. You can be in for a nasty surprise if you don’t even stop to look at the price, although luckily it’s not the most common.
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 take into account 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 some last-minute unforeseen event can always arise.
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 bad things about the hotel. You will know if the employees are friendly, if the location is good, if the rooms are clean… It is something that is going great.
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 they can charge you with the currency there if they specify it. In this 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 amount contracted, since sometimes they take the exchange rate on the day of payment as a reference and this always fluctuates.
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 that you should do at that very moment, although it is highly recommended just in case. 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 important cities).
10- It shouldn’t be mandatory because today everything is computerized, but it never hurts to bring the printed paper of the reservation. That or use the application that I have mentioned before if you reserve through Booking, although it is always better to carry the paper in case the mobile runs out of battery.