May 12, 2016
Many hotel booking sites claim to have a “best rate guarantee” to save you money. But there are often hidden conditions that can backfire. Here are 3 tips to make sure you get the most for your money.
Hotel myths are endless. One popular one, now widely debunked, says that all your identity and credit card information is stored on your electronic room key. This isn't actually the case, but here are five more myths that many travelers believe when checking into a hotel.
At branded hotels, when they say all their rooms are the same, they mean it.
Regardless of whether it's a ghana email address big brand hotel or an independent one, no two rooms are exactly the same in a hotel. How could they be? Of course, this doesn't mean that the hotel won't stop trying to convince you otherwise.
“ They certainly want you to think they mean it ,” says Jacob Tomsky, a longtime hotel worker and author of the hotel exposé, Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels , Hustles and So-Called Hospitality. “ But it’s an outright lie. Every hotel, every floor, has structural differences. Room sizes change, views change, and yet they’re all listed under the same price category, all identical in the eyes of the system. A hotel wants you to think they’re all the same, because someone has to stay in the bad rooms .”
Tomsky points to examples where a room on each floor has lost half its bathroom because it was built adjacent to the floor's ice machine or the elevator shaft is cutting into the floor to the size of a room.
“ Even if the square footage and layout are the same, not all rooms are in the same optimal location ,” says Christine Sarkis, senior editor at SmarterTravel.com . “ There’s always a room that’s noisier, and there’s always the room with the view of the loading dock, parking lot, or exhaust fans .”
But all is not lost. When booking, “ you should be specific about the features you want in your room and be pleasant to the front desk staff ,” says Daniel Craig, a former hotel general manager and president of Renown , a hotel consultancy. “They decide where to put you.”
On sold out nights, a hotel always has an extra room available just in case.
Conversely, if the hotel is full there's a good chance it has more reservations than rooms available, Craig says.
