Accommodation is one of areas where you will likely spend most of your money so this is an important area to plan. If you have done some travelling in the past you will likely have used some of the popular accommodation booking sites – booking.com, expedia, trivago etc. I have been using booking.com and that is what I used for the majority of my bookings. There are a few reasons for this. Firstly the more you use them the more discount you get. Secondly I like the filters that booking.com allow you to select. Also, I have found them to be generally close to, if not cheaper than some of the others and they usually have a good range of place to choose from. However, that does not mean that I didn’t do some checking on Trivago (as that has all the other sites together in one place including expedia and booking.com). I also checked the actual website of any potential hotels/motels/stays etc to see if I could book any cheaper direct. I also did periodic checks of prices even after I had made bookings to ensure I couldn’t get them cheaper as the dates came closer. Another thing with booking.com was that it gave me the price or approximate price in my country currency which was helpful for recording the potential costs and giving me an overall accommodation cost as I added them.
But, lets start at the beginning. At the start of this exercise I wasn’t actually going to book all the accommodation – thinking that I would book the main cities and any two nighters but leave the one nighters and we would book them on the fly. However, I ended up changing my mind fairly early on this. That was because of two reasons. The first was that I could at least book them so that I had a booking there but make sure I booked one I could cancel if plans changed. And then secondly, I realised we were going at the time towards the end of the UK Summer holidays – in fact the last 2-3 weeks. Therefore I thought it would be wise to ensure we had a place to stay!
There were a few criteria that we needed when searching for our accommodation. We obviously wanted something nice but not over the top expensive. We needed to have parking either at the motel or very close by, and we needed to be able to have twin beds or bedrooms. I also wanted to be able to cancel it if need be, so cancellation was another filter. Booking.com made this filter very easy and it sort of saves those filters at the top of the page each time you go to search which made it nice and simply when I was going in and out of places/towns etc. So there became my search for places to stay, using the filters above. Be aware though that you should always check the distance the motel is from where you are wanting to be and that it is also close to any attractions/places you want to visit. You don’t want it totally out in the farmlands and be too isolated from food and other amenities. But the good thing about booking ones that can be cancelled is, you can book it to hold it but it can be cancelled at any time up until the cancellation date if you find something better! And yes, booking accommodation that can be cancelled is slightly dearer. However, if you are doing this about a year out, it still works out cheaper (yes I have checked), then waiting and booking closer to the time and paying straight away. There will always be some exceptions to this – motels might have particular sales or specials that come up, but in general all the ones I have checked six months later were either the same price or dearer.
Another thing to note is that you can still make payment on these bookings, even though there is a cancellation. I didn’t want to leave it and have to pay them all when we got over there and reached the cancellation date, so I did start paying for them. There were a few I could not actually pay for – they won’t accept payment until that cancellation date. And some I messaged as there was not a payment link on the booking.com booking but they did send me a link and I made payment either by credit card that way or by international bank transfer, but a lot of them had an option down the bottom of the booking to make payment – which I did.
Worried if you want to cancel it would be a hassle to get your money back? So was I to start with, however there was a change in our itinerary where was needed to change two places – increasing a night and one and decreasing a night at the other. I had paid for both already and even though there was a link to change dates on the one I wanted to decrease, it said that I could change the dates so my only option was to cancel it and do a new booking. Surprisingly, the credit for what I had paid was received back straight away. My thinking on this is that booking.com might accept the payment, but they don’t pass it on until the cancellation date. Therefore they take advantage of having the month in their bank until such time as they have to pay it, or until it is cancelled.
Some may not be comfortable doing this – and that is something you can decide for yourself, but I was comfortable and didn’t have an issue with this process. Particularly knowing I could still cancel and get my money back if things changed before the cancellation date.
As I booked I recorded the details on my spreadsheet. This meant I had a record for each place we were staying and to start with I put the approximate costs in AUD on my spreadsheet to help with recording costs. As I paid I recorded the amount that I actually paid which meant the costs were slowing showing actual rather than estimated.
This is what my spreadsheet now looks like – I colour coded any that were paid and not paid. It also shows on the example below that I booked one through Expedia – this is helpful so that I know where to check if need be.
I also noted any that included breakfast which was helpful to record as well.
As I mentioned earlier, I did periodic checks of some accommodation – especially the ones that were one the high side. I also did checks direct to the hotel/motel we were looking at as some can be cheaper (and some can actually be dearer!) direct through the hotel/motel – but note you might have to pay upfront as well!
When you log into booking.com – and click on your bookings – all our accommodation booked will be “bundled” together:
Note that this shows 42 bookings – this includes not only your accommodation, but also any hotel transfers, rental cars and any other bookings you have made in this trip. When you go into it, it will list all the bookings you have in date order, which is a great way to check if you are missing any dates or have double overs etc. You can also double check this against your spreadsheet easily.
One thing we did do when booking our accommodation – we choose different type of accommodation – B&B, Motels, country estates, apartments etc. We even picked a caravan type accommodation in the list as well. We want to appreciate all types of places and styles and this was a great way to do that.
So the accommodation has now been booked, and as I mentioned I slowly started paying for them – usually a few a month to spread out the costs and make it so I wasn’t paying a large amount each month. I found it reassuring to know they were paid for already but could still be cancelled if need be.