If you’re planning on taking a vacation soon, I’m sure you going to need a hotel unless you plan on staying with friends or relatives.  If that’s the case, then this might not be for you but you can use it for future reference.  I’m going to talk a little bit today about how you can find the perfect hotel that fits your budget and how you can find it.  In my example, I’m going to use the website, TripAdvisor.com, a great review based website.

Figure out your desination and budget

If you haven’t figured out where you want to travel yet, that may be your first problem.  You’re going to first have to decide where you want to go!  From there, you’re going to want to decide on how much you’re going to spend a night.  Depending on where you’re starying, you can pay a few dollars a night or a few hundreds a night.  This will all depend on the time or year and location.

Search for the Hotel

On the website, TripAdvisor, we’re going to want to search for the hotel that’s in our budget.  Let’s say we want to go to Chicago, IL and our budget is going to be anywhere from $100-$300 a night.  Hotels are very expensive in Chicago, keep in mind!  From here, you’re going to get the list of hotels.

What I generally like to do is sort it by the popularity.  These are all reviews from the visitors themselves, so you’re going to get a honest review!  The cool thing about this site is that you’re going to be able to see what the #1 hotel is according to the visitors and it will go from there.

Explore the list

Once I sort the list by popularity I then start to browse the hotels invdividually.  I look at the pictures of hte hotels, the accomodations, and the user reviews.  I generally try to stay at a hotel with more than 3 1/2 stars.  Anything below that I have found that they aren’t that great.

Browse the prices

Once you find the hotel you’re interested in, make sure you check out at least four travel websites including the hotel itself if it has a website where you can reserve rooms.  You’ll find that most of the times it’s the cheapest to book through the hotel itself.  Sometimes there are exceptions though where you can get deals through the travel agent online.

Hopefully, once you find that hotel you like, it turns out to be what you want it to be.  If you like it or hate it, you can always come back to the website and leave the review on how your stay is.  I’ve used this method countless times and it has always worked like a charm.