Not long ago I posted here asking about people’s experience with long distance train travel, apropos of a trip to NYC we’re planning on this Spring. Since then, wiser councils have prevailed and we’ve decided to fly like sensible people, and one of the advantages of that is it’s fairly easy to find a good air and hotel package on the Internet, for just about any place you want to go to.
As for a hotel, we don’t want to stay at the Waldorf, but we’d be looking for some basic amenities, like room service and perhaps a gym. The room needn’t be huge as we don’t expect to spend a lot of time in it. So as I scroll over the packages presented, I find myself gravitating to the three-star hotels like the Washington Square Hotel (we want to be more downtown), and the Wellington, just south of Central Park. Both of these places, for example, look great on Orbitz.com, but who knows? In no other area of photography do spaces magically expand to the extent they do in pictures of hotels.
And aside from all that, I’ve never used an online travel agent. I’ve heard bad things. Do desk clerks actually curl their lip and sneer at you because you booked online? Has anyone experienced any actual travel disasters with an online agent, like finding you had no reservation at the hotel even though you’d prepaid?
I’ve never had a desk clerk sneer at me for the way I booked my room. Hotel rooms get booked in a myriad of ways.
Just make sure you print out your confirmation from the online service and bring it with you. If you’ve reserved with a credit card and have a confirmation in hand, you are in good shape.
If you want to doublecheck, call the hotel directly to reconfirm.
As for NYC hotel rooms, if they’re inexpensive, the rooms will likely be small. There really isn’t much of an offseason there, although some rates go down on weekends.
I used expedia.com for a trip to Disneyland last month. I got a four nights for the price of three at the top hotel there (Grand Californian) not available anywhere else. Furthermore, the deal couldn’t have been better on airfare, the passes to Disneyland and California Adventure, and the airport-hotel ground transportation.
I have used all of them for several years without any problems. Employees certainly won’t sneer at you. I think that booking online is almost the norm now. I have never had any problems even internationally but you can also double check the hotel through the hotels own website to get pictures and more details if you want them.
Expedia and Hotels.com are great sites to do research, and occasionally to find good deals, price-wise. Sometimes, however, you can get better results negotiating directly with the hotel. It’s sometimes easier to get a free upgrade if the hotel feels you are a direct customer, rather than an indirect customer. I would use Expedia and hotels.com to find a couple of target hotels, then contact the hotels directly to see if I could get a better deal than the one listed. If not, book through the intermediary.
Yeah, I was very impressed by the deals I saw. It was the discovery that we could get both the flight and hotel for about the same money as just the train fare and sleeper accommodation would have been by themselves, that made me deep six the train idea. When going to New York it’s better to spend your money there than spend it all getting there.
Be very careful of the fine print, though, especially with hotels.com. I tried to use them once and found that their change and/or cancellation policy was **entirely unacceptable ** – ANY change or cancellation, regardless of lead time, imposed a $25 fee, PLUS, if it was within the policy period, you have to pay a full night’s room rate, plus taxes, plus “service fees”, whatever those are! Uh-uh.
As an example, I checked The Wellington (as mentioned in the OP) and here’s what it said…
I’ve heard of some people getting a perceived poor treatment because they booked on priceline.com. I’ve used priceline several times and always done well. I’ve used travelocity for airfares but never hotels.
I just took a trip to Philadephia and Virginia that I booked through Orbitz. I was very pleased. When I booked the car, my wife said her travel agent could do it cheaper. I called said travel agent, and the best she could find was $40 more than what I’d found on Orbitz.
I can’t imagine anyone caring how you booked something. I don’t see any reason to care if they care, for that matter.
I forget what travel magazine it was, but it was in a short article on how online bookers, who usually pay significantly discounted rates, were often shunted to less desirable rooms because of that. When the representative from the hotels’ association was asked to comment, she answered, speaking to the hypothetical traveler who booked online–“because you’re cheap, and we don’t want you”. Why then do they have arrangements with the online agents? “To fill the rooms”.
Now I really don’t care too much about the room–if it’s in the back, overlooking the lightwell, whatever, that’s fine. But I don’t want to get a bunch of 'tude. From the responses, it doesn’t seem like we’ll get any, and I can assume that the article I saw was somewhat alarmist.