Could use some hotel/travel help

[Andrew Beattie]

May I recommend airbnb.co.uk

This is often staying in the spare room of someone's home, so the price tends to be reasonable.

They show the locations on a map, so it is easy to pick a suitable one.

I use it regularly and like it.

Andrew


On 26 Sep 2013, at 11:55, Smylers <Smylers at stripey.com> wrote:

> Alan Mosca writes:
> 
>> I've got one word for you : Priceline.
> 
> OK, I've never used Priceline before so just had a look to see what they
> can find for our London trip.
> 
>> You can easily get sub 100$ per night and have a 4*, depending on
>> period.
> 
> The dates were fixed for us (we're attending a wedding).
> 
> I dispute “easily”. By default it searches all of London, which is
> surely useless for everybody. It doesn't allow narrowing down by
> postcode or Tube station. Admittedly it does offer to search by
> proximity to golf courses, but regrettably directions for venues tend
> not to mention those in the way they do postcodes and stations.
> 
> So I'm left reading through a long list of ‘other landmarks’ to work out
> which one is likely to be nearest to where we want to stay, then going
> through the resulting hotels list, adjusting the distances given to
> allow for the delta between the location we actually want to search near
> and the one it let us search near.
> 
> At which point it turns out that some of the purported hotels in the
> list are actually hostels or apartments.
> 
> So far as I can tell we can get actual, non-scummy, hotels for $182 or
> $239. Which admittedly is less than £189, but still way over the $100
> you mentioned.
> 
> Oh, except that there's an extra mysterious[*] ‘taxes and fees’ added at
> checkout, which I'm guessing is VAT, making the $182 actually $218 per
> night (which, when translated to sterling, is exactly the same price
> that Booking.com quote for that room on those dates).
> 
> [*] Mysterious in the sense that they don't even try to justify how they
> calculated that particular charge for this booking, just waffling on
> about the kinds of things they cover.
> 
>> YMMV.
> 
> Apparently it did.
> 
> Having already checked Booking.com, Priceline didn't find anything
> additional or provide better rates. And nor was it's interface so slick
> or process so helpful that I'm wishing I'd used it instead of
> Booking.com.
> 
> Smylers
> -- 
> Stop drug companies hiding negative research results.
> Sign the AllTrials petition to get all clinical research results published.
> Read more: http://www.alltrials.net/blog/the-alltrials-campaign/
>