Hotel booking desks - a helpful tool for RTW travelers
Depending on where you’ve traveled, you may or may not have seen these hotel booking services that are unavoidable in many parts of the world and unknown in other areas. And even if you have seen them, there is a good chance you might have looked upon them with great suspicion, and you could hardly be blamed for this.
In case you haven’t seen them, all over Europe, and in much of the rest of the world as well, every major airport, train station, and city center has a hotel booking service run by the local tourist board. The good news is, these things can be great tools for RTW travelers and others who like to book their accommodations as they go. When you are in a city or airport that has one of these things, they tend to be located in conspicuous places, so they are harder to miss than they are to find.
At first glance these hotel-booking desks might look like some gimmick where the most expensive hotels in a city hire a service to trick unsuspecting visitors into booking into a pricey hotel, and adding a commission on top of the price for their trouble. But the opposite is often true. Especially in Europe, and particularly in smaller touristy cities, these booking desks often list every room in town, including pensions, home-stays, and even hostels.
They are almost all computerized, and each hotel will tell the booking desk early in the day how many rooms they still have available. If a larger hotel is certain it will have many empty rooms that night, they will often tell the hotel booking desk to offer a special discount of up to 50% with the hopes of filling some of these empty rooms. This kind of competition means that late-arriving travelers looking for a room can sometimes find a 3-star hotel charging less than a 1-star place next door.
During busy seasons you might be lucky to get any room at all, forget about a bargain, but these places can often find the last available rooms in the city during crowded times. There might be a few exceptions out there, but in general these booking desks do a great job finding arrivals the best room in town for their budget. In exchange, they will almost always ask for a small deposit to hold the room, but only after they’ve confirmed it on the phone or by computer, with you standing right there. The small deposit (perhaps US$5 or so) will usually go toward the price of the room. Some places add this to the room rate, and others include it as part of the room rate. Either way, trusting these services is usually worthwhile.
Of course, this is just a strategy to help you find a decent and cheap bed when you arrive in a city with no reservation. You can often find great deals on that first night’s stay on the Internet, especially if you book a hotel as early as you can after confirming your flight or train ticket into the city. Both of these things are far better than arriving and wandering around aimlessly with your backpack getting heavier each block you go.