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Home » RTW Travel » Look for bargain hotels before you settle for a hostel bed

Look for bargain hotels before you settle for a hostel bed

Hotel room One thing that is really important for keeping your budget in line when on a RTW trip is taking advantage of bargains whenever you can. Generally speaking, most things seem to cost a bit more than we planned or expected when we are traveling, so whenever a cheap opportunity presents itself, it’s good to be ready to take advantage of it.

Whether you are more of a hostel dorm person, or a 1-star hotel person, it can be easy to get into a rut where you are basically looking in the same place each time for your sleeping arrangements, and then booking whatever seems best from those options.

Here are two facts that really compliment each other well: You’ll get sick of hostel dorms once in a while so you’ll want to stay in a decent hotel, and, some decent hotel rooms can be even cheaper than 1-star rooms in the same city if you know how and where to look.

If you haven’t yet started out on your RTW trip, you probably don’t know what it’s like to “hit the wall” when it comes to cheap beds and hostels in general. If you are like almost everyone else, you’ll have fun at first, but then after a while you’ll be ready to trade your entire backpack for one night in a queen-size bed in a room with air conditioning and a TV. After a couple days in places like this, you’ll be ready for hostel life again, and those dorm beds will be fine for a while.

Finding these cheap hotels

When you are traveling through SE Asia or even parts of Central America, there are plenty of places where hotels are so cheap there is little or no demand for hostels with dorm rooms, so these will always be places where you can splurge a bit and get a lot of bang for your buck. But there are other situations in expensive cities where hotels can be surprisingly cheap as well.

You best bet is to regularly check a last-minute booking site like RatesToGo.com. This site, and others like it, will book rooms in cities around the world only within 28 days of the arrival date, and a quick scan of their listings is worth the minute or so it takes. Often you’ll enter a city and a date and you’ll see expensive hotels listed at a very small discount, so if that’s the case you’ll know this is a city where you should book a hostel. But other times you’ll see hotels in different price ranges that can be half off or even more.

This phenomenon is caused by the fact that most large cities have an abundance of “business hotels” that tend to hover around the 3-star range. And these business hotels might be jammed full maybe 40 or 45 weeks out of the year, but when you are heading to a city and there is no trade fair on the calendar, or it’s when many local businesses close for holidays themselves, you can find amazing deals. This can happen on Friday and Saturday nights at these hotels too, depending on the city.

A US$120 room might be “on sale” for US$109 during busy times, but for US$49 if the town is dead. These last-minute hotel booking companies are one of the best ways for these hotels to fill up all their empty rooms during these periods, and often a 3-star hotel will be cheaper than a 1-star hotel next to it, simply because many budget travelers aren’t aware of the cheaper rooms.

So before you book into yet another hostel dorm a couple weeks before you arrive in a city, take a scan on the last-minute sites because you might just find an incredible deal on something far nicer than you were going to book otherwise.

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