Booking hotel rooms can, for many of us, be a constant requirement of the job, especially if you are travelling around and working on client’s premises. Having a handy, local and reasonably-priced hotel or B&B to retire to after a hard day’s work is important. So this month’s Netcheck is dedicated to the process of selecting and booking rooms. I’ve developed a system for myself, which I’d like to share, which utilises two web sites in conjunction with one another. And between them, these two web sources have usually located a good place to rest my weary head.

The process begins by using TripAdviser. This web site is a kind of meeting point for travellers to give their views, advice and opinions on hotels, locations and places of interest. The geographic coverage is from the farthest reaches of the green Amazonian basin through to the arid, airy desert confines of Barnsley. It’s necessary
to register with this site, but it doesn’t produce an ‘In Mail’ avalanche and the service it provides is superb.

So, the process works like this; after registering, enter the name of the location in which you want to locate a hotel via the search option. Occasionally it will return several countries which have locations sharing the same name; did you know, for instance, that Kurdistan has its own Scunthorpe? (It doesn’t but my point still stands.)

Once you reach the target page of your search, you will be offered several options against which you can search further. As we are looking for hotels, it’s appropriate to click on the ‘hotels’ link. You will now be given a range of hotels listed initially in the sequence of positive reviews offered by members of TripAdviser. And here is TripAdviser’s great strength – the reviews are all undertaken by real life punters like you and I and, typically, the most recent will have taken place within a week or two. The reviews are unsophisticated but you can spot the negative or positive trends that users have experienced.

Each hotel has a little pen picture supplying details of the facilities, location and current rates. Reviewing these should help you produce a short list. At this stage, the second web site – Expedia at www.expedia.co.uk – comes to the fore.

Expedia also requires registration
but provides a one stop shop for booking flights, hire cars and hotels without any allegiance to a particular hotel chain or airline. What Expedia lacks, however, is the significant critical assessment which TripAdviser provides. On the Expedia site, input your hotel name; this will return further details and sometimes cheaper rates but, before you book, make one final check on the hotel’s own web site or via Google. This can reveal if the hotel has any even cheaper offers for booking direct with them. If not, do it via Expedia, job done.

Garry Platt is a senior consultant at Woodland Grange, specialising in management development and trainer training. He can be contacted on +44 (0) 1926 336621 or at garry.platt@wgrange.com

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