As I’ve been moving forward with my Scotland planning, it occurred to me today that it might be useful to let any of you who might be planning European vacations to know about my go-to site for finding hotels in Europe. Booking.com
First off, I’m not getting any money from Booking for this post. I just find the site extremely useful and reliable, and I’ve gone to it for trips to Italy, Austria, Poland, Hungary, and now Scotland. Each time I go to a new country, it takes a bit of time to do some research to see which sites that country uses for lodging. I’ve tried AirBnB, VRBO, Hotels.com, and individual hotel sites. Occasionally one of those pans out more than Booking, but almost always, Booking ends up having the best prices.
Beyond simply getting the best prices, they’ve got other perks to the site that I very much appreciate. They have extensive user reviews, and you can quickly and easily filter through results by rating, location, and price. They bring together results for chain hotels, hostels, smaller hotels, and individual apartment listings. Most of the time you can find places that offer free cancellations, so that you can book something right away, and then go back later to see if you can find something better.
(True story: as I’m planning this Scotland trip, going to the Isle of Skye was high on my list of things I wanted to do. Last week, I used Booking to find a spot there when all the other sites I had tried had come up empty. As usual, I just wanted to grab something that seemed like a decent price, planning on coming back later to do a deeper search to see if I could beat that. Well, when I came back a week later, prices had skyrocketed. Almost nothing was left at all, and the cheapest I could find a place was for twice as much as I’d found the week before. Scotland is seriously busy in August.)
In any case, I know sometimes we get used to using our go-to search sites when we’re looking for things here in the states. It’s important to keep in mind that while those sites might find things in other countries, it’s no guarantee they’ll be particularly good at it. Just in case that tidbit of information comes in handy for you in the future at some point. Safe travels!
We took a boat past the booking.com headquarters in Amsterdam in December – it’s the real deal! And Tom had great experiences with them when he went on his last German adventure.
Use “private window” or “incognito” (what it’s called depends on which browser you use, it will be found under “file”) to search out flights, hotels, etc. Without that protection the prices will rise when you go back to the site next time. Once you show interest it’s their green light to jack up prices the next time you look.