What You Should Know Before Booking A Hotel

Nowadays, it is becoming simpler to make a hotel reservation online for vacations straight from your smartphone or laptop, dropping your reliance on travel agents and sometimes eliminating contact with them.

What You Should Know Before Booking A Hotel
[image: unsplash by michiel annaert]

There is nothing simple like booking a hotel online. Hundreds of websites and apps disclose all the information possible concerning a wide variety of hotels across the world. Asides from the usual rates that these hotels are charging, the information provided may include photographs of the hotel, details about the attractions in the area, and reviews of visitors who stayed. Some might even have deals or perks when you opt for an early reservation. This post explains some of the things you need to know before booking a hotel.

Location, Location, Location

One of the best and most useful tools you should use before booking a hotel is Google Maps. Google Maps can help you discover hotels in Harrogate and navigate through places you have never been. All you need to do is to visit their website, type in the exact street name of the hotel, and click Enter.

Now, you will have two options. The first option is the street view photosphere. This option will allow you to travel almost anywhere across the world using photos taken in 360 degrees. For instance, you can see which area the hotel is located in if there are restaurants, entertainment venues, stores, and train stations nearby.

The second option will be direction. This option will open a new window where you can put any additional location – an attraction, restaurant, museum, and many more, and see how far your hotel is from that destination with different modes of transport.

Hotel Atmosphere and Amenities

The first thing you can do when booking online is to look at pictures on the hotel website or on other websites. Much of your attention should be on photos of the hotel itself. Some hotels show lots of images of the surrounding area around the hotel and nearby attractions, and with fewer pictures of the rooms, the hotel facilities, and the breakfast served.

So yes, pictures viewing the hotel environments are also good and can provide some information about the area, but the focus has to be on the rooms and their maintenance. You can often see that the same pictures appear at other hotels situated in the same area.

There is a trick that hotels use particularly those that have tiny rooms. That is, taking photographs with a fisheye camera lens, making the room look much larger than it is in reality. It is advisable to check the details of the room in order to know the actual size of the room.

Once you have found a hotel of your desire, double-check it on a few different websites and check out the photos on TRIPADVISOR. Since they also show photographs taken by hotel guests, they are much more realistic and not edited like the pictures the hotels' upload.