Researching a nice place to stay
Finding a nice place to stay can be a bit of a nightmare. You’ll find yourself asking all sorts of questions around, what’s the neighborhood like, will I have a nice view, are the hotel staff courteous, will I be able to check out or in early or late..I could go on. This you might think is fair enough, its called research, everybody should do it…right?
OK, so what next, what do you do to research that luxury weekend break or holiday on the coast? What are your options? We could draw up a little list that looked something like this
- Find a local tourist board guide, call them up and find out the names of a few recommended places to stay.
- Call directory enquiries and ask for a number of a good hotel in the area.
- Buy a travel guide or visit your local library
- Speak with friends or colleagues to see if they have any recommendations
- Use the internet
As this Is an Internet based site, Im going to focus on number 5.
How do we find most of the things we need on the net? Yup,usually a search engine. Search engines in theory should be an easy to use solution. Pump in the query, and get a list of returned options.
One of the problems wit the way most search engines work is that they tend to rank sites that have been best optimised to their algorithm. These algo’s change and evolve often pushing some good websites out and promoting a few others. Sites that tend to do well are those ran by or in affiliation with accommodation consolidators. These tend to all carry the same hotels served up in what are by and large, very similar ways. There is very little originality or variation in price as most of the hotel’s info is pulled from the same database. As most of these sites exist via a commission you’ll often find that the hotels individual email or phone number is absent. This is due to the restrictions put on the use of the content by the content provider. Agents find what people need, earn a small percentage of the booking fee for their troubles, the person seeking accommodation gets what they need, everybody wins, right?
Well no, not really. For the researcher looking for answers to her questions it can be immensley frustrating. All she wants is the hotel phone number or email so she can ask if the room can be adorned with her favourite lily’s or if her flight can be met by a pick up service, or if the restaurant can cater for her son’s food allergy or…the list can go on and on. These types of questions do not have answers that fit into some neat little descriptive catchall box; they are real time individual questions, requiring real time individual answers.
Which is one of the reasons why we at airport accommodation offer an additional free service to help assist people with such things. Sure, we might well be similar to our competitors in the sense of we too earn commissions on bookings made, we too can’t provide numbers or email addresses prior to bookings from one of our affilaites, but we can make an effort to help our visitors find the answers they need.
Most of the time these answers can be found in the pre-existing content, a review, a customer comment even, and sometimes they can’t. In these case we will where possible research an answer for the person, or at least put them in contact with someone who can.
So, if you need an answer, or require more information just look out for the 
button next to the hotel descriptions and we will do our best to help.