Finding a Place to Stay: Online Booking Sites

This post isn’t meant for the seasoned traveller. In fact, if you are a seasoned traveller, we would love to hear from you…. help us add to the list. This post is primarily for those who have recently been bitten by the travel bug and are finding ways and means to save a few dollars. Few dollars saved on every trip can add up and fund another trip!

Long weekend budget trip to Kochi… money saved is money earned!

Regardless of where you choose to travel, it always makes sense to maximize returns on your hard earned money. USD 75 can get you a five star room for two in Thailand …great! However, USD 75 may not even get you a couple of hostel beds in Scandinavia.

Koh Tao… view from our room on a cloudy day

As we plan our vacation, we read up on our planned travel destination, book day trips and activities, make flight and spend a fair bit of time sorting out our accommodation. We have stayed in top end luxury resorts, budget hotels, hostels and with locals. Each stay has its own story to tell and it is rare that we are disappointed with our choice.

I have never simply landed in a new city and then looked for a place to stay – it isn’t the wisest and safest thing to do for a solo woman traveller in India and I have extrapolated that view to cover the rest of the world. Ankur, on the contrary, is capable of landing in a new city and then figuring out where to stay and what to do. As on date, my insistence to book our accommodation before hand over rides his ‘let’s figure it out after we get there’ attitude and we always end up pre-booking our bed.

Here are some online sites that we often use to book our stays while travelling:

Agoda

Agoda was the first hotel search engine that we started using about five years ago and we have been fairly loyal to the site. We like the award points that the site lets us accumulate and have been able to get a few free nights as well, courtesy our loyalty to the site.

Our Maldives booking on Agoda gave us enough points to get a free night in a domestic hotel

Booking

We have found that the room inventory that booking has for budget accommodation is much higher than that available on other hotel booking sites. The site caters to every budget – luxury, moderate, budget and even back packers.

We found great budget options on Booking for our Jordan trip

Hostelbookers

We enjoy ‘hostelling’ in Europe. Cleanliness standards are high and it is fun meeting fellow travellers in the dorms or over a drink in the bar. Most of our hostel bookings are done through Hostelbookers, unless we book directly with the hostel. Its a great tool for back packers!

Hostelbookers worked well for us as we planned a weekend in Stockholm

Airbnb

It took us a little while to warm upto to airbnb and get comfortable with the idea of being hosted in someone’s house. After our first stay, we wondered what took us so long? It is a joy to be hosted by someone. Our stay in the Arctic winter was made comfortable by our airbnb host – a perfect evening with some home cooked food and real life interesting stories.

Our Airbnb host dropped us to the Ice Hotel at Jukkasjarvi

Obviously, besides the above sites, we do book directly with properties, hostels and BnB hosts.

Do you have a site that you use to book hotels/BnBs or hostels? Do let us know… we would love to add more to the list!