| We want you to use this site as we do - a resource for as many of our travel needs as possible. We enjoy writing about the places we love, and we will continue to do so both on this site and on our travel blog. But when it comes time to go, we want to be able to see as many choices as possible for booking all the mundane parts - the flights, hotels and cars that we all need to make our trips that experience of a lifetime. More is always better, and what could be be better than the world's #1 travel comparison site?
But if you are like us, you find that you enjoy going back to properties or even chains that treat you well and make you comfortable. Here is a link to some hotels we have enjoyed in the past.
There is another, completely different, lodging option that is quite popular with Europeans, but that many American travelers overlook. That is the holiday apartment, often referred to as "self-catering", because they generally offer kitchen facilities. But the "holiday" term is somewhat misleading - these apartments are usually just like those lived in by the local residents. Often it is possible to find a nice one, two or more bedroom apartment, or flat, in a convenient location for much less than the cost of a hotel room. You can find a wide variety of these at Bungalow. For a complete list of their properties, visit our bungalow page.
If you are looking at the UK, HomeAway UK is a very special site that lists apartments, flats and rooms of all sizes::
There are of course other options for booking hotels, from the small "boutique" sites all the way to the big booking engines. Occasionally it is possible to get some specialty hotels and even apartments from these sites, and since we focus on and spend a lot of time in Europe, we have two good European alternatives. We particularly like both these choices because there are no hidden fees, and your credit card is only used as a reference. It is only charged by the hotel depending on their rules - it is not charged beforehand. Note that this is not true for many of the large "booking engines", so compare carefully!
The first is Venere, an Italian company with availability for hotels, apartments and even B&B's. They've recently been purchased by Expedia, but they have managed to maintain that small company, friendly look and feel while taking advantage of the industry-leading list of Expedia properties:
The other option is Booking.com, a part Europe's leading online hotel reservations agency in terms of room nights sold:
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