Travel Booking Checklist: Vital Booking Rules
The Importance of Lodging
One of the absolute definers of a positive or negative travel experience is where you stay. Lodging determines if you’re comfortable, getting enough sleep, well-positioned for nearby activities and unstressed regarding money. The best trip to the most beautiful part of the Philippians isn’t going to be enjoyable if you come home to a stinking shack with a cardboard blanket on concrete flooring. Likewise, a treehouse apartment overlooking a cloud forest in Costa Rica can make every mundane moment outright magical. Having a travel booking checklist can ensure you find the perfect place for you.
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Sleep
Before discussing lodging, it is important to discuss sleep while traveling. Sleep is the all-defining necessity of travel, which often gets pushed to the backseat in favor of adventure.
Sleep is beyond necessary normally and absolutely vital when traveling. A well-rested person handles unusual circumstances easily, without errors or mistakes. Meanwhile, a poorly rested person tends to make huge judgment errors when acting in a state of sleep-deprivation. Supplies are lost and forgotten. Wrong tickets are purchased. Huge impulse buys drain funds. Times that have been checked over three times are still somehow missed.
Since sleep is such a vital aspect of traveling, it should be your primary concern for lodging. Wherever you stay, it must be quiet enough to rest, comfortable enough to get a full eight hours and safe enough to snooze without fear.
Lodging Checklist
When looking for a place to stay, here are the following things to view:
- Is this a quiet district? (for example, Lapa district in Rio de Janeiro is too loud for most people to rest easily)
- Are necessities nearby? (Food options, public transportation, access to work, access to points of interest etc.)
- Does this location have internet? (Important for digital nomads.)
- Is this a safe neighborhood? (Every city has its unsavory neighborhoods. This is especially important if your flight time has you arriving late at night.)
- Does this location have necessary amenities? (While water and electricity are commonplace, some tropical regions might require air conditioning to sleep well, which is uncommon in some countries.)
- Are there reviews? (Be sure to glance over other visitors’ experiences prior to booking.)
- Price and Cancelation Policy (Compare to others in the region.)
- Look at Check-In Check-Out Time, especially if arriving late.
- Check for foreigner availability (Some countries, such as China and Japan, have hotels that are exclusively for native citizens. Make sure that your hotel allows for foreigners.)
- Ensure there aren’t substantial “extra charges.” Sites like Airbnb are particularly bad about this, since they add all sorts of additional fees like “cleaning services” at the very last stage of being booked.
This checklist increases in importance depending how long a person is staying in an area. A couple of nights in a shoddy Airbnb is probably fine. But if you’re in a location for over a month, more diligence is warranted.
Step by Step Travel Booking Checklist
When looking for lodging for travel, there are three major steps that must be completed on your travel booking checklist in order.
First, explicitly look for lodging options and find the ones you like. Be sure to save these but don’t purchase them quite yet! You’re ensuring there are places to stay. This strategy is the same for free stays, such as volunteer stays, work-stays or couchsurfer programs.
Second, organize your transportation. Make sure you have a verified flight, bus, car or another method for getting to your new shelter. If flights are overbooked, insanely expensive or outright unavailable, it is better to know before booking a hotel, Airbnb or hostel.
Third, now, select your favorite lodging options from your initial research and book. Only do this once your transportation is confirmed. Double check the dates, especially if the months and days on dates are inverse to your native country.
Types of Lodging
There are lots of different ways to travel and live while going around the world. When reviewing your travel booking checklist, the type of lodging you stay in will determine your experience.
Hostels
If you want to meet lots of people, hear their stories, get advice and travel with new and exciting strangers, a hostel is probably your best bet. These large buildings have dorm rooms which allow groups of people to sleep in a series of bunk beds. Though hanging out in the rooms and making noise at night is strongly discouraged, they’re fairly comfortable and extremely affordable.
Hotels
If you have a lot of work to get done and require peace, quiet and focus, a traditional hotel is probably your best bet. Hotels are good for privacy and professional travelers, since they usually have good service, a strong internet connection and lots of extra amenities. These tend to be somewhat expensive.
Airbnb
If you’re more interested in splitting the difference and would enjoy immersing yourself in the local culture, an Airbnb is probably a great option. There are tons of Airbnb’s out there which have wonderful, verified hosts offering rooms at great value. Though Airbnb has been heavily monetized over the years, there are other sites and programs using a similar business model appearing all the time.
Camping
If you’re traveling for the full adventure experience and concerned about costs, camping is probably your best option. Even the most urban environments have cheap campsites somewhat outside the city limits. This is probably the most consistently cheap (if not outright free) form of travel lodging.
Free Stays
Free stays are another option for travel, but these require a bit of extra work to find. A free stay is a living situation that allows for free lodging, usually in exchange for a bit of work. Working holidays, work-stays, couchsurfing or just finding a foreign friend all fall under this umbrella.
Promo-Stays
Another option, which takes a fair amount of hunting, is a review-stay or promo-stay. These are usually found online for new locations. Companies will seek out verified review specialists to try staying at a hotel or villa for free, in exchange for a full review and critique.
In all cases, when selecting a place to stay, it’s wise to ditch valet services and “rooms-with-a-view” to cut down on costs. These extra services don’t typically enhance the experience much and can rack up significant charges.
Booking with a VPN
A Virtual Personal Network is an endlessly useful tool, especially when traveling. VPN’s are designed to protect users against third parties from spying on their online activities, but a good VPN has another great function. A VPN can be used to switch servers until accessing the internet from a different country.
This is a huge money saver thanks to discounts by country. For example, you might use a VPN to connect to a server in India and browse hotels in India. The prices shown are native Indian prices, rather than the prices shown to wealthy expats visiting the country. Though options might initially appear in Hindi, the translate feature found in the Google browser (or other browser extensions) can use Indian servers for in-country purchases in English.
Short and Long Term Booking
Keep in mind that a different kind of booking may require a different travel booking checklist.
If you are rapidly traveling through a bunch of areas on a whirlwind tour, it might be better to book a series of lodgings well in advance as a bundle deal. These kinds of deals can be found through single hotel or hostel chains within a country. Provided transportation is stable and reliable, this is a great way to visit a lot of places cheaply.
Alternatively, it may be better to spend a month or so in a single area and rotate outwards. Having a long-term stay often unlocks specialized deals which makes the overall cost per night much cheaper. For example, Airbnb might have a stay for $24 dollars a night. If I book for 32 days, that price holds through every night. However, if I book for exactly one month, 31 days, the cost per night drastically drops to $18 dollars per night. Only the final night, when I book again, costs the full $24 dollars per night. This simple strategy ends up saving me $186.00 dollars.
Booking Resources
When finalizing your travel booking checklist, there are plenty of places to look for lodgings out there. Here are some of the more popular sites to find decent deals:
Booking – A large company dedicated to online bookings for hotels, flights and vehicle rentals. Booking.com works well for traditional hotel searches, especially in well-established countries.
Kayak – Kayak works primarily as a flight comparison website, but they can also scan multiple different hotel deals in an area.
Hostel Finder – When looking for a place to meet other travelers, nothing is better than staying at a hostel. Hostel Finder compares different hostels and dorms for travelers passing through.
Airbnb – The original Airbnb model used a person’s home as a place to stay while on vacation. It was an excellent way to visit a place and be immersed in the local community. However, Airbnb has gradually shifted to a model of independent entrepreneurs using extra apartments and housing in an area to set up a living place for tourists. It’s still a great way to travel, but visitors will have to go out if they want to sample the local culture.
There are many ways to travel the world and even more ways to live in it. Try different lodging experiences to find out what you like best during your adventure.