Finding a Hotel Online = Hell on Earth

You'd think that by now I'd be a wiz at finding hotels online. Not the case. In fact, it's right up there on the Internet fun meter between doing taxes online and trying to self diagnose yourself on webMD.

My utter disdain for finding hotels can be attributed to two key factors. 1) I have no money. Who would have thought not working for 3 months and living in the most expensive countries in Europe would limit one's spending. And when you are hotel hunting on a thrift, it's extremely hard to find a nice place that's close to all the attractions and when walking back to it at night won't make you want to clutch onto your valuables for dear life. 2) I wait till the last minute. Sure, you might think lounging around the apartment all day would afford me plenty of time to plan ahead -- but no, my natural procrastinating tendencies wouldn't allow that. And when you are trying to find that cheap, centrally located hotel one week prior to your arrival, the choices become rather limited.

Case in point: Booking a hotel in Rome.

We booked our flight to Rome about 2 weeks ago, but I decided to put off the hotel search till now, a week before our trip. I thought maybe no one visits Rome in the winter time, it being cold and all. And besides, it's a big city with lots of choices right?

I first go to venere.com, a great site filled with a ton of user reviews and also allows you to search for hotels by clicking on an area of a map filled with landmarks. Great for those unfamiliar with a city.

So I proceed to click on all the prominent areas of Rome and it spits back a list of 2-3 star hotels in the 60, 70, 80 Euro range. Great. I was ecstatic. But then I soon realize I forgot to plug in the specific nights of our stay.

Okay, so Dec 6th check-in... Dec 10th check-out... 2 people... Search.

Suddenly, all those 70 Euro hotels were replaced with 250 and 300 Euro a night ones. I quickly click on "sort by price" and all sub 150 Euro hotels are under the location category, "suburbs" or situated in the far outskirts of the city limits.

I immediately go to my back up sites: booking.com, sidestep.com, and kayak.com. Same results. I get desperate. I franticly go to google and type in the search box: "cheap rome hotels please for the love of god".

For the next 5 hours I proceed to sift through dozens of hotel search sites, most of which you wouldn't feel comfortable submitting your credit card to. My standard approach is to first look at the price, find out whether anything is available (some require you to submit a form with your dates and they promise to get back to you within 24 hours), google the hotel name to look for any reviews, and then copy and paste the hotel address into google maps to get a better sense of its location.

After countless hotels and 500 opened Firefox tabs later, I finally zero in on a place and book it, only to get a frantic email from the hotel staff the next day stating:

I don't have the room for the period required!
I availability only 6 and 7 ( 2 night).
Please , send me urgent.

I quickly "send them urgent" telling them that I booked the room through their website and received a confirmation number from them. They then respond with a cancellation email with no explanation, leading me to proclaim, "if you can't trust a confirmation number from a hotel anymore, then who in this world can you trust?"

At this point, extreme anxiety starts to set in, kinda like the feeling you get during an exam when you look up at the clock and realize you have 1 minute left to finish 10 problems. Suddenly, those hotels in the suburbs were looking pretty good as long as it was close to a subway and "would it be really that bad to share a bathroom with the entire floor?"

Luckily, cooler heads prevailed, and after more searching, I was able to find a place that was close to the Colosseum, looked relatively clean, and was cheaper than the hotel I originally booked.

I think that after this recent episode, I've finally learned my lesson of waiting till the last minute to book a hotel. But then again... nah... you can't fight human nature.