Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
have gone unsold and are therefore available at a discount. For last-minute travel,
you can also find very good deals on the British site
LateRooms.com
.
An excel-
lent free program,
TravelAxe
(www.travelaxe.net),
can help you search multiple
hotel sites at once, even ones you may never have heard of, and conveniently lists
the total price of the room, including the taxes and service charges. Another book-
ing site,
Travelweb
(www.travelweb.com),
is partly owned by the hotels it repre-
sents (including the Hilton, Hyatt, and Starwood chains) and is therefore plugged
directly into the hotels' reservations systems—unlike independent online agen-
cies, which have to fax or e-mail reservation requests to the hotel, a good portion
of which get misplaced in the shuffle. More than once, travelers have arrived at
the hotel, only to be told that they have no reservation. To be fair, many of the
major sites are undergoing improvements in service and ease of use, and Expedia
will soon be able to plug directly into the reservations systems of many hotel
chains. In the meantime, it's a good idea to
get a confirmation number
and
make a printout
of any online booking transaction.
In the opaque website category,
Priceline
(www.priceline.com)
and
Hotwire
(www.hotwire.com)
are even better for hotels than for airfares; through both,
you're allowed to pick the neighborhood and quality-level of your hotel before
paying. Priceline's hotel offerings even cover Europe and Asia, though it's much
better at getting five-star lodging for three-star prices than at finding anything at
the bottom of the scale. On the downside, some users claim that hotels stick
Priceline guests in their least desirable rooms (it hasn't happened to me, but that's
the scuttlebutt). Be sure to go to the BiddingForTravel website (see above) before
bidding on a hotel room on Priceline; it features a fairly up-to-date list of hotels
that Priceline uses in major cities. For both Priceline and Hotwire, you pay
upfront, and the fee is nonrefundable.
Note:
Some hotels do not provide loyalty
program credits or points or other frequent-stay amenities when you book a room
through opaque online services.
If you have a specific hotel in mind, be sure to check the big three on the Web:
Travelocity
(www.travelocity.com),
Expedia
(www.expedia.com),
and
Orbitz
(www.
orbitz.com).
These monolithic sites offer a variety their competitors can't match,
and while their lowest prices usually aren't quite as low, for midrange and luxury
hotels they tend to be quite competitive.
LOOK INTO
AGRITURISMO
Originally defined as more of a farm-stay pro-
gram, the definition of
agriturismo
had expanded to include every building with
a roof outside of a city, from B&Bs to luxury hotels, to cramped outhouses, to
actual farms. In the past few years, regulators have imposed some standardization
to this lodging category, requiring that anything denoted as
agriturismo
derive at
least half its revenues from farm products. Still, this leaves over 2,500 establish-
ments certified as
agriturismi
in Tuscany alone.
So how do you make a selection? The government has created a rating system,
with one to five ears of corn (no, really) ranking the facilities, amenities, and rooms
for each establishment. Decide what you're looking for in a “farm holiday,”
whether it be a rustic horse-riding ranch (Rendola Riding, p. 183) or a full-service
