{"id":5414,"date":"2014-07-22T07:36:22","date_gmt":"2014-07-22T11:36:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/?p=5414"},"modified":"2019-06-20T14:25:24","modified_gmt":"2019-06-20T18:25:24","slug":"hotel-hunting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/2014\/07\/22\/hotel-hunting\/","title":{"rendered":"Hotel Hunting: Tips How to Find the Right Hotel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When traveling, once you figure out where you\u2019re going and how you\u2019re going to get there, the next (and often trickiest) step is to find the right hotel.\u00a0 This task becomes even more complicated when you\u2019re traveling with young children.\u00a0 Through all of our traveling around Europe, I came up with a pretty good system to find the right hotel\u00a0after our first few situations that were not ideal.<\/p>\n<p>Traveling with little ones makes picking the right hotel even more important.\u00a0 Because you can\u2019t just jump in a taxi without proper car seats and because lugging car seats around while you sight-see is not usually an option, location is everything!\u00a0 When traveling around Europe, we rarely took car seats unless we were renting a car.\u00a0 Most major European cities have fantastic public transport or the touristy areas are\u00a0small enough that walking everywhere is doable.\u00a0 All the cities we visited even had train or bus service from the airport.<\/p>\n<p>On our first trip to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/22\/paris-france\/\">Paris<\/a>, I picked a nice hotel in an ok location that had breakfast and was a great price.\u00a0 It was close to the Hop On\/Hop Off bus that we planned to use so I was pleased.\u00a0 Until we got there and we realized the bus stopped running before we wanted to head back in the evening and the buses only circle one way which was often the opposite of where we wanted to go (all info I could have found online had I known to look!) so we ended up walking back to our hotel each night, about 2 miles and my pregnant body wasn\u2019t happy.<\/p>\n<p>After a similar hotel mistake in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/2014\/05\/13\/belgium\/\">Brussels <\/a>where I chose a hotel in the UN district and we had to take the bus everywhere, I devised a plan for picking the best hotel and it worked for us each time after that.\u00a0 It\u2019s a simple process that has a few steps and takes a little time, BUT it\u2019s time well spent to ensure a great location when you get there!<\/p>\n<h3>Here&#8217;s my method to ensure you find\u00a0the right hotel every time:<a href=\"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/2014\/07\/22\/hotel-hunting\/find-the-right-hotel-2\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-12449\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12449\" src=\"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/find-the-right-hotel-1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"749\" height=\"480\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/find-the-right-hotel-1.png 749w, https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/find-the-right-hotel-1-300x192.png 300w, https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/find-the-right-hotel-1-600x385.png 600w, https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/find-the-right-hotel-1-390x250.png 390w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 749px) 100vw, 749px\" \/><\/a><\/h3>\n<p><b>Step 1: <\/b>Visit sites like TripAdvisor to explore what there is to do and make a list of what you want to do and see (my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/product\/family-trip-planning-pack\/\">Family Trip Planning Pack<\/a> can easily help you keep track of everything).<\/p>\n<p><b>Step 2: <\/b>Map each attraction you think you might want to visit.<a href=\"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/london-map.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-5416\" src=\"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/london-map.png\" alt=\"london map\" width=\"689\" height=\"537\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/london-map.png 689w, https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/london-map-300x234.png 300w, https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/london-map-600x468.png 600w, https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/london-map-321x250.png 321w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 689px) 100vw, 689px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>(In <a href=\"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/29\/london-england\/\">London <\/a>I used a map of the underground system to determine where we should stay.\u00a0 Since I was 9 months pregnant with Sugarplum, I wanted to make sure we were close to public transport in order to get everywhere we wanted to go and save my poor aching, tired body!)<\/p>\n<p><b>Step 3: <\/b>Search for hotels that meet your individual criteria and budget (I liked Booking.com when we were traveling around Europe).\u00a0 We always looked for triple rooms with included breakfast for as cheaply as possible, which is not the easiest thing to find in European city centres!<\/p>\n<p><b>Step 4: <\/b>Map the hotels on the map with the attractions.\u00a0<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-5415\" src=\"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/madrid-map.png\" alt=\"madrid map\" width=\"716\" height=\"403\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/madrid-map.png 716w, https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/madrid-map-300x169.png 300w, https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/madrid-map-600x338.png 600w, https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/madrid-map-390x220.png 390w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 716px) 100vw, 716px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>(When we took our next big trip to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/2014\/02\/11\/madrid-spain\/\">Madrid<\/a>, I used Google Maps to map the locations of attractions, printed it out and marked the hotels on the map to discuss the options with hubby.)<\/p>\n<p><b>Step 5: <\/b>Focus in on what you really want to see, what is most accessible from each hotel and then pick the hotel that meets all (or most) of your needs!<\/p>\n<h3>Pin it!<a href=\"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/2014\/07\/22\/hotel-hunting\/find-the-right-hotel\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-12448\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-12448\" src=\"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/find-the-right-hotel-680x1024.png\" alt=\"Surefire method to help find the right hotel to make traveling with kids easier and getting out to the sights less stressful.\" width=\"680\" height=\"1024\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/find-the-right-hotel-680x1024.png 680w, https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/find-the-right-hotel-300x451.png 300w, https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/find-the-right-hotel-600x903.png 600w, https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/find-the-right-hotel-166x250.png 166w, https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/find-the-right-hotel-199x300.png 199w, https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/find-the-right-hotel-390x587.png 390w, https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/find-the-right-hotel.png 703w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px\" \/><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/2014\/07\/22\/hotel-hunting\/find-the-right-hotel\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-12448\"><br \/>\n<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When traveling, once you figure out where you\u2019re going and how you\u2019re going to get there, the next (and often trickiest) step is to find the right hotel.\u00a0 This task becomes even more complicated when you\u2019re traveling with young children.\u00a0 Through all of our traveling around Europe, I came up with a pretty good system [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12449,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[441,572,573],"class_list":["post-5414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tiny-travellers","tag-family-travel","tag-hotels","tag-sightseeing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5414"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14488,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5414\/revisions\/14488"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}