Aoraki Mount Cook & Tasman Glacier
First sure thing is we do need a plan before we start a journey. This can help you to reduce your travel cost as you would know Accommodation Cost is a “Big” part in your budget. A plan doesn’t need to take you too much time, even it’s just 10 minutes work, however it’s better than you do nothing, better than you just randomly pick up one and just go with that. Also any information for the Hotels is being changed dynamically from time to time, so the experience you have with some hotels in your past mightn’t be suitable for you to make a right decision for your next journey, because that could be wrong since something has been changed. So the question is how we get the plan right? I think first step is to categorize what you need; here is what I normally do,
1) Cheapest price rate and acceptable living conditions. This can give you the bottom line to save the accommodation cost. But you need to aware that you can’t expect too much in this option as just stay with the line as “Acceptable”. As long as you have a clean environment and everything you need to cook your simple meal and have a hot drink, and then have a good sleep for the next day trip.
2) Higher price rate and easy access to the most main facilities you need. Sometimes it can mean more important to you to stay close to those facilities, because you won’t have the problems for car parking and save transportation fees, just walking short distance to your favourite restaurant for a wonderful dinner and also as a hub to easy go somewhere else.
3) Most expensive price rate and luxury stay. Obviously it’s expected to give you an ultimate good feeling to enjoy what the environment has to offer.
Don’t be confused about the options you would take as looks like the price rate is not the one to dominate your decision, because as human natural for most people have is that like you originally had a budget for buying a house with a price range not to exceed $700,000 but end up you would buy $1 million house. That’s true you would possibly go any options at the same time, you could see how an idea or a decision could be changed quickly to satisfy your comfort for the things you’re dealing with. It’s not your problem. The only problem is if we wouldn’t have any plan to cope with the scenarios and then regret what we did later on. So next step I do is to have a strategy and mechanism to have my options implemented, I think that would yield a good result. Here is what I normally do,
1) Use a Hotels Search Engine to find out the hotels which are in different price range to fit your plan as the basic information. Remember to pick up more than one for each option as I’ll explain more about this in the next point.
2) Open the Google Map to locate those hotels’ exact locations; this gives you the geographic view to ensure they are in the locations you want. If there is possible to get a Street View from the Google Map, then you can go further to check the environment of the surrounding areas of the hotels. This is important as if you could see something in "Real" if you’ve never been there before. You would be happy with the clean and nice looking street or disappointed with the dirty rubbish just outside of the hotel or there are more pubs around it and can make much noise to disturb your sleep etc. You can avoid that by just simply checking through the Google Street Map.
3) If you need to stay about 4 days or more, then just book first 2 days to avoid any possible cancellation fee if you're disappointed after arriving and don’t want to waste your precious time to have a dispute with the hotel. You wouldn’t need to be worried about if there wouldn’t be available for the rest of days, because you have lots of backup and plenty of time to make a wise decision to chose a good one while you're just there.
4) If you’re the person who wouldn’t like to be bounded with any booking prior to your departure, then you would have the chance to bargain the price directly with the Hotels especially in Off-season. Once you have a hotel list from your research work, and then call the hotels to check the possible availabilities. This gives you the idea of the current marketing situation. If you still haven’t got a hotel booked, I suggest the best bargain time is after 5:00 pm as it’s better than nothing for the hotel for the day. Sometimes you would be surprised for what you get, Free breakfast? Free upgrade? ...
5) Search Google with kind of keyword “... Security …” then you would get a list of possible important information which could tell you something like what happened just around the area, so you could make a safety issue. And often this fact could also affect the Hotel price rate.
6) Check what other people say is always a way to spot something through. If a hotel is bounded with more than 50 reviews and average rating is at above 85% or 4 stars, that could be sure this one is good.
7) Become a “Part Time Travel Agent” is a way for your long-term benefit. It’s easy to get huge discount for your hotel booking, airline ticket booking and everything you could think off.
To be continued...
