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Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and if you can hear

some background noise that's because I'm at a quite noisy hotel room in Singapore.

Seven floors above the main road out to Changi Airport and there's a fair bit of traffic around but I knew

that would be the case when I took this hotel room and what I want to talk about

today is what people get wrong when they are booking hotels or choosing a

hotel which is actually a slightly different thing I would say.

First of all, I suggest that you consider being old school.

I talk to all my friends and family and they will always book a hotel online having either read reviews about it or searched and found

that it had a fairly decent price for the night they wanted to be there. Well, I really don't like

doing that. I prefer to make sure that there are going to be plenty of rooms around and you can normally

do that by keeping an eye on, for example, Trevago or booking.com or Hotels.com. Any of those sites

will give you a good selection of hotels and if there are going to be problems getting a hotel

then you will be able to detect it immediately in terms of very high room rate but most of the time

most hotels are not full and therefore you can be fairly certain that you will get a room.

Sure, there are some times and places I was in Amsterdam and it was Queen's Day,

the day that everybody piles into Amsterdam and I got the last bed in a Catholic youth hotel which considering I wasn't exactly a youth surprised me and possibly them

...