Barcelona Weekend Break

How to find hotels

If you want to take a short break, or a longer holiday in Barcelona, you may want to organise your accommodation independently. Doing this can save you money and throw up a much wider choice of hotels and locations than a typical package tour operator can offer.

Before the advent of the internet, finding hotels rooms took a lot of time and often some long distance phone calls. Today it is a quick and simple process and one that can save you a lot of money.

Where to start

Almost every hotel, be it large or small, cheap or expensive, uses at least one internet hotel room reservation company to sell its rooms.

Some hotels do most of their business this way, whilst others use these companies to get rid of their un-booked or vacant rooms at the last minute.

Many hotels use multiple online reservation companies and this means that you will often see the same hotel, sometimes with different room rates, on different websites. The rates change as the reservation period runs out. Booking late often means getting a very good rate. To find out about the hotel classification system that operates in Spain go to this Spanish hotel classifications page.

In order to access these rooms you need to go to any of the websites that you see advertising on the internet with phrases like “cheap rooms”, “last minute bookings”, discounted hotel rooms”, “Hotels in Barcelona” etc. All of these companies will be in the business of selling hotel rooms for lots of different hotels and this means lots of choice and your chance to find the best possible deal.

Why are room rates different on different sites?

There can be any number of reasons why the same hotel seems to appear with different room rates on different hotel reservation websites.

The most obvious one is that the rates are constantly changing as room availability goes up and down and as time runs out for the hotel to sell the room. The price that a hotel (or the booking company) expects to get for a room being booked 3 months in advance is very different to the price that they will let it go for with a last minute booking. With these late bookings it is all about covering costs and keeping the hotel ticking over, so prices fall and you get the best deal.

The other reason why room rates may differ is because some of the online hotel room reservation companies make their profit based on the difference between the rate that the hotel want and the rate that they, the online booking company, sell at. This means that they make an informed guess as to the price that they think that they can sell a room for and this is slightly different for every company.

Ultimately it pays to shop around, check availability and, if possible, leave your booking until the last possible moment. By doing this you do of course run the risk of having your first choice hotel sell out, so always have two or three reserves or next-best alternatives to fall back on.

Always check the same hotel with different companies, but also ensure that you are comparing like with like. It may be that one company is offering the room with half board and the other with full board. Make sure you know what you are getting and exactly how much you are paying for it. Don’t book rooms where you do not know the rate. Leave those website alone.