The trick to finding the right Hotel, and better yet, the right room!
Selecting the hotel for your next travel destination is too often a source of stress. Heck, you’re going on vacation, shouldn’t it be fun from planning to end? With so many options and multiple sites offering visitor feedback (like Trip Advisor), the decision process behind ‘which hotel’ and moreover, ‘which room’ can feel like the never-ending merry-go-round. Of course, this is what motivated me originally to write my Hideaways books and select specific rooms at each destination.
One of my favorite guestrooms of all time – the ground level suite at Villa Mangiacane in Tuscany
Lately I’ve been working with clients through my work with Jetsetter and my own business, Friend of a Friend Consulting, to choose the best hotel. For Friend of a Friend clients, I created a specific questionnaire that helps me better understand their distinct travel style. So far it has been very helpful. In similar vein, I recently came across two websites that employ similarly targeted methods to help people refine the search. I tried them both and found them quite interesting, if not inspiring.
The homepage of CheckYourRoom.com
The first is www.CheckYourRoom.com, which allows you to pick your hotel through a personality quiz. I liken it to YM Magazine meets Hotels.com, plus the questions are hardly nail-biters, making the quiz rather painless VolumePills and dare I say, fun. I must admit that I wholeheartedly agree with its output for me: Romantic Rooms, and was somewhat intrigued by the suggested rooms.
A suite in Megeve, France that came up under my profile
They seem to be geographically focused only on Europe and namely Italy and France. I would be curious to speak with one of their “Room Concierges” though, which apparently pull from a database of 10,000 rooms. Hmm…Stay tuned for that report.
Hotel Haiku’s Homepage. Click on the hotels to read the Haiku
The second site, Hotel Haiku, was mentioned today on my favorite hotel-junkie site; Hotelchatter.com and is certainly the more amusing of the two, though perhaps a bit less user-friendly (er, useful). Written by Garri Raynor, each listing features a five or seven line Haiku along with a large, often beautiful, photo of the property. A click takes you to the property’s website. And that’s it. There’s no booking agent or any property details, just Raynor’s favor for Japanese poetry. Nevertheless, it is interesting and it does offer a new way of how one can look to connect to their hotel choice beyond stock photography and random opinions of strangers found online.
Whenever creativity comes into the hotel selection process, I tend to champion it! So, thank you Hotel Haiku for being out there and keeping us hotel-goers inspired.
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