Book rooms early or day of need
 

If you are traveling by car in Scotland and England can you find last minute rooms or do you need to book in advance. My wife and I are not fussy, but we do prefer a private bathroom. Have stayed in B&B's, rooms from airbnb, and cheap motels. When we travel mostly we just need a place to sleep and shower.

>>If you are traveling by car in Scotland and England<<

Based on your other thread you won't have any time (at all) to look for accommodations and will mostly be limited to motorway service area travelodges and the like.

You'll be lucky if you have time to sleep in the car.

I may just do Scotland, or just do southern England, the question would stand for both.
For others our travel would be early May

I've noticed that the U.K. has a lot more tourist traffic than it did some 5/6 years ago. There is no longer an off season except maybe for January/ February and perhaps March. I would book in advance. Even limiting your trip to either England or Scotland, you still have an aggressive itinerary which would not allow much time for finding rooms even if availability wasn't a problem.

In 1970 taht would have been no prob.
But wea re in 2017 and people used internet to book their rooms.
And they all do the same : they look for the best rooms in their budget.
Which means you'll be left with the crumbs.

There was a time when I just played it as I went. One could just pop into the TIC (tourist office) in any town and they'd have a book with loads of same-day choices, I'd pick one, they'd call and off I'd go. Last time I did that, maybe as long as 10 years ago, it simply no longer worked well. Any rooms worth having had their own websites so no reason whatever to pay a percentage to the TIC.

If you really don't want to pin yourself down to an overall day-by-day time frame, I suggest you do book as you go, but online a couple of days in advance when you have a pretty good idea of where you'll be.

Early May includes a bank holiday weekend and some school holidays. If you try and wing it during those periods you will take a hit. Hotel pricing is now time/usage variable so booking late you will tend to pay a bit more, however, just walking in and asking for a best rate should resolve that variable.

So the weekend of the 1st and 29th.
School holidays varies by council but roughly 8-23/May

If I was doing it, I book for the weekend of the 1st and then book each place while at breakfast for that night.

We will need rooms the 6th thru the 11th.

You will find a room - somewhere... but you may end up having to drive quite a long way to get to it, once you have actually found somewhere.

I have this vision of one of you driving like fury just to fit everything into your itinerary and the second person spending all their time on their mobile phone trying to find somewhere to sleep - End result neither of you sees much of the scenery.

Try these websites for the UK

www.laterooms.co.uk
www.lastminute.com

If you use Laterooms on a smartphone or tablet, it will centre the search results on the place where you are, and tell you the price of available rooms and their distance from you. It will at least reveal if there is some event in the town which has meant fewer rooms available, and higher prices.

Not that I have ever used it, bring the sort of person who likes to book in advance.

I use booking.com it has a number of optional tools which include a map, distance to hotel and bookings that can be cancelled up to say 6pm on the night. If in doubt book the rooms and cancel before the due time.

Thank you for the quality replies. I tried both
www.laterooms.co.uk
www.lastminute.com
and as a test found rooms for same day when it was 1pm in Scotland.
I know this can change, but it looks like you could get a room if you reserved the night before or the morning of.

>>and as a test found rooms for same day when it was 1pm in Scotland.<<

But you do realize this <u>February</u> and no one (well, almost no one) is traveling around Scotland or northern England right now . . .

and, then there are the school holidays.

Yep, a lot more people will be travelling around wanting accommodation in May - and many of those will already have booked it, so there won't be as many available places anyway...