Hotel planning before the Internet
 

Back in the days when it wasn't possible to ask questions on travel sites or view properties' web sites for photos and other information, how did you research hotels and other accommodations?

Guidebooks

- Guidebooks
- Travel agents
- Local tourist information
- Booking service at local train station or airports (some free, some paid)

Hi U,

The first European hotel I booked, I found in "Europe on $10 a Day".

(Sorry Fodor's, but I was on a strict budget. :) )

The second I found through the VVV office in the Amsterdam train station.

The third was at the tourist info office at the Copenhagen train station.

Back in them there days we had lower expectations.

((I))

Karen Brown books.

Publications such as "The London Advertiser," guidebooks, travel agents, and recommendations from other travelers.

Frommer/Fodor books were my biggest source of info for hotels and everything else. I still buy guidebooks but this board is now my main source of info.

I used a mix of guidebooks, travel articles, then I'd call and request a brochure and see if I could get a feel for the place by if the staff was helpful and friendly on the phone... or not. (I still do that after I-net research. LOL!)

I used guidebooks and I also wrote away for brochures--pretty slow but I found some good hotels that way.

If arranging accommodations before a trip I'd use national, regional or local tourist agencies (often with US offices) for lists and contact info. I'd then call hotels directly and make a reservation. Many guidebooks listed the contact info at consulates or tourism bureaus in the US.

Back then I found that I could count on * rating for a hotel to have a consistent quality standard, at least within a country or region. 3* hotel/gasthof in Germany always meant, clean, comfortable, albeit basic accommodation. Same 3* in Sorrento was lower quality, so 4* was well advised.

When traveling solo I'd very often use local info center at train station upon arrival - they'd give me a list of open rooms, location, price, and book a room on the spot. Q.E.D.

I used guidebooks to research possible choices then sent letters to several and awaited their replies (had to plan months in advance for the international mail).

Then when fax machines became available I used to fax letters and but I had to remember to turn my modem on before I went to bed at night since that's when the replies from Europe would come in. I remember many a night hearing the phone ring and the fax beep in the middle of the night.

Thankfully I am too young to remember of the dark days you mention !

Then you don't know the joys of delayed gratification! I always loved getting brochures in the mail and looking through quite a few guidebooks to get validation of my choices.

It was a blast doing it "the old" way. My first trip to Europe was right out of college, w/my sister, in late winter, and we only had reservations for our first few nights in Amsterdam. All done by very snailish snail mail. Remember those old onion-skin international mail letter thingies? Sigh.

The entire remainder of the 3-month trip we did by the seat of our pants. Europe on $5, recs from fellow travellers, and sometimes we slept on beaches and in train stations (daddy & mommy didn't know until we returned, of course!) Nobody would even consider worrying about such a thing as reservations for museums, ferries, etc. -- we just paid our entrance fee and walked in, and had plenty of viewing space around us, too!

I enjoy the opportunities for research & virtual-room-inspection, etc., that we have now, but the old way was definitely fun in a totally different way.

Guidebooks--but I tried to look for places that were listed in more than one.

Recommendations from friends when I could get them.

The old way was a blast, especially the romance. She was studying in France, I in Germany. We'd met in Austria, had a wonderful, flirting evening before she caught the midnight train back home. Letters back and forth, but no phone calls, no email.

I still remember arriving at Florence train station, not sure if she would be there as promised. Sure enough, she was. Wonderful weekend, and she remained my long distance sweetheart even after we returned to US some months later.

I'd see ads in magazines and get brochures. It was MUCH harder, the internet has been a wonderful equalizer (for the good hotels, anyway!)

Guidebooks, particularly the Let's Go guides. Then writing letters to the hotels and including those "international reply coupons" with the letters to pay the postage for the hotels' responses.
After Let's Go, I paid most heed to the recs in the old European Travel & Life magazine. However, most of the time, I couldn't afford the hotels recommended. But it was fun looking.

Travel agents had massive books - one for each continent - and each the size of an unabridged dictionary. When doing trip myself I would use guidebooks for suggestions - then go to the corporate travel office to borrow the europe books for further info and options. (The in-house "agents" knew nothing of europe - they really just booked flights.)

If we wanted something special we would book through my travel agent (a real one, who had traveled extensively in europe and could get us all sorts of extras since she worked for AmEx).

Funny, I was just thinking about this yesterday. I would go to the local library (it's a really amazing community library), take out as many books on the region as I could, spread them all out on the dining room table, and then cross-reference for consistency in recommendations.

Of course, I would speak to people who had travelled to my destination.

Hi rhapsody
>Thankfully I am too young to remember of the dark days you mention !<

Well, the internet has made it more efficient to search, to book train tickets, etc

BUT, as lot of the adventure and romance has gone.

((I))

ira, I agree.

Though I can't help wondering: if I were taking my <u>first</u> trip to Europe (or wherever), and I had no previous experience planning/travelling in the manner that I once did, wouldn't it feel just as adventuresome? I.e., don't you think that we feel as we do simply because we associate that kind of planning (internetless, etc.) with our first big adventures?

Maybe it's like they say about crack cocaine: the addict keeps doing it only because of the incredible thrill of his first high, something which he can never attain again. (Not to make light of crack addiction -- nor to imply that travelling is a self-destructive addiction, by any means!)

My university had a &quot;Travel Industry&quot; program, so its main library had a reference section on the travel industry. It had huge books - like phone books, only bigger - of most hotels anywhere in the world. It gave rates, ammenities, locations, travel agent commission amounts, photos, pretty much anything you would want to know about a particular hotel. You couldn't borrow the reference books, but I'd spend hours in the library researching. I thought it was fun (I was a boring nerd, obviously).

Writing away for hotel brochures also provided the added pleasure of seeing the rich variety of foreign &quot;postage stamps&quot; in return. Even though I am not a stamp collector, the stamps added to the sense of pending adventure. I still have some of them!

iPodRobbie,

Was your romance made into a film? It sounds very familiar.

I still marvel at how easy it is to get information today compared to &quot;the good old days.&quot; For my first trip to Europe (six countries in a month) we mostly winged it. Sometimes it worked out and sometimes it wasn't so great. But the memories! I also traveled to Greece the same way once. And then there were the times wheen serendipity led us to marvelous discoveries.

Now there is so much information available, I wonder how the hotels deal with it? I would not want to be in the lower half of hotel ratings for a location on tripadvisor.com. Does this make them try harder? Do you think the hotels read about their guests' experiences and work to change those things that are not quite right?

Some hotels do try harder. I know that the co-owner of the Hotel de la Porte Doree in Paris (which we loved) responds sometimes to guests who write on Trip Advisor. I think that is great! But I also think there are other hotels which don't really care. It in't like everyone goes on Trip Advisor, and even when they do, sometimes the guests book low-rated hotels anyway! I love the comments like &quot;well, it had bad reviews, but I chose it anyway&quot;. Why? Why, if a hotel is mostly badly reviewed, would you not figure out somewhere else to go? :) Oh, well. :)

Does this make them (the hotels) try harder?

Apparently, it makes some of them submit positive reviews of their own hotels. There was a thread about this last year following up some newspaper stories of planted/bogus reviews, with respondents analyzing writing styles and so on.

And as far as hotel planning before the Internet, I think we used a newspaper advertisement for the Kenilworth Hotel in London, now the Raddisson Kenilworth and lovely even then. I remember how screamingly excited we were and how fabulous that first trip was as we stumbled around not knowing anything really (no guidebooks for the know-it-alls). It's breathtaking how the Internet has opened it all up.

My husband has not let me forget the apartment (he lovingly refers to as The Dump) I picked in London from a NY Times classified ad. I was looking for something REALLY inexpensive and didn't have all the internet reviews that we have now.

He still talks about how the main TV channel in the apartment building was Al Jazeera Television (it really was!) but we didn't think anything of it in those days. And if you think pre-internet research was ancient history, this was in 1998!

Way back in the dark ages, 1968, my wife and I arrived in Bergen asked a taxi driver at the SAS office for a high quality hotel and ended up at the Bristol. A couple of days later we flew to Oslo and again stayed at the Bristol because we liked the one in Bergen. We then flew to Copenhagen and asked a taxi driver to help us because the next day was May 1 when Tivoli opened and rooms were difficult to find. We flew to London and ended at a small hotel in Sloane Square. All without reservations or guidebooks or any other research. Sort of a Lewis and Clark approach.

I think maybe people used newspapers? I remember looking at ads in the newspaper for airfares back in 1988, in the Travel section. There were some really good fares to Asia that you could find in the LA Times and SF Chronicle. I think the Sunday paper was especially useful.

I can see why people might have needed a travel agent back in the day.

I too remember the Kenilsorth, as it was then--not bad at all for the price.

The days before the internet. Our first trip to Italy in the 1970's, I went to our local travel agency and they booked us on an Alitalia flight (that airline was great back then). We arrived at the Malpensa Airport. We had a hotel reservations for the first two nights but no idea how to get there. I found a counter which sold bus tickets. The bus (the Malpensa Shuttle bus) we took into the Centrale Train Station in Milan. We than got a taxi and went to our hotel. A couple of days later the hotel told my husband where the car rental place was and we picked up the rental car that we had reserved from home. We travelled around Italy for two months..and got hotels along the way. Such fun! Way before one had to have reservations and buy tickets to climb the Leaning Tower of Pisa, to go into museums, the coloseum etc. A two months that I wish I could relive!

We got lost more than once, we checked out more then one hotel before settling on one, we could stay longer or leave the next day, we never did find the autostrade from Pisa to Florence but enjoyed the country road, we stayed in everything from what I would call 2 star places to luxery hotels. Bari, a story and a half.

Good times..I almost feel sorry for people now as it seems like they have to organize and plan every moment of their trips due to reservations etc. It seems to me like there are no surprises left in travelling.

Hi

I've been booking hotels over the last 25 years.

We used to have a hotel guide &amp; a phone, or use a travel agent.

Much easier now ?

Peter