Hotel Advantage

I've always thought the great Irish Playwright George Bernard Shaw had it right when he said: "The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a great refuge from home life." When I travel, that's what I want: a refuge from the household tasks I must perform at home, combined with a little luxury and a lot of cleanliness. Hotels Combined makes it easy to find what I want.

Viva La Difference

They're not a travel agency so you can't book a vacation, transportation, or a room with them. Their name says it all. They're a search engine that combines and compiles data about hotels all over the world. You can discover room availability at specific locations along with the room rate, or the rack rate as my son who's a hotel general manager calls it. You don't have to open a bunch of browser tabs to jump back and forth between different sites in an effort to compare prices and offers.

You just plug in your destination city along with your "check in" and "check out" dates, and Hotels Combined goes to work. In mere seconds, you'll be presented with Search results giving you many choices with the prices displayed. You can even read independent hotel reviews posted by travelers, see pictures, and read descriptions of the hotel. When you find something that matches what you want in a hotel, just click to deal directly with that hotel or travel website.

Free? You Bet!

Guess what? This user friendly Search service, established in 2005 by former online hotel reservation industry experts, is free. You can filter your search by price or location, and you get real time results including taxes, not last month's rates, displayed on one simple web page. You can compare not just hotels but also online travel agents like Expedia, Travelocity, Hotels.com, to name a few.

With the click of a mouse button, you have access to a database containing more than 900,000 hotel deals, more than a million consumer reviews, about 3 million pictures of hotels, 2 million descriptions, and maps too. Now that's the kind of information smart travelers can use to make smart decisions.

Getting Around

Those maps can help you out when it comes to planning your transportation once you arrive at your destination hotel. It's odd, but when I'm in my own country, I drive everywhere. When I've been in Europe and Asia though, I delight in the mass transit transportation offered. Trust me on this, anyone who goes to Europe should get a Rail Pass. You can order it online and have it when you arrive. There's just no better way to get around Europe.

I recall the first subway system I ever used was the Paris Metro. In Texas, we don't have subways so taking the Metro was an adventure for me. It can whisk you from anywhere in Paris, all the way out to Versailles and beyond. It's inexpensive, convenient, and easy to navigate even if you don't speak any language but your own native tongue.

Takeaway Truth

Planning trips has changed a lot with the advent of the Internet. Today, you can choose your own hotel, knowing it matches your requirements, not a travel agent's possible arrangement with a hotel.