Cheap-Accommodation

Note: This is a guest post

This may be hard for some younger readers of this blog to believe, but once upon a time, booking a hotel was a strenuous and confusing process.

Back in the 1990s, I was a salesman for a rapidly-growing technology company. If you’ll permit me to slip into corporatese, I sold “middleware solutions” to other corporations around the world. Whenever I had to go on a business trip or on vacation, I’d have to call up someone from a profession that no longer really exists: a travel agent.

In those days, we all relied on agents with extensive contacts, lists of hotels, and up-to-date pricing. It was expensive to book anything and time-consuming. I remember that I’d have to instruct a secretary (that I shared with another salesman) to contact our travel agent, who would then fax me a long list of hotels, prices, and a proposed agenda for my trip. The whole process would cost me a lot of money, time, and stress. The agent would copy over something from her gigantic binder of international hotels, I’d have to pick from the list, and then call her back with my selection.

Don’t listen to anyone who reminisces about the “good old days.” The good old  days sucked. My company was headquartered in London, where I would frequently need to fly in to France, Germany, Spain, and even Eastern Europe.

I probably spent weeks of my life just paging through those faxes as I shuttled from London to Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Zurich.

Nowadays, I’m in business for myself, so I don’t have a secretary or a travel agent. EasyToBook has replaced both of them. The interface moves quickly, has an attractive color scheme, and always finds the right hotel for my budget in the area I want in three seconds or less.

One feature that I’m particularly impressed with is its event search engine. This year, I decided that I wanted to run the le Marathon de Paris again, after missing it for five years in a row.

All I need to do is punch in “Paris Marathon” into their engine, et voilà! It shows locations in my price range close to where the event starts.

It has detailed, well-written reviews, user ratings, discounts of up to 80%, and a broad listing of hotels around the world.

What I like best, though, is the clean interface and the fast-loading suggestion feature. It works especially well when I book reservations from my Android. Instead of typing out the full place name on my mobile keyboard, it finishes it for me in less than a half-second with relevant suggestions. If I’m punching in the name of one of my favorite hotels, it completes it for me before I can finish.

It’s not bogged down by ads, provides relevant suggestions for my profile and what I’m looking for, and shows listings in multiple currencies and languages.

EasyToBook focuses solely on hotel reservations, it’s far more useful to me than most other booking sites that do package deals. I rarely go for packages because I have a high-level membership on an international airline, so my flights are usually covered by my frequent-flier miles already.

You’ll be impressed with the speed, the design sensibility, and the low prices.

Even if you already use a different service, go try it out.

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