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Booking a Hotel on a Road Trip: What to Avoid, Tips & Tricks
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May 22, 2024
This video is about how to book a hotel for a road trip. How do you plan your trip? It about the journey or the destination? Do you book in advance or on the road? Simon addresses all of these, and gives some pointers from experience on how to get the best stay and best service out on the road. Watch this next: https://youtu.be/OlNS6Fybup8 DISCOUNT ALERT! 14 or more days at 33% off + EXTRA 20% off at OYO Rooms: https://www.oyorooms.com/ Brought to you by LakeHub. We are sharing the joy of lake life! Learn more at https://LakeHub.com
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What's up everybody it's Simon from Lake Hub. It's road tripping season, summertime, gotta love that
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If you're planning on hitting the road but you're wondering on how to plan your stays when you're
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out on the road, I've got a few pointers for you that I've learned along the way
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Last time I checked I've got over 100,000 miles in road tripping experience. We do regularly we do
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about five to seven thousand miles a year out on the open road and there are a lot of things I've
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learned along the way that I'm going to share with you today. Such as how to book your spots when
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you're out on the road, how to book a last minute hotel room when you're out on the road, how to save
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money, and how to get the best customer service from those hotels when you're out on the road
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Because that is something I had to learn the hard way more than once. First is the planning stage
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So you're planning your route, you have an idea of the places that you want to go
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the kind of highlights. You either have a destination, like one destination in your mind
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and you want to make a couple stops on the way to get there or you have to make a couple stops
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on the way to get there because it's going to take a couple days. Or the journey is the
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destination and you want to make like kind of a route. So regardless you have a route in mind
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So that's the framework that we're working with. You've got the bones of your trip
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is the route that you want to take. Now how do you break that down? So if you have a destination with like a fixed amount of time that you want to go there
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like say you're packing the Vista Cruiser and we're heading to Wally World. So you have this
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fixed amount of time and a fixed destination you want to get there, but you have this flexible
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amount of time and how long it takes to get there and how much road time do we push every day
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If you're young and you're happy and you're healthy and you don't have little ones with you
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you can do eight hours a day. All right. It's not comfortable, but you can do it
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My rule is not more than that unless we're doing a one-day shot somewhere. So under eight hours
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it's just a matter of comfort. How much time do you want to spend in the car and how much time
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do you want to make on the road? So those are personal decisions. Some people like to go in
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little tiny chunks and just make a journey out of it. That's fine. If you have little ones
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plan on a stop no more than two hours. If you can do more than two hours, then that's like
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expert level, pro level road tripping with kids. So hour and a half, two hour chunks
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you can break up your day. I like two hours just because it's a nice round number. We did two hours break, two hours lunch, two hours break, two hours and you're done. Okay
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That's how I break up our road time when we're doing a full eight hour day. So once you break up your times, you figure out how much time you want to spend in the vehicle
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You know your route. Now you can say, okay, we're probably going to stay in this city or this town
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or this area. All right. So you're either doing it by destinations or you're doing it by time
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So from there, now you can figure out a place to stay. Now talking about a place to stay
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if you're the type of person that has to have every minute of your vacation planned out
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then congratulations. I'm never going on a vacation with you because that drives me crazy
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Just be straight forward with you. A lot of people are like that. That's fine. You need
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to plan everything out, plan everything out and book all your spots ahead of time and say, okay
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we've got a hotel room in this town at this time, and we're going to be there by this time
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Now I'm going to tell you, you got to have a little bit of flexibility. If there's no
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flexibility in your plan, then have flexibility in your mind that, hey, something might go sideways
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on us. Okay. I've been hit by surprise snow storms. I've been hit by tornado sirens and obvious
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tornadoes forming in the distance and things like that. High winds that I did not expect
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Yeah. Ice that we did not expect. Torrential downpour that we did not expect. Highway closures
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vehicle failures. I've been through it. So you have to maintain a certain level of flexibility
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in here, even if it's not in your schedule. Now me, because of that, because I expect stuff to happen
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and I expect things to happen like, you know, us getting at each other's throats in the vehicle
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and wanting to cut an eight hour day down to like five hours. I like having a little bit
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of flexibility in my time. So what I do is I look for hotels and the place we're going to stay when
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we're like an hour or two out. And we're like, okay, that's it. Now we've picked a spot. We kind
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of had like a rough sketch of like where we wanted to stay in our mind, but we don't make the final
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call until day of. It's a gamble, right? Hotels might be booked out. That happened one time we
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were going through Phoenix and it was spring training. Didn't even think about it. It was week
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one of spring training, which meant all the media was there. All the families were there
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and there was not a hotel room left in Phoenix. So we had to roll right on. You know, we just
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we gambled and we lost. That also happened in Midland, Odessa and West Texas when oil was
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booming like crazy. And I didn't know this, but oil companies were buying up entire floors of
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hotel rooms at a time just for their employees. Nowhere to stay. Keep on trucking. So what we
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do is once we pick an area and we go, okay, we're, we want to stay in this town. Then what we do is
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we get on Google maps. Now you can use Travelocity. You can use Expedia and Kayak and all these
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aggregation sites. But here's what I found out. You can't get good customer service when you book
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through those because they take such a big chunk that the hotel managers are, they're not left with
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any options because they didn't make any money on you. And so they might've made all in, they might
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have made $10 on you or something like that by the end of the day, because they use those sites just
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to fill up and it's like, well, we've got it here. We might as well fill them up. Right? So I was told
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two different times, I was told by a manager, I wish I could help you. If you book directly with
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us, I would comp your night and give you a move you into another room. Instead, I got a $5
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Whataburger gift card for my troubles. And by troubles, I mean, trying to keep my kids asleep
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in West Texas in the summertime with a failed air conditioning unit
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$5. So now what we do is sure we'll check Expedia or whatever, and we'll price shop and just see
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you know, if it's like, Hey, we're going to save like $50, then okay, I'll take that risk. But if
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we're going to save like $3 or $5, then I'm going to just going to book straight with them. And
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usually what we do is we just call them. We just call them and say, Hey, what, what do you got going
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on tonight? Do you have any construction? Those are the other things that we asked too. Are you
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guys working on your building at all? Is there any construction? Because sometimes the prices
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will be drastically different. And it's tempting to go, Oh man, we can save 30 bucks. We save this
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state, this place over here. But you know, it smells like, you know, sheet rock and asbestos
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and paint the whole time and like carpet glue and they start working at seven o'clock in the morning
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Yeah, you get what you pay for. Right? So something to consider
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Once again, we use Google maps. We call them directly. We talk to somebody, Hey, what's going
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on? What's it like right now? Is there a place to park my camper? Is there a room? Are you guys
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booked out? Is there nowhere to park? All those things matter. So just get on the phone, talk to
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somebody, book it. Once you get there, you can pay for it and you are good to go. Now I want to make
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you aware of another option that you have that I'm learning about. That is OYO. O-Y-O. So I see these
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popping up all over the place now. I mean, we go some of the same routes. We go some of the same
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routes every year and I'm starting to see these more and more and more. So what it is, is it's
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basically the concept is it's Airbnb or VRBO for motels that are privately owned
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new money renovated. They renovate all the rooms and then you can book directly through the site
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and then they don't have to staff like the front office and all that kind of stuff
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They're, they're, they're made service or contractors. They only clean the rooms that
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were stayed in and so their overhead is really low and that means you get to save some money
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So that can be a great on the road option. So now what we do is we're checking Google Maps
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and we're checking OYO to see what our options are. I'm going to put a link to OYO down below
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I've got a link for you to be able to just click and go and just explore it because that might
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become really useful to you. If you're planning a road trip, once again I've got a lot of experience
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and I made a six-part series that I'll put a link to here and down below on what to pack for your
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road trip. Whether you're flying solo or kids, packing for emergencies, packing for convenience
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all the stuff that you need for your road trip is going to be in those six videos. I encourage you
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to watch those next. I'm Simon from Lightcab. See you out on the open road
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