Finding cheap hotels online

If you've found, as I have, that searching online for cheap hotels or for good deals on more upscale accommodation can be a pretty time-consuming and hit-and-miss kind of process, help may be at hand.

One night recently, having sat at my PC for over an hour, juggling and wrestling with the browser tabs of various hotel and online reservation websites, and occasionally fending the cat off my keyboard (I think he took my intermittent groans and profanities as a request for solace), I decided there had to be more profitable ways to spend my evening. I gave up on trying to arrange cheap hotel accommodation here in Tokyo for my soon-to-be-visiting parents, and decided they'd have to make do with the dubious 'cosiness' of my 10ft x 5ft spare room. I consoled myself with the prospect of the comedy that was likely to ensue as they fought for space for themselves and their luggage in a space the size of their laundry back home in New Zealand.

After fortifying myself with a snifter of the hard stuff (Twinings English Breakfast) and being briefly waylaid by some cat vomit on the kitchen floor (so that's what you were trying to tell me!), I was back at my PC searching for something quite unrelated to do with Tokyo train line maps when I struck gold.

I found a link to a fantastic free tool at a kind of database site called hotelscombined.com, that allows you to compare prices and availability of hotel rooms worldwide, through 31 different hotel reservation sites at the same time. As I mentioned, it's free - they don't charge a commission or referral fee for their service, they make their money through advertising the sites they search.

The site is uncluttered and easy to use - you choose a city from a list or just type it into a box and choose your check-in/check-out dates. It then lists the hotels it finds, starting with the cheapest (you can select the ranking order by clicking on the column headings), and shows you a star rating, location, consumer rating (and number of guest reviews available, if any) and an indicative nightly rate, in any currency you choose from a pull down menu. You then click on the individual hotel you are interested in to see a description (often with a great deal of detail), and click a button to show which reservation sites are offering the hotel and which room types are available at what rates. When you click to select a room type at a particular rate, you are transferred to the relevant reservation site. The worldwide numbers of deals searched (700,000) and hotel descriptions and images (2.4 million) are pretty staggering, and cover more than 200 countries.

Once my parents confirm the dates of their now-postponed visit (maybe they heard somehow of my dastardly plan to house them in a glorified cupboard), I'll be straight to the hotelscombined site to sort out something a bit more lavish for them - maybe even with a bed.

Hope this site helps you too - let me know.
Happy Holidays!