RESERVATION PAGE LAYOUT....what's important and what's not

FINDING YOUR DESTINATION in the search box....or, where is Tuscany?

FINDING HOTELS in the best locations....advanced search options and great maps

TIMING OUT....and losing your selections !

MAKING PAYMENT

TERMS & CONDITIONS...who wants to read that?

Lots of links on the reservation page, for stuff like weather and a currency converter. Most are of minimal value and may just distract you from what you probably came to do, which is to book hotels, transfers, or sightseeing tours. The link that offers by far the most good information is "Travel Guides." It takes you to practically a whole new website with lots of guidebook-like info such as "what to see." But if you already know where you want to go, you can leave that for reading later, or it may eat up your whole booking session. Note that you will need to use the "Back" button on your browser to get back from "Travel Guides" to the reservation system page. As to the other links on the reservation system page, we suggest you not be tempted by the link to hotel "Hot Deals," because you'll see those same deals later when you do your hotel search, and they will be easier to evaluate when seen in direct comparison to the other hotels.

What's most important on the reservation page is what we call the booking engine. It's front and center, consisting of a screen with boxes for your destinations and dates. Using the booking engine is what the rest of the comments on this tips page are all about.

The reservation page opens with a booking engine screen for hotels, as opposed to a screen for transfers or sightseeing or apartments. If you want to book something other than hotels, you need to click on one of the tabs at page top.

Even though we specialize in Italy, Switzerland and Paris, you will be looking at a worldwide reservation system. You may see your destination highlighted right at the top, among the major cities -- Rome, Florence, Venice and Paris are right there. Just check the circle for the one you want and then put in your dates. If not, search for your city, or area, in the drop-down menu.

This is important. We suggest that you start by doing a simple search, then take advantage of the terrific tools here for doing an advanced search. Your ability to find specific kinds of hotels, in specific locations, is a big strength of this reservation system

Start by choosing a destination, putting in your travel dates, and setting your room requirements. For setting the dates, we like to click on the calendar icons, rather than typing in dates, because it helps keep us from putting in the wrong dates. Then, if you only need one room, or more than one room of the same type (such as two double rooms), you can make that selection in the Room Type and Room Number boxes. But if you need two types of rooms, such as a double room and a single room (for a party of three people in separate rooms), then you need to click on "Add More Rooms", which simply gives you more boxes for room types. We suggest that you NOT bother at this point to choose Advanced Search Options, because you will see those options later, when they are handier to use.

A simple search in a big city, such as Rome or Paris, will return a list of hundreds of hotels. Don't worry, because we'll show you how to quickly reduce that list by using the filters. There are filters in two locations. The handiest filters are right up top of the list of hotels, where you see the option to "Filter Results by....All Stars or All Locations." The rest of the filters are on the lower left of the page, beneath "Change Search."There, in addition to the choices for picking hotel star ratings and location, you will also see the chance to check for a certain hotel, by putting in the first three letters of the hotel name. Just be aware that there could be a thousand hotels or more in a big city, and no reservation system carries all those hotels, so do not be surprised if a certain hotel -- maybe one that was recommended to you -- is not listed there.

You can also sort by facilities, by checking any of the boxes, such as for "fitness center," or "parking."

But by far the most useful search filters are the ones for Star Ratings, and Location.

Before you begin to refine your search, check out what you can do with the interactive MAPS, and see why we think this is such a nifty way to find hotels.

Using the maps. The maps are zoomable and can also be re-centered. You can use the scroll button on your mouse to move in or out, or if you see a choice of + (zooms in) or - (zooms out), that gives you more measured control. Then there is the "hand" symbol. Put your cursor on the map, avoiding any of the hotel symbols, and the cursor arrow will turn into the shape of a hand, so that you can grab the map and reposition it.

The first map you see, in the upper left of the page with your simple search results, is too small to be of much use. So go to "Click here to enlarge map." That will open a new page with a bigger map. To the right of the bigger map is a list of all the hotels from your simple search, and above that list are the search filters for Star Ratings and Locations. This is where it gets interesting.

Choose a range of star ratings, such as 4-5 stars, or choose a neighborhood or district within the city, or both. For example, if you're searching in Rome, try selecting "3-4 stars" and "Spanish Steps" for the location. Watch the map change, as it focuses in on a much smaller area of Rome, and see the list of hotels change from more than 200 hotels to maybe 20 hotels. Now you have zoomed in on a limited area and see only hotels with a certain range of star ratings.

The hotels are arranged by cost. You may see that at the top of the list, out of order as to price, are a few hotels that are "suggested." Those hotel suggestions are made by staff members of the hotel booking company, and our experience is that they have some value, but not enough to deter you from looking through the rest of the list.

Don't hesitate to change the search filters again. For example, if you are looking for a hotel in Paris, where you have a lot of choices, you may not know which district to choose for location, or which category of hotels you can afford. So by all means, use this handy tool to zip around and get familiar with choices for hotels, locations and prices.

Did we mention that you can use the aerial view on the maps? That means a photographic image of the real place. You probably know about that already, but if not, check it out. Paris, Rome and Venice are especially nifty places to use the aerial views, because you can look for recognizable landmarks, like St. Peter's Square at the Vatican, or the Eiffel Tower, or the Grand Canal. And you can see how many blocks away you will be if you choose a certain hotel. Just look under the map for choice of views -- Road, Aerial, or Hybrid, which is a combination of roads and the aerial view.

Star rating. As you would expect, hotels get fancier as well as more expensive as you go from one star to five stars. The common misconception is that the stars only indicate hotel quality. Yes, as you go up from one to five stars, generally the quality goes up. BUT, the stars are assigned to a great extent based on facilities. For example, a hotel with a restaurant gets more stars, but that does not necessarily translate into a nicer room. There are some very nice little hotels with just a few stars, and other hotels with lots of stars that really need to be renovated. The stars you see here are the ones assigned by the govenment of that country, for example, Italy, Switzerland or France. You may observe that price rises gradually as you go from 1 star to 4 stars, and then it takes a pretty big jump to the 5-star (luxury) category. If you're looking for a starting point, we suggest choosing the category of 3-4 stars.

Location. In the bigger cities, such as Rome, Venice, Milan, and Paris, you will see a list of neighborhoods or districts, and you might find recognizable names, such as Spanish Steps in Rome. For the smaller cities, like Florence, where there are no neighborhood options, you can at least choose "City," as opposed to "Suburbs" or "Airport," to zoom in a bit. But your best bet in most cities is to use the maps to zoom in manually. Where IS the city center?? You may be able to find it by looking for the biggest cluster of hotels, or by looking at the cluster symbols for popular attractions. The attractions are usually concentrated at the city centers. Finally, you can look at the road patterns. There is usually a ring road, or more than one, around the center of a city, so that you can use it as a guide when zooming in on the city center. In other places, like Venice, you just need to know that the city center is around Piazza San Marco.

Want some real aggravation? Try spending a lot of time selecting hotels and lining up your itinerary, only to have it all just disappear ! Referring to that as "timing-out" is far too kind, and you'll probaby find a better word. Be careful to keep this from happening.

Until you create a booking and make payment, you cannot save your selections. So if you go into the reservation system and spend a lot of time studying hotels or transfers or sightseeing tours, and make some selections, you have no ability to save those selections, short of actually paying for them. Yes, they'll stay up there for a while. But at some point, unless you keep making searches or selections every few minutes, your session on the reservation system will "time out," and there will be no record of what you did.

If you've used other travel websites, you know this timing-out thing is not unusual. In fact, in our comparison tests, our reservation system gave us more time than the best-known consumer hotel website. There is a reason why your selections are not saved for long: it is the nature of booking TRAVEL. When booking hotels, you are not in a shopping-cart environment, even though it may seem like it. You know how you can put something in a shopping cart at Amazon.com, and it will still be there weeks later? That makes sense for products that are stockpiled and generally available anytime. But space at hotels is not like that. Hotels fill up, especially the very small hotels typical of European city centers.

You don't have dibbs on a hotel room until you pay for it. It's risky to do a hotel search, find one you like that shows availability, and assume that rooms there will continue to be available, when thousands of other people are looking for hotels in the same city, at the same time. Booking travel is not like buying a toaster online. Hotels, trains, car rentals, and even sightseeing tours, are all "first come, first served." So the reservation systems are not geared to saving your choices...until you actually pay to secure them.

One way to handle this is to pay as you go. If you think your booking session will take several hours, involving careful searches for hotels in 4 cities, you may just want to pay for each hotel as you select it, rather than choose three of them, planning to pay for all at once, then lose your work while deciding on the fourth one. This approach does have some advantages, the biggest one being that you don't need to worry about your hotels being gone when you finally do go to pay for them. As travel agents, we've seen that happen....you chooose a hotel, and a few minutes later, it's no longer available. Just imagine how many other people may be poised to choose the last room at that charming hotel you found in just the right location in Venice.

Also, this "pay-as-you-go" appraoch permits you to break up your sessions. You could do the Rome hotel one evening, then come back and do the Florence hotel the next day. But be careful about dragging it out. You might find after committing to your dates in Rome that there's a big convention in your next destination -- the city of Florence -- on the days you want to be there, with nothing much available for rooms. And suddenly your whole itinerary is at risk. Ideally, you would make a preliminary search for all your travel dates, see that there is an acceptable selection of hotels in each location, then get your choices booked before too much time elapses.

An alternative to paying as you go is to be mindful of keeping your booking session alive. Our observation has been that you can expect to get about 45 minutes for starters. That means that if you do your first hotel search, choose a hotel, put in your names, and get a booking number -- then get distracted -- the system will keep that "preliminary booking" available to you for something less than one hour before deleting it all. That's provided you have NOT taken any further actions to keep it alive.

But if you do take more action, such as doing searches and making other selections....you may be able to keep going for a period of hours and still have your work available when you're ready to pay for it all at once. We have found that some action must be taken every 15 minutes or so, to avoid losing your selections. But these numbers are only estimates and may vary depending on factors we can't appreciate. So if you anticipate a long session of planning and booking of hotels, transfers, or sightseeing tours, you may want to have a kitchen timer handy, to cue you to do something every 10 minutes or so. If this seems like a pain, just remind yourself that it is the nature of booking travel in a reservation system, competing with all the other people booking travel to the same destinations at the same time you're doing it.

Once you do make a payment, an account is created, and you will have access to that account for making additions.

First, this reservation system is currently enabled for residents of North America. What that really means is that any credit card you use for making payment must have a billing address in the USA, Canada or Mexico. So if you are in the armed services, or otherwise temporarily located overseas, but you are using a credit card with address in the USA, that's fine. But unfortunately, we are not able to offer hotel bookings here, as yet, for residents of Europe or Australia/New Zealand, or anywhere else in the world. Sorry, We REALLY wish we could.

You can use VISA, Mastercard or American Express; you cannot use Discover.

You can only use one credit card for making payment. That means that if several couples are traveling together, for example, and they want to pay separately for their hotels, they need to make separate bookings. But be careful! Let's say that you do a search for hotels, checking for availability of two double rooms, and you find a hotel that you like. Then you decide that in order to pay with two credit cards, the first couple must make a booking and pay for one room. Then the second couple tries to make a separate booking for the second room, and that hotel is no longer available. It happens, because there could be thousands of other people using the reservation system at the same time, and there's no telling when that room will be gone. That means that whenever possible, it's best to book all the rooms needed for your traveling party within the same booking.

If you make payment, then decide that you want to ADD something, you can go back into "Your Account" (tab at top), make the addition, and make an additional payment. For example, if you decide to add a transfer or a sightseeing tour after you have already made payment for your hotels, it is not necessary to create a new booking. Note that if you make an addition, requiring an additional payment, you can then use a different credit card. So...if you are adding a room, to accommodate more travelers, and they want to use their own credit card for the added rooms, it is possible to do that within your original booking (see the comments above about being restricted to one card when you make the first payment on that same booking).

Nobody wants to read about terms and conditions -- certainly we don't -- UNTIL plans change and you need to confront the idea of revising or even canceling your trip. That's when some people get a rude surprise because they did not bother to read about the COST that may be charged for cancellation. As to hotels in particular, Americans and Canadians have this idea that they can expect to cancel a hotel as late as the day of scheduled arrival, without penalty. But it doesn't work that way in Italy, or Switzerland, or France. In particular it does not work that way with prepaid hotels. Typically you can cancel prepaid hotels until a few days prior to scheduled arrival, without penalty. But it depends on the specific hotel.

Some hotels have much more rigorous cancellation policies than others. For example, hotels in resort areas tend to require more lead time for cancellation without penalty. What all this means is that you really need to look at the cancellation policy for each hotel that you book. Before you can book a hotel, the reservation will require that you check a box indicating that you have seen and accept the terms for that hotel. So why not actually do that?