Sometimes when the system doesn't work, it's a good thing!

First of all, a note on how I usually do hotel bookings when travelling; and the usual disclaimer, I have no interests, financial or otherwise, in the company through which I do these.

I use an Internet booking site http://www.hotel.de/ for my bookings. This is a German organization, but they seem to be smart enough to look at the IP address that you are connecting from, and figure out that you want the English website. If that doesn't happen, there is a language button at the top right (with a flag representing the current language of the page your looking at - for English it is a weird combination of a Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes!), and you can use that to change the page to English. You can use this site to book a hotel just about anywhere in the world, and, you can set yourself up as a user, with your contact information stored, and even your preferrred payment option (all over a SSL-Secure Sockets Layer link), so that you can simply book without having to enter this information each time.

You can search for hotels using various parameters; within a particular city, within x km/miles of a particular city, within x km/miles of an attraction or event, etc. You can set up other parameters, such as more than x stars on their rating system, and below y $/Euro/whatever currency per night. Besides a star rating system based on what the hotel provides about their facilities, you also get a user score on a 0 - 10 scale for each hotel, based on user evaluations. If you book a hotel through hotel.de, you will get an e-mail on the day you check out, asking you to evaluate the hotel, with a link to the evaluation page. The user score is derived from these evaluations, and you can also read any written comments submitted as part of the evaluation process - although these are in the language of the user, and since this is an international site, may not be understandable by you.

On about 10 bookings both in Germany and in Canada, I have found this site very reliable - in one case they got me a room in a hotel (in Canada) at a lower rate when the hotel itself had told me that only their premium (about $100 more) rooms were available. And, they guarantee that you will get the lowest Internet rate, that is, the hotel cannot sell their rooms for less than this site offers, on-line. (If they do, and you bring a print-out of the web page on which they do, the hotel has to give you the lower rate.)

Rcommended! .... but

As I noted in the post about having to cancel our German trip, there was one hotel that I had booked whose cancellation policy required cancelling at least 14 days prior to arrival, else they would charge anything-unspecified- between 0 and 100% of the total cost of the booking. We were well within that period, and thus the hotel.de website, which allowed me to cancel all my other reservations on-line, would not cancel this one. I contacted the hotel - twice. The first time I talked with a very charming young (I think) woman, late evening German time, who didn't seem to know what to do, but assured me that the hotel would call me back, after they had figured out what to do.

That didn't happen at a time that made sense, given the time difference between Ontario and Germany (they are 6 hours ahead of us), and so at about 4:30 p.m. their time I phoned again. This time I got someone (a man as it happens) who, after some explanations about what I called about, informed me that they had no booking for us (today was Wednesday, this was for Saturday next) and thus as far as they were concerned, if we didn't arrive that was no problem for them; on the other hand, they didn't care to be charged for a booking that they never received by/from hotel.de. But he also agreed that we should not be charged, certainly not the 450 Euro that our full booking was for. After an exchange of contact information - he already had my phone number from call display, but e-mail would be cheaper - we left it that I would contact hotel.de, point out their failure, ask questions, and insist that no one be charged anything for failure to cancel a reservation that never was made. I am still waiting for a reply from them. (Questions asked; how would it have worked out if we had shown up at this hotel, after an overnight flight from Toronto to Frankfurt, then a 5+ hour drive, and they had no reservation, and no room?) To be fair, digging around on the hotel.de site, looking for a hotel and looking at user comments, very occasionally (maybe 1 in 100 to 200 comments) someone complains that they arrived at a hotel that had no idea they were coming, and always the hotel either had room, or went to great lengths to place them elsewhere, at the same level of quality, and the same or lower price(which may be a hidden policy for hotels that sign up with hotel.de).

So, the booking system failed, but it may have saved us something between 0 and 450 Euro!

In other good news, the Salzburger Landestheater, where we had tickets for an operetta, got back to my e-mail telling them we couldn't make it with the news that they would put our tickets back into the "for sale" pool, and if they were sold, credit us with the value against a future visit, when we try this trip again next Spring. I am still waiting to hear back from the Hamburgische Staatsoper, where we had tickets next Tuesday.

All together, this is not working out too badly!