Last week, a friend and I were planning a weekend getaway and needed to locate a hotel room with two beds. Visiting several websites, we entered 2 guests and found that most of rooms offered had only one queen or one king bed, a big time-waster since it wasn't what we wanted.
After I thought about it for a while, I had an idea. Hotel reservation systems are somewhat stupid and can't tell whether the 2 people you're reserving for need one bed or two. However, if you tell the system three people are traveling, they're smart enough to figure out that you need two beds and will present you only with those options. This is especially helpful if you're using a site like Expedia that returns a lot of hotel options because it screens out the places that only have one bed available. After you've chosen your hotel and are ready to reserve, you can just change the number of people and select the kind of room you need.
By the way, I'm going to Pacific Grove and Monterey next weekend. Where are you headed?
Yep, what a great idea, nothing like lying to the reservation system especially when many of them are set up to add on an extra person charge for more than 2 people in a room. Hope you dont plan on complaining about the rate after you make that reservation with false info in it.
I think DeskClerk misunderstood. If you need two beds but enter two people, you can get long lists of rooms, but it’s very time-consuming to click through to each one just to find out which rooms actually have two beds and which ones don’t. I’m not advocating making the reservation for three, just using the trick to quickly filter out rooms that don’t meet the need. Please note: “After you’ve chosen your hotel and are ready to reserve, you can just change the number of people and select the kind of room you need.”
This is a great idea to research hotels. I had this exact issue trying to find 2-bed option in NYC. Thanks for the tip!