find a place to sleep, the easy-peasy way

One thing that can be so annoying when you’re planning a trip on the fly is finding a hotel or a nice bed and breakfast to sleep over. Usually it means you throw down the location and the obvious keywords in Google and hope for the best. Usually you’ll also end up wasting time on tons of hotel-booking sites which don’t even show you places near where you are looking for. Those sites get indexed anyway because they function like a crappy online phone book full of advertising banners. Blegh.

So this one time I was using Google Maps to plot out the location of quarries we where going to end up diving in, when I noticed it actually knew some of them by entering “quarry”. Then I tried looking for “hotel” and “bed and breakfast” ét voila, a whole bunch of those reddish balloons appeared on the map, indicating places and phone numbers to sleep over. Awesome!

The cool part is that you can see right away which ones are interesting geographically, and which ones aren’t. Some of them might be in a town you didn’t even know was there. In fact, we ended up just over the border in France in a sweet little B&B and had an excellent weekend. There’s no chance I would have ever found that one without Google Maps for sure.

It just makes so much sense to put places on a map isn’t it? Funny nobody really thought of it before, or executed it properly. So no more dull searches on badly designed websites for me. It’s Google Maps from now on when I’m planning trips.

So if you’re a hotel or bed & breakfast owner, you might want to get your data in there. Resistance is futile, after all.

Photo by Face it, cc-licensed