Adventures in Discount Travelling

One of the great things about living in London, is that it is so easy to visit the rest of the world. There are several discount airlines like RyanAir and EasyJet that can get you to your destination at an affordable price. Along with the discount airlines, you can get a fairly good deal on hotels using lastminute.com.

Now I’ve used lastminute.com many times before. They have a fantastic feature where you can get a two for one deal on mystery 5 star hotels. It sounds scary as you don’t know what hotel you’ve booked until you’ve already paid. But the places that I stayed at the past two times that I used this function were gorgeous and centrally located.

Now the problem with relying too much on this function, is that you (and by you, I mean, me) rely so much on lastminute.com’s awesomeness that you forget that there are still some really shitty hotels listed on the site.
Case in point, during my last trip to Amsterdam I booked my hotel based on lastminute.com’s recommendation. After all, if it’s on the site and highly recommended, it can’t be too shitty right?

God I wish I hadn’t been so wrong.

1. Our hotel was located in the middle of nowhere. And when I say middle of nowhere, I’m talking off a highway near an industrial park.
2.  We did not stay in the nice accommodations as pictured. We somehow ended up in the 2 star trailer park located next to the hotel. I was not amused.
3. Not only did our room not have towels (I had to ask for them) but we somehow also had to pay an extra 3 Euros in local taxes. Because added them to the cost of the booking would have been logical.

But to be fair, I should have looked at where this hotel was located. I shouldn’t have relied on my past luck with lastmintue.com. But I did. And I learned my lesson. Be sure that you (now I really mean you, the reader) don’t make the same mistake.