Saturday, March 01, 2008

Travelling in Asia - for those who do

Last week, my boss and I spent a good couple of hours trying to book hotels online. These were in Sydney and Brisbane, and though we found the ideal place in Sydney, we couldn’t for the life of us get it to go right through to completion stage. It kept telling us we were spending more than forty minutes on the site, and that was too long. We must be some kind of bug/virus/bot or whathaveyou.
I was reminded of this just now, because of looking at sites advertising Cheap Hotels in Singapore, Cheap Hotels in Bangkok and Cheap Hotels in Kuala Lumpur. Bear with me if I seem to be repeating myself here! It’s the leftover result of struggling to book Cheap Hotels in Brisbane or Cheap Hotels in Sydney.
Booking hotels online has its ups and downs. When we were in Europe we had to book hotels and hostels as we went. The result was that we got a very mixed bag of accommodation, as I’ve said in my Travel blog. In Barcelona we had to climb five flights of stairs to get to our room, even though there was a lift in the building. The lift, however, was reserved for permanent residents. Good grief.
In Rome we paid a fortune for a very ordinary hotel. Not only that, but it was a long bus ride from any of the tourist spots.
In Hamburg, the shower wasn’t just en suite, it was literally built into the room! In Heidelberg there was absolutely nothing in the room except the bed and a hatstand.
On the other hand, in Valencia, where we stand for a week, we had two wonderful apartments; in Florence we were within spitting distance of all the tourist places and could walk comfortably to them; in Cologne we paid about half the price of the Rome room for exactly the same kind of accommodation. The luck of the draw, obviously.
It would be interesting to have a go at doing the same thing for Asia - if I ever get a chance to go there!

The various photos of come from Flickr.com, and were taken by
MsAnthea: Bangkok
Storm Crypt: KL (Note that this is the building Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones hung between in the film, Entrapment.
Christopher Chan: Singapore

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