Imagine this, you plan a perfect weekend with your partner to visit Bheemshwari because you have an extended weekend. You plan everything, pack your bags, get your car ready, and book a couple friendly hotel at Indiranagar with a high rating without giving much a thought. You reach the hotel and.....it's a complete mess. The rooms don't look anything like the photos, basic amenities like a geezer are absent, the food while decent is heavily overpriced, sounds relatable? It probably does for many, and this mainly due to the fact most people when booking a hotel don't seem to assign sufficient time for research as either they're too excited about the trip or busy with planning other stuff. But what most people fail to understand is doing detailed research is greatly worth it in the long run because your hotel experience can make or break your whole trip experience. So to make things easier for so you don't book similar hotels like that one couple friendly hotel in Indiranagar in our example here so 6 rookie mistakes you should avoid when booking hotels.

1. Comparing prices

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Starting with the very basic, many of you might be already doing this, but for the ones that are not please check multiple websites instead of only the most popular ones. It is a very common practice for new traveling websites to offer bigger discounts by incurring less profit just to get their name around, whereas bigger websites due to having a bigger customer base don't have to do this. To make things easier there are websites dedicated to doing this exact task of comparing prices. Also an extra tip many might be unaware of but always do your price comparison on the incognito mode if you're using a browser, this is because hotel booking website use cookies to check how many times your visit their website to book a room for a certain place or a specific hotel and offer dynamic prices. This is the same reason if you search for 'couple-friendly hotels in M G Road' too many times on a website, you're likely to see a spike in prices on websites that have dynamic pricing and also see a lot of pesky ads on social media.

2. Time of booking a hotel

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While many of us don't have the opportunity to plan our vacations as it is dependent on when you get a leave sanctioned from your workplace. But if you are fortunate enough to have that luxury and wanted to save some money, always try to book hotels during the off-season of the specific location. While booking a hotel in Delhi will be costly all around the year due to its being a major metro city, a place like Sikkim would have its hotel prices skyrocket during the winter. If you intend to book during the main season as that's when you get your leaves, booking a hotel multiple months prior is a good option, given you are sure you're going to go at that time but still we aware of the refund policy in case of an emergency.

3. Basic amenities

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A lot of times during hasty booking we forget to check if the hotel offers basic amenities like a geezer, timely room services, electric kettle, TV, etc. Normally it is expected to have them in the description whenever you're booking a hotel room, but again it is always better to either call the customer care of the website you're booking from or the hotel itself, better to be safe than sorry.

4. Not reading customer reviews

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Reading customer reviews doesn't mean reading only the two top reviews by relevancy but going through bunch of them. It might take you about 10-15 minutes, but believe me when I say you're not going to regret it. The main idea of reading multiple reviews is trying to find a trend, as there can be times when you see a very extremely positive or negative review due to an isolated experience can misportray  the true experience at the hotel. You have likely seen the same happen to a restaurant you like eating at have a negative review, which in isolation would make someone not go their but that is not the case for that restaurant, and the same goes for many hotels. You can always visit multiple online hotel booking websites to see different customer reviews.

5. Falling for images

All that glitters isn't gold

Hotel images can be very much deceiving and while most of us are aware of it, when booking a hotel many forget about it. Firstly the rooms on websites are always hotels put to their best possible condition and then edited just like commercials, so always keep this analogy in mind when you're looking at images. Secondly, the hotels have pictures of rooms from their best category and more specifically their best rooms from those categories in case the hotel has many rooms. That is the same reason when your super deluxe room at a couple friendly hotel in Navi Mumbai that you booked for your Mumbai trip looked different from the website images. A tip, you can to call the hotel once you've booked the hotel and ask for images beforehand if possible for your booked room.

6. Not reading policies

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Quite a simple one but most people commit this mistake out of sheer laziness. Why this is important you might ask? Well, imagine this you're on a week-long holiday to experience winter in Delhi and have booked a hotel at Connaught place and all of a sudden a close family member becomes sick on your 1st day. So you choose to go back and ask for the refund only to get a reply that it was written on the policy when booking the hotel through the specific website they offer no refund or negligible amount. Similarly, there can many more weird clause hotels have for this very reason most people don't read policies. The only tip to overcome this is to stop being lazy!

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These were a few of the many mistakes people make during booking a hotel. While it does seem a lot of work to do them every time you book a hotel, once you start doing them it'll become a habit, not to mention the great benefits you can reap from avoiding these mistakes. To end, always remember to do research everywhere, even when you're doing something simple as booking a hotel.

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