This list comes from nine years watching hotel revenue teams decide which room gets sold first, plus every booking I have made since. The category names are marketing words until you ask what sits behind the window, so each tip below is a question I ask before I look at the price. The order matters, because the answers change what the room is worth.
Read the category, not the star rating
Stars describe the building, while the category describes the room you will actually sleep in. A three-star superior with a proper desk and a quiet courtyard beats a five-star standard sitting next to the service lift, and I have paid for both. Ask for the category in full, with superior or deluxe attached, instead of accepting whatever rate code appears on the confirmation.
The star count survives renovations and category changes, so a building rated four stars in 2011 may hold rooms that the same hotel would not show a repeat guest. The category is what the revenue team controls this year, which makes it the number worth arguing about.
Ask what the sea view actually faces
Side sea view, partial sea view and sea view are three different products, and only one of them puts water in front of the window. I ask for a photograph taken from the window this season, and I expect a side view to sit twenty to thirty euro a night below the front rooms. The trade-off is real: the cheaper room often sits over the quieter street, and that silence may be worth more than the slice of water.
I also ask where the sun sits in the afternoon, because a west-facing room in July means shutters closed from four o'clock and a space nobody wants to sit in. One photograph taken from the window answers both questions in a single look.
Take the higher floor for the noise
The floor decides the sound and the lift queue, and neither appears anywhere in the category description. Above the fourth floor you leave the delivery street and the late bars behind, while the very top floor brings the roof plant and the morning heat. A high room at the back is the cheapest quiet booking in almost any city.
I check what sits behind the hotel before I care about the lobby: a service entrance, a school yard or a tram line says more about the night than any review does. When the map is unclear I take the courtyard side and accept the smaller window.
Count the beds, not the occupancy
Occupancy counts people, and beds decide where those people sleep, which are two very different numbers. A room for three may hold one double and a sofa that a teenager will refuse outright, so I ask for the configuration in writing before anything is held. The three questions I send every time are these:
- Two separate singles for anyone travelling who is not a couple.
- One bed a child can be moved out of at night without waking everybody.
- A cot confirmed as standing in the room, rather than promised at the desk.
A room sold as a triple often means a rollaway in the aisle, while a double may hold two twins pushed together, which is a different sleep entirely. I ask for a photograph of the actual setup in that room rather than a generic picture of the category.
Price the step up across the nights
An upgrade from standard to the next category looks steep per night and small across a week. Ten euro a night over seven nights is seventy euro for a window and a bathroom you use every morning, while that same seventy buys an excellent dinner on the first evening. I compare every step against the length of the stay instead of against the nightly rate, and I take the upgrade when the trip runs longer than four nights.
The reverse holds on a single night, where the standard room wins because the upgrade only buys an evening and a sleep you will have forgotten by the airport. Spending follows the length of the stay, and the nightly rate is simply the surface of the calculation.
Put the category on the confirmation
A reservation that names the room type survives a busy check-in desk, and one that names only a rate code gets whatever happens to be left. Ask for the category in the confirmation email, keep a copy on your phone, and show that line at the desk rather than explaining the booking from the beginning. That line, plus the photograph of the view from the window, is the whole method behind every room I have ever been happy in.
When the desk says the category cannot be guaranteed I ask what can be, and the answer is usually the view, the floor or the bed type. Take whichever of the three matters most, write it into the booking, and let the rest of the description go.