Book Hotels Through Booking.com
My favourite website for booking hotels for rail travel is Booking.com, as it offers one of the largest selections of hotels, apartments, and other accommodation options.
Moreover, Booking.com often has excellent hotel deals, and its website is extremely user-friendly. Use the search tool below to find a hotel at your destination.
** I earn a small commission if you book your hotel through Booking.com using the search widget or link above. This does not affect the price you pay, but it helps support the maintenance of my website and fund rail travel research. **
reasons to USE BOOKING.com
In addition to its easy-to-use interface, good deals, and wide accommodation selection, there are several other reasons why avid rail travellers like me use Booking.com to book our hotel stays.
Location and maps
Booking.com lets you search not only for a specific destination, but also for hotels near major landmarks or, which is especially useful for train travellers, near railway stations. For example, you can enter St Pancras railway station in London or Keleti station in Budapest as your location to find accommodation close to the station.
This helps you filter out options that are poorly located when you need to stay near the station because you arrive late by train or depart early the next day! Booking.com’s excellent map feature is also a great way to search for hotels by easily seeing which options are closest to the railway station.
Free cancellation
Another great feature of Booking.com is that many hotels offer free cancellation. You can easily find room deals on Booking.com that allow you to cancel up to 18:00 on the day of arrival. Often, you do not even have to pay for your stay at the time of booking and only need to guarantee the reservation with a credit card, allowing you to pay on arrival at the hotel.
Although free cancellation depends on the specific hotel and room deal you choose, it can be excellent value for rail travellers. Imagine being on a delayed or cancelled train and not making it to your intended destination that night. Instead of losing the money from a pre-paid hotel stay, you can still cancel it at the last minute.
Similarly, the free cancellation policies offered by many Booking.com hotels work particularly well for Interrail and Eurail travellers who want to take full advantage of the flexibility these rail passes allow.
Do you feel like staying an extra night in Salzburg instead of moving on to Vienna as planned, or heading towards Verona rather than Prague the next day? You can simply cancel your original booking and reserve accommodation somewhere else.
