Call Them. They Speak English.

(7 minute read)

Last year I missed a train out of Paris.

There were no more that night, which meant I needed a room in a city I had not planned to sleep in, at short notice, which is not the greatest look for a man who plans travel for a living. So I did what you would do. I opened an app. I found a small hotel near the Gare du Nord, I paid, and I went there feeling reasonably pleased with myself.

The man at the desk could not find the booking.

He looked. He looked again. He was, and I want to be fair to him, clearly trying very hard, on behalf of a tired American who had turned up at his desk having already handed money to a company that was not his. When the reservation finally surfaced, it was for the wrong room, too small for two people. He sorted that out too, and put us somewhere better than we had paid for, and none of it was his fault or his mess.

That is the shape of nearly every accommodation problem we have ever had. The middle man takes the money, and the human being takes the responsibility.

So here is what we do instead. It is not complicated, and it is mostly free.

The method: search on the platforms, book off them

We are not going to pretend we never use Booking.com. It is a very good search engine. It has photographs, filters, a map, and reviews, and there is no shame in using a tool that works.

The trick is to get off it before you pay.

Find the hotel you want. Note the name. Then google the hotel by name, go to its own website, and book there. That is the whole technique. It takes an extra ninety seconds and it changes where your money goes.

If the site is bad, or won't take the booking, or is one of those French hotel websites that appears to have been built in 2006 and never touched since, then call them. In English. This is the part that stops Americans dead, and it shouldn't.

Hotels employ people whose actual job is to be helpful to foreigners. They speak English. Many of them speak German, Italian and Spanish too. You are not imposing, you are not being an ugly tourist, and you are not testing their patience. You are being a customer, which is the thing they came to work to deal with. You say you would like a room for two people on these dates. They say yes. That is the whole conversation.

And occasionally a hotel is genuinely only bookable through a platform. We ran into this in Scotland and it happens elsewhere. Fine. Book it through the platform and get on with your life. The point is not purity. The point is that direct should be your default, not your last resort.

Why the middle man matters more than it sounds like it should

The obvious argument is money. Platforms take a commission, often a substantial one, and it comes out of a small business's margin. Booking direct keeps that money in the building. It stays in the town, pays a wage, keeps a roof on.

That is the ethical case and we made it at length last time, so we will not relitigate it here.

The practical case is the one people underrate: when something goes wrong, you want to be the hotel's customer and not the app's. The man at Gare du Nord had no leverage, no visibility into what I had paid, and no obligation to fix a problem he had not caused. He fixed it anyway, because he was decent. That is a thin thing to rely on. Book direct and you are not relying on it. You are simply someone the hotel knows about, with a name in their system, and a person on the other end of a phone.

Everything else in this article follows from that.

Hotels are underrated and we will not apologize for it

Somewhere in the last decade it became slightly embarrassing to say you were staying in a hotel, as though it revealed a failure of imagination.

We think that is nonsense.

A hotel has a person in it, twenty-four hours a day. When the shower dies at eleven at night, that is somebody's job. When your train is cancelled and you need to stay another night, that is a conversation with a human being and not a message thread with a host who is asleep in another country. When you arrive at three in the morning, wrecked, someone hands you a key.

And a good hotel is not the same as an expensive hotel. We should be honest here: when we travel on our own money, we very often end up in an Ibis. It is fine. It is clean, it is where it says it is, and nobody has ever made us feel foolish for booking one. There is no moral failing in a budget chain, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

What we actually put people in

The point of a specialist is not to find you a fancier hotel. It is to find you the right one, which is a different problem, and it starts with what you are actually there to do.

We had a couple whose trip was built around architecture, art, and history. That was the spine of everything, so the lodging had to serve it rather than sit beside it. In Marseille we put them in the Hôtel Le Corbusier, which is inside the Cité Radieuse, the Corbusier building itself. You do not visit the architecture. You sleep in it, and you make your coffee in it, and you walk out through it in the morning.

Later in the trip they stayed at Château La Coste in Provence, which is a country estate with an art and architecture program running through the grounds. It was the indulgent night of the trip and it was entirely on theme.

Neither of those is a place you stumble onto by filtering a map by price. They are choices, made because we knew what the trip was about. That is the actual service. Not a better room. A room that means something.

The one we are still watching

Fairbnb.coop deserves a mention, with a caveat.

It is a cooperative platform built on a straightforward premise: half the commission goes to fund community projects in the city where you stayed. So the money the middle man takes goes back into the neighborhood instead of out of it. It is an honest attempt to build the thing Airbnb once claimed to be.

We are not going to tell you it is ready to plan a trip around. The honest problem is that there are not enough listings yet, and a platform with a beautiful model and nothing to book on it does not help you get to bed on a Tuesday.

But we would like that to change, and platforms grow when people use them. So: check it. If it has what you need, take it. That is roughly how a better option becomes a real one.

The short version

Search wherever you like. Pay the hotel, not the app.

Call them. They speak English. It is a two-minute phone call and it is the single easiest ethical upgrade available to a traveler, and it will very likely get you a better room.

What's your best direct-booking story? The upgrade you got, the rate they matched, the night they found you a room that wasn't on any site. Or tell us the one that went wrong. We want both.