How to Find the Cheapest Hotel Rooms

The rooms at the Omni National Resort in Tucson are larger than most Paris apartments!  This room also has a king-size bed, a desk area, two vanities, separate tub and shower areas, a walk-in closet and a patio.

Seth Kugel, frugal travel writer for the New York Times, wrote a helpful article recently about a seven-step process to find the cheapest hotel room.  The piece is thorough and maximizes the use of multiple websites, Hotels.com, Hipmunk, and so on, to obtain the best possible price.  Still, I think he overlooked two sources that are extraordinarily helpful.

Cheap Sleeps

Fort Payne, Alabama

Want a room for less than $55 a night?  Then look for those old motels with names like Dew Drop Inn or Three Roses Bed and Breakfast.

I wrote about these colorful accommodations a few weeks ago, and now Seth Kugel, frugal travel writer for The New York Times, has discovered them, too. On a recent trip through the heartland of America, he enjoyed staying at these roadside motels, the mom and pop places that have sometimes been in the same family for fifty years.

He found that, "... the old roadside motel has gotten an upgrade. Though they are still decidedly one-star, my experience indicated travelers can expect flat-screen televisions, free Wi-Fi and beds that are perfectly comfortable."

I'm sure he'd agree with me that most of these places also have character, a trait missing in most of today's motel chains.

If you'd like more details about Kugel's experiences and information about how to find these places, read Kugel's article, "Finding the Right Roadside Rooms," here.   Check my blog post for additional resources.