A few years ago we featured a great little web companion for frequent flyers: seatguru.com (a handy way of searching the best and worst seats on just about every airplane model, to give you an additional leg up — or leg room — when you reserve your spot before you fly. Now, we’ve found an equally valuable service to insure that once you arrive, you might have the best room possible in the house.
Tripkick.com gives you the inside scoop on the rooms you really want (and which you want to avoid) in many major U.S. hotels…
Before you book (or as you are booking, or even after you’ve booked… but definitely before you arrive), bookMARK this site and use this as a quick information-is-power reference tool. It equips you with key little known facts about specific rooms within a hotel (the kind of information your travel agent won’t know and hotel agents will never tell you).
An example: you are planning a visit to the Ritz Carlton in South Beach, Miami (a favorite of ours). Look it up on Tripkick and you’ll first find a descriptive summary of the hotel (not merely copy lifted from the hotel’s website). However, scroll down to find the real value, in the details. Want to know which rooms are corners, and oversized? Tripkick helpfully tells you to request a room at this property ending in a number 10, 14 or 24. Continue to scroll and you will know which rooms have which kind of views, which have the best bathrooms, which are the most quiet… and which if any are rooms to avoid. (Would you know otherwise, until after you had finished tipping the bellman, that rooms ending in 43 are right above the valet parking, so better to avoid on the lower floors)? The Compare Rooms tab is particularly helpful to solidify your top choices.
If you have not already decided on a hotel, this site can be a great express lane to finding one that meets your preferred criteria, i.e. a “Trendy/Boutique” hotel with an ocean view… a “Creative/Eclectic” hotel that is pet-friendly; your query is met with recommendations, complemented by reader comments that are far easier to navigate than the tomes on Trip Advisor.
The only downside: we wish Tripkick had total hotel omniscience… right now it just covers major hotels in select U.S. cities. However, for all travelers, it’s worth taking a look at their Insider Tips. Thus sufficiently armed, chances are the days of winding up in the broom closet should be in the past.
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