New and impressed customer of this site - my experience (laterooms.com)

Member Name: azana

Product:	laterooms.com
Date:	09/06/09 (81 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: does what it says

Disadvantages: could be far too tempting

These days I don't get to stay in hotels very often, so when I do I want it to be a bit of a treat and I want booking to be straight forward.

I had come across laterooms before when googling accomodation in France last year, and when late last Thursday I decided that it would be really nice to stay away on Friday night I thought I would give the site a try. I have to say that my use of late rooms was a total success and I have added it to my very select favourites list on this basis. If you are looking for a late room the site does exactly what it says in my experience.

Using the site:

The site covers late rooms in the UK and abroad, we used it for a stay in this country.

I found the search engine very simple to use, and actually for my needs far quicker than expedia which I have used extensively. You enter your destination, night, number of nights and number of people. For me the latter category was where the site stood out as being good.

In my particular circumstances finding a room or cottage can be tricky - I have 2 children and some places can't or won't accomodate smaller children. On this site you just enter "2 adults + 2 children" (it goes up to 3 children and then 5 people, 6 people, 7 people). You then can search for a room and the site retains that information for subsequent searches.

This is a boon for me personally as expedia drives me mad asking repeatedly for age of children and then displaying rooms with "exceeds maximum number of children". This site doesn't do that at all; the results are displayed clearly with price and availability for the various choices, and only rooms that can cater for you are offered.

Everything is in table form - you can see clearly the name of the places, and then there are a few columns showing the price for the next few nights and whether booked or not for your needs - simple and crystal clear with no need for endless scrolling and clicking.

If you are looking for a room for one person that option is also available, and you can also filter by price or special needs.

The default setting is a radius of 10 miles from wherever you have chosen, but this can be expanded further if you can't see the deal you are looking for.
In my particular circumstances I chose "Longleat" and had found somewhere suitable within 5 minutes, which was great as prior to this for this particular destination I had spent a couple of hours trying to find somewhere for that night with no success and rather a lot of waste of time emails to bed and breakfasts.


Making your choice, savings, and delivery:


When you find your room you select it, giver your details and a credit card purely to be used if you don't turn up - you pay the hotel directly.

Once I had found somewhere that looked suitable, if a bit more luxurious than the kind of place I would normally go for (bad week), I checked reviews on www.tripadvisor.co.uk. Now here is where my need to get a good deal has made me a bit cheeky in difficult times - I have to confess to phoning the hotel I found to see if they could match the deal found on laterooms so that I didn't have to necessarily register with the site (sorry laterooms).

The hotel I had selected would normally have been £285 for the night for a family room - the reasons why it would normally beyond by reach are self explanatory. I phoned the hotel, but they did not offer to match the deal of £165 so I decided to go ahead through late rooms. The hotel was a high end hotel in a country house, but there were cheaper options available, suffice to say that not being able to run to a family holiday this year we decided to treat ourselves.

I registered with the site, booked and confirmed and within 5 minutes had email confirmation. Everything ran extremely smoothly and the hotel, which is another review, was excellent.

When I got there I was on their system like any other guest, and might have felt smug about my £120 saving only it was still a major outlay and at least one of the other guests probably wasn't worried about money (lady with the £800 handbag, expensive car and ability to tut at the sight of well behaved children this is you). Suffice to say we really enjoyed staying somewhere that otherwise would have not been for us and the breakfast was the best I have eaten ever.

Aftercare:

Having registered I now have an account to keep track of any further bookings, savings, and can choose to have offers sent to me if I so wish. I also got a request via email for a review of the hotel to go on their database. Having looked at the site some more there are other options like "secret rooms" where you book a late deal in a 4*/5* hotel and then find which it is - for the brave only maybe. There are also cottages, city guides and latest savings.

Overall:

I was really impressed by this site, and found it professional, smooth and a good experience. I will definitely use it again and would be loathe to waste time trying to find somewhere via expedia again where, in my opinion, this site is much simpler and easier to use. The savings are good and I will definitely be using it again especially if we decide to go on an impromptu getaway to the coast or maybe in the future for a stay abroad, hopefully those times will come again! Highly recommended.

Summary: A great site that I found easy to use