My husband is traveling to Vermont on business in August, and we're going with him. We've already had our traveling-with-five-kids boot camp back in March when we drove to Tennessee to visit our families, but on that trip we didn't make any reservations ahead of time because we weren't sure how far we would get each day. (It took two days to drive to my parents' house in southern middle Tennessee, and two and a half days to drive back from my inlaws' in Memphis.) So I wasn't introduced to the difficulties involved in using the online hotel searches to book a room for two adults and more than two (or three) kids.
Orbitz and Expedia will not let you search specifically for suites or condos, and as far as I can tell, you can't restrict your searches for adjoining rooms either. On Orbitz, the search begins with "number of guests" and if you type in "7" for 1 room, you get an error message telling you that you need to search for two rooms. On Expedia, you can put in the number of children you have and it will search for you, but everything it pulled up came with the message "exceeds the max number of children per room."
Hotels.com does have a tab for "suites, condos, and bed and breakfast", but the site wasn't working last night and I wasn't able to see room rates and availability on any of my searches. If you are searching for a suite, you can only input a maximum of three children, however. (If you search for two rooms, you can divide the adults into one per room and put up to three kids in each room. But if you've got more than six kids -- say six kids and an infant, who might not even need a crib if you're co-sleeping -- you can't input your whole family to check for kids' discounts. Although I don't know if there's an upper limit to how much you can have discounted?)
Around midnight, I finally made it to Priceline.com. On Priceline, you can just search for a room. Or two or three. All kinds of rooms will pop up, and you can choose which ones best suit your family. It took me about fifteen minutes to find a room that would work ( a suite with 2 queen beds and a sleeper sofa, with the added bonus of a kitchenette) at a price that didn't take my pulse to dangerously high levels, when I had spent an hour and a half trying to find ways around the search restrictions of the other sites.
The one drawback to using Priceline is that I had to pay for my reservations in advance in order to get "the websaver special", and these reservations are not refundable. In general, making non-refundable reservations when small children are involved makes me nervous (especially after a particularly bad experience involving Branson, Missouri and a sick 16 month old daughter). But if you are able to commit without reservations (I don't try to make puns this bad -- really), then Priceline did seem to be the easiest online discount reservation to use for our larger than average family.
Recent Comments