You’ve all seen the adverts; the web is now saturated with sites offering you the best of the best deals when booking hotels, from fancy to bargain basement!

When I started planning my Europe trip, one in particular stood out for me, and that was Booking.com. The ad shows people becoming more and more awesome having booked their hotels through the site. Booking.com? Booking.YEAh! Well I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

Because my trip was going to be super flexible, I started by only booking my first night in France. I entered where I was going, and let the site take me from there; it ranked the search options by popularity, made suggestions on nearby places that might be cheaper, and had detailed information on each hotel from parking to check out times. I was genuinely amazed with how easy it was, and best for me was that I was getting great prices. There are daily deals, no booking fees, and with most places, you don’t pay a penny until you check in! Cancellation fees vary, but its normally free to cancel your reservation, so long as you do it in a timely manner.

I booked the majority of my hotels through Booking.com, but because its such a popular site, some places book up really quick, and where I was booking mainly last minute, in one or two places there was nowhere in my price range, so I had to look elsewhere.

Booking.com made my travels really straight-foward, and the app was just as easy as doing it online!

When I did have to look elsewhere, I turned to hotelscombined.co.uk. This site compares all the travel comparison sites, including Booking.com, Trivago, Lastminute.com etc, as well as hotel groups like Best Western and Marriott. Once you put in your travel details, it not only brings up all the available hotels, but also all the prices from all the sites, highlighting the best deal. Once you’ve chosen the deal, it directs you to the site offering the deal, and you book through them. In a few cases, it told me Booking.com had the best deals, so I went back to them.

One thing I will say about Hotels Combined is that sometimes it took me to foreign booking sites, which were obviously in a different language, and I didn’t feel comfortable booking through them, so at times I decided to pay a little extra to book through a more familiar site.

So that’s how I booked all my hotels on my trip, and I must have done something right, because I didn’t pay more than €60 to stay anywhere! Sure, I did stay in some cheapy little places, but some places were really great value for money, and honestly, if there was a bed and a hot shower, I was pretty content!

Do you have any favourite booking sites?