Monday, July 13, 2015

Ten Budget Hotels in Barcelona below 100 Euros per night

Both business and leisure travelers are looking for more ways to save their money on upcoming travel to Barcelona and one of the best way to do that is to stay in a budget hotel in Barcelona to cut cost on expensive hotel room prices. As a budget conscious travel blog, we are happy to released a list of 10 Barcelona budget hotels with below EUR 100 per night room rates. These Barcelona budget hotels have also collected the best customer reviews and many are located near the city center and/or within walking proximity to metro stations and with their affordable room rates are a boon to both business and leisure travelers.

Although Barcelona hotels are known to be expensive, travelers can take relief that there are still cheap hotels to be found in Barcelona.

#1 – Casa Gracia Barcelona Hostel
Passeig de Gracia, 116, Gràcia, 08008 Barcelona

Just metres from Avinguda Diagonal and within 300 metres of Diagonal Metro Station, Casa Gràcia is a modern hostel at the top of Barcelona’s Passeig de Gràcia, 300 metres from Gaudí’s La Pedrera. The location and friendly atmosphere is complemented by the beautiful building and spacious rooms. Nightly rates in Casa Gracia Barcelona Hostel start from 44 Euros per night.

#2 - U232 Hotel
Comte d’Urgell, 232, L’Eixample, 08036 Barcelona

Located in L’Eixample, U232 Hotel offers stylish, air-conditioned rooms with flat-screen TV and free Wi-Fi and a location just 150 meters away from Hospital Clinic Metro Station. Spacious rooms, comfortable beds and luxurious atmosphere adds up quite well. Room rates in U232 Hotel start from 68 Euros per night.

#3 - Hotel Denit Barcelona
Estruc, 24-26, Ciutat Vella, 08002 Barcelona

Located in central Gothic Quarter close to Plaza Catalunya Square and the Ramblas, Hotel Denit Barcelona has a great location which is walking distancefrom major tourist attractions. The quiet, clean and comfortable rooms, free WIFI and service offers a very acceptable price-to-value ratio. Room rates in Hotel Denit Barcelona start from 101 Euros per night.

#4 - Condado Hotel Barcelona
Aribau, 201, Sarrià-St. Gervasi, 08021 Barcelona

200 metres from Barcelona’s Diagonal Avenue, and a 10-minute walk from Diagonal Metro Station, Condado Hotel Barcelona offers a very good location in addition to lovely rooms, nice facilities and modern-helpful staff. Room rates in Condado Hotel Barcelona start from 82 Euros per night.

#5 - Aparthotel Acacia
Comte d’Urgell, 194, L’Eixample, 08036 Barcelona

Acacia Suite is located in Barcelona’s Eixample district. It is just 50 metres from Hospital Clinic Metro Station and offers a comfortable and value for money stay in Barcelona. Room rates in Aparthotel Acacia start from 87 Euros per night.

Sagrada Familia by night
#6- H10 Itaca Hotel
Avenida Roma, 22-30, L’Eixample, 08015 Barcelona

10 minutes’ walk of Sants Train Station, the AVE High-Speed Railway, Plaza España and the FIRA Exhibition Centre, H10 Itaca Hotel is slightly out of town but Metro makes everywhere accessible. H10 Itaca Hotel offers good sized room and bathroom for 99++ Euros per night.

#7 - Four Points by Sheraton Barcelona Diagonal
Diagonal, 161, Sant Martí, 08018 Barcelona

Located 350 metres from Glòries Shopping Centre, in the modern 22th district of Barcelona, Four Points by Sheraton Barcelona Diagonal has easy access to city center thanks to public transportation (ten minutes walking to Glories Metro station) and 20 minutes walking distance away from Sagrada Familia. Room rates in Four Points by Sheraton Barcelona Diagonal start from 77 Euros per night.

#8 - Aparthotel Bonanova
Bisbe Sivilla, 7, Sarrià-St. Gervasi, 08022 Barcelona

If you want to experience the local life in Barcelona instead of the tourist character of city center, these apartments located in the residential neighbourhood of Sarrià-Sant Gervasi (10 minutes from Plaça Catalunya) will work for you. The metro is near so accessing tourist attractions is not a problem. Room rates in Aparthotel Bonanova start from 70 Euros per night.

#9 - Hesperia Presidente
Avenida Diagonal, 570, Sarrià-St. Gervasi, 08021 Barcelona

10 minutes walk away from Diagonal Metro Station, Hesperia Presidente is yet another Barcelona hotel offering budget stay with a very accessible location. You can reach Gaudi’s La Pedrera and fashionable Passeig de Gracia by a short, 15 minutes walk. All in all, the hotel is just great value for money. Room rates in Hesperia Presidente start from 70 Euros per night.

#10 - Hotel Barcelona Princess
Avenida Diagonal, 1, Sant Martí, 08019 Barcelona

4-Star Hotel Barcelona Princess is 10-minute walk from the beach in the Barcelona’s Forum area. The pools, Desigual Bar on 23rd floor, an excellent Sky Gym on 3rd floor and free mini bar complements nice and clean rooms. Room rates in Hotel Barcelona Princess start from 83 Euros per night.

Ok, we know this is a list of “below 100 Euros per night” hotels but we cannot exclude this one below even if the room rates are around 120 Euros per night. So this is our bonus hotel:

#10+1 - Hostal L’ Antic Espai Barcelona

This 2 star hostel in Barcelona has a great decor and atmosphere with its old, elegant and artisan furniture. The lovely outdoor terrace with plants and birds is great for breakfast or a drink and the hotel is in the centre of Barcelona where almost everything is within walking distance. Amazing breakfast and fantastic staff are also big pluses here. Room rates in Hostal L’ Antic Espai Barcelona are 120 Euros per night.

If you want an introduction to Barcelona’s neighborhoods, take a look at our post titled Where to stay in Barcelona?

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Batumi Night Life

Batumi is a major tourism city in Georgia and Caucasus Region known for its beaches, casinos and colorful night life. This small seaside city’s tourism life revolves around a long street named “Bulvar” near the beach. In the morning, Bulvar is full of families and kids and in the night young couples and party animals fill the space. There are nice restaurants and bars a little inside the beach and this street, which was built in 1881, offers a very nice Black Sea seaside experience.

For most men traveling to Batumi, Batumi means night life and Batumi night life means 2 things: gambling and sex. In the Black Sea region of Turkey, from where most Turkish “tourists” hail from (since 2011 Turks can enter Batumi without passport), Batumi is known as Sin City and because most men from Turkey comes for commercial sex and gambling, they are not respected in Batumi so much.

These “tourists”, who are mostly there for “business” if you buy it, are mostly coming for casinos which are not legal in Turkey. Batumi is also known as The Las Vegas of Black Sea and Turks are not the only ones coming there to gambling. According to local sources, 70% of the tourists are coming to Batumi for gambling and half of this crowd comes from Turkey.

Some popular casinos in Batumi are Sheraton Peace Casino, Casino Iveria, Radisson Blue and Grand Palace Intourist Casino.

The second most popular “attraction” for Turkish tourists in Batumi is sex tourism. Discos and night clubs are full of sex workers and they are now becoming number one reason Turkish men travel to Batumi. The discos, night clubs and the girls are not comparable to the ones you will find in Istanbul but Istanbul is much far away to Rize and Trabzon compared to Batumi.

For these reasons, Batumi is increasingly becoming a big problem for families in Turkey. Many men lose a lot of money to casinos and sex workers there and at the end ruins their family life.

Batumi Night Life - Sheraton Batumi Hotel
Sheraton Batumi Hotel also houses one of the most popular casinos in Batumi, Sheraton Peace Casino.

Where to stay in Batumi?

Thanks to its increasing popularity among well heeled visitors from Russia, Turkey, Ukraine and Central Asia, Batumi hotel stock is steadily increasing. The emphasis is on luxury hotels and casinos but you can also find cheap hotels in Batumi. The hotel rooms prices in Batumi hotels will also be based on the proximity of the establishment to the beach, neighbourhood as well as service standards. If you are looking for a hotel in Batumi you can take a look at Batumi Hotels page.

How to get to Batumi?

Georgian Airways operates flights to Batumi from Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kiev-Boryspil, Moscow-Domodedovo, Odessa and Tbilisi. Other than these flights, there are flights to Batumi operated by Aerosvit (from Kiev-Boryspil), Belavia (from Minsk), Turkish Airlines (from Istanbul-Atatürk) and Pegasus Airlines (from Istanbul-Sabiha Gökçen).

How to find cheap hotel rooms?

One of the most expensive item you purchase in your holiday is your hotel. You have many ways to save on this cost but it is not easy to find the optimum solution : staying in a place as good as possible while paying as less as possible. Even if your travel budget can land you in expensive and luxury hotels or you have already decided in which hotel you would stay, you would still want to find the cheapest of the rooms in these hotels or cheapest of the same room.

You may ask "what do you mean by cheapest of the same room". Surprisingly, the same type of rooms in the same hotels at the same dates are usually sold with different prices through different channels. The rack rate (full price at which rooms are sold to customers before discounts and usually the price at reception) are much higher than what you can find online. Don't underestimate the difference. I know a hotel in Singapore's Chinatown whose rack rate is 200 USD per night while the rooms for this budget hotel goes for 80 - 100 USD in online booking sites. But even the prices in online booking sites as well as discounted rates in some hotel's own web site are quite different.

An important factor effecting the room price is the negotiation power of the online booking site in the region. For example Agoda.com is traditionally powerful in Asia - Pacific region and they usually negotiate the best price in this region (and is also one of the best options to check first).

So if you are planning to book your hotel room online either you need to spend a considerable time to cross check prices on multiple web sites for multiple hotels or book a room and most probably pay more. Even if you do your time consuming cross - check you will probably miss out the prices on direct hotel sites (yes, occasionally these prices are better than aggregated booking sites).

The solution to this problem is simple. You can find cheap hotel rooms or the cheapest hotel rooms by using hotel meta-search engines. For example, hotelscombined. This web site is a meta-search engine which partners with all the most visited travel websites to build the world's largest hotel price comparison search engine.

Hotelscombined hotel price comparison search engine
Sample hotels combined search result. 

HotelsCombined.com is not an online travel or hotel reservation web site. It searches the travel websites such as booking.com, hotels.com, agoda.com,  in real-time to show travelers availability and the optimal hotel deal. You can then click directly through to partner websites to book. Its web site is served in 39 languages and 120 different currencies.

One of the most important feature of the web site is that it also aggregates data from hotel's own web site (for some hotels only). The direct web sites are usually overlooked by travelers in the expense of travel sites but they sometimes offer the best deal with significant discount.


Hotelscombined - Crowne Plaza Hotel Changi Airport Singapore
Sample search result for Crown Plaza Singapore Changi Airport hotel. Note that the hotelscombined has also searched the direct hotel deals from hotel's web site.