If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I’m the type of person that plans everything down to the very last detail when I go on vacation. Many times, I’ll have hotels booked months in advance, a schedule mapped out for exactly what restaurants I’ll be frequenting, and I’ll have subway routes highlighted within an inch of their lives to minimize travel between the 32.4 tourist sites I’m going to visit.

Imagine my terror when, during a European backpacking vacation, my travel companion threw a wrench into our travel plans by eliminating two cities in favor of a cross-channel trip to London. London! The London. The one with high prices, even when you take the time to book in advance. That schedule deviation almost gave me a panic attack when I realized that what seemed to be every last budget hotel and hostel in the city were booked. But my partner was determined: we were going anyway.

When we arrived, we were greeted by what remains to this day to be my favorite travel surprise ever: expensive hotels that hadn’t reached 100% occupancy were offering deeply discounted rates. More that 50% discounted. As we de-trained representatives promised us excellent prices for beautiful rooms. Really beautiful rooms. In fact, we split our 7-day stay between two hotels, one three star and one four star, never once paying more for a night than we would have payed at a pre-booked hostel. That’s right, we stayed in a four star hotel for the price of a hostel.

Moral of the story? My travel advice to you is this: if you can stand the anxiety of not having a booking, throwing caution to the wind on your next vacation, do so. To begin, it adds to the adventure. But more importantly, your pocketbook probably won’t hurt very much for it and, if you’re as lucky as I was, your body and heart will thank you from beneath 600-threadcount sheets as you sip piping hot coffee that was brought straight to your door.