My travel experience!
Travelling to places gets a lot of us excited irrespective of the purpose of travel. People travelling for work reach the destinations at odd hours or have return journey booked at odd hours, travellers hopping cities tend to reach late in the night or early in the morning. All of these people have been plagued with this issue of booking room for 4-6 hours that they have to spend before moving on.
In one of my recent travel experiences, I was travelling from Shimla to Delhi after a long trip in the Himalayas. I was supposed to reach the city by 8:00pm but ended reaching only at 11:00pm which complicated my accommodation arrangements as I had planned to figure out my stay after reaching Delhi, realized later that it was a very stupid decision. There were multiple factors driving that decision –
- My flight to Bengaluru was scheduled to leave 6:00am in the morning which meant that I had to leave my room by 3:00am for the airport.
- Uncertainty in the travel plans from Shimla as I wasn’t sure of the time that I would be able to reach Shimla.
- Extremely expensive stay options just for 7 hours stay.
I had decided to reach Delhi and negotiate with the hotel directly to accommodate my booking at a lower cost as I was going to utilize the room only for 7 hours (which turned out to be only 4 hours because of the delay). Now, I was going door to door at 11 pm in Delhi closer to the airport that could help me with a bed for 4 hours before I could head out. I had never been so angry and disappointed as that day for so many reasons –
- The hotels were charging exorbitant prices for 4 hours of stay for the rooms that are actually empty and will be vacated without affecting their inventory.
- Visiting multiple hotels and getting rejected at late hours stating hotel policies which would not let them book me for just 4 hours.
- The extremely tiring journey which had drained my energy and insensitive climate conditions.
Now, I was really exhausted and wasn’t exactly in the position to negotiate with limited options to go to, I ended up paying a hefty sum to crash for 4 hours. After interacting with a lot of people who travel, I realized that this is a widespread issue and always kept wondering as to why is the problem not addressed. Problem statements are simple –
- Book the room by slots where you can choose the number of hours of stay.
- Pay for the slot booked and not the entire day.
- Have a hassle-free platform to do it.
After doing my research, I realized that there are quite a few companies providing slot-based booking of hotels. I came across this website, bookbyslot.com which provides the exact same service that listed down a problem statement. Amazing inventory, smooth platform, provides slot-based booking for as low as 4 hours stay, and reasonable price. I wish I had known about the platform when I was in Delhi and I had some amazing options to stay near the airport at almost half the price that I paid. I am really glad that there are people looking at real travel problems.
Whenever I am travelling next, bookyslot.com is the website that I will visit and check if I have better options to stay.