The most useful list is the 100 "Best Value" hotels around the world, which is based on
TripAdvisor findings and published in Budget Travel, the nation's leading budget travel magazine. For each hotel, the Best Value list includes its numerical score (on a scale of one to 100), contact information, price per night (as reported by TripAdvisor contributors), and a brief contributor comment. Here are some highlights, but I urge you to visit the complete set of lists.Advertisement
The majority of Best Value prices are in the $150 to $225 per night range—not exactly my idea of budget, but at least well under the rates on most other best-of lists.
The list includes only six hotels with rates of $100 or less: The Steigenberger Nile Palace, Luxor Egypt, $100; the Sheraton West Des Moines Hotel, $100; the Hilton, Kuching, Malaysia, $72; the Crowne Plaza Hotel Riverside, Kuching Malaysia, $67; the Taba Heights Marriott Beach Resort, Taba, Egypt, $80; and the Villa Caletas, Jaco, Costa Rica, $100.
The highest Best Value rates, at $240 to $250, were at the Iberostar Bavaro, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic; Andel's Hotel Prague; the Grand Oasis Meridien, Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic; the InterContinental Berlin; the Iberostar Dominicana, Punta Cana; and the Grand Bahia Principe Samana, Samana, Dominican Republic.
Not surprisingly, most low-priced U.S. hotels on the list are suburban motels.
The best European rates are generally in the East: Out of the 100 listed hotels, five are in Budapest and three are in Warsaw.
Hotels with rates under $150 are concentrated in Asia, especially in Malaysia and Thailand.
You won't find any Best Value hotels listed for New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, or other notoriously expensive cities, although a couple of Tokyo hotels make the list at the top end of the price range.
For convenience in trip planning, the list is cross-referenced by region.
On TripAdvisor's own site, you can register and download a set of 39 diverse best lists in PDF format. It provides individual best lists in 10 categories: luxury, hidden gems, pools, for families, bargains, inns and B&Bs, romance, service, best brand, and all-inclusives, with two or more regional 10-best breakouts within most of those categories. (Spoiler: The best brand is Four Seasons.) Another interesting sub-list shows the best hotel in the world's 25 most popular visitor destinations. Several hotels covered in TripAdvisor's compilations are in Cuba, a testament to international participation among the TripAdvisor contributors.
Unfortunately, this listing shows only hotel names and locations, with no price information—and no links to the detailed information in the TripAdvisor database. You have to check separately for those details. Still, it's a great place to start your hotel search for just about any kind of trip imaginable.
Overall, I've seen a disagreement among prominent travel mavens about the relative merits of hotel reviews generated by ordinary travelers, such as you get on TripAdvisor and a few other websites, as against reviews prepared by professional writers, as you typically find in guidebooks. The big risk with reviews generated by the public is that hotel owners and managers could prepare rave notices about their own properties and load them up on the sites. As I look at TripAdvisor, however, I don't see that as a major problem, and TripAdvisor (and several similar sites) say they're able to detect (and reject) any such submissions. On balance, I'm convinced that user-generated reviews can be of great help in selecting hotels.
source:http://www.smartertravel.com/travel-advice/best-hotels-for-budget-travelers.html?id=2508254
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