As getting to Bulgaria is extremely easy for those of use fortunate enough to be living in Bucharest, a lot of the short gettaways I have been on included a place in Bulgaria. Their lovely beaches when I was in mood for a few relaxing days spent sunbathing and diving into the Black Sea, and Veliko Turnovo when I was in the mood for a mountain top sceneray.

Every time I go to Veliko Tarnovo, I stay at Hotel Concorde. I felt so great the first time I stayed there, I just did not feel the need to try another one! Only a few minutes away from the colorful center with the town hall, purring bikes, great looking cars and delicious ice-cream that I never seem to have enough of, Hotel Concorde is a chic and small venue, with only 18 rooms, all extremely big and all looking chic, a restaurant, a bar on the top floor where you can enjoy an amazing view, conference rooms and a small and intimate breakfast room.

If you’re like me and just can’t breathe without an Internet connection, don’t worry, they have both wireless and wired Internet, all free, but the wireless might play a few tricks from you if you stray from the lobby.

The rooms, especially the three VIP ones, are perfect for romantic gettaway. Bold colors, sparkling wine, great decorations and a jacuzzi, let’s just say it’s enough to keep you inside for a long time! If you get hungry, you can go downstairs to the hotel restaurant or take a 5 to 10 minutes walk and try out one of the many restaurants in Veliko. Main street tarraces, hidden treasures on narrow streets with artisans seeling souvenirs, wherever you choose to eat the portions are huge! Make sure to ignore anyone else eating around you, allowing yourself to get distracted by what they are having usually leads to ordering way too much!

Hotel Concorde has great personnel! They are friendly, they all speak English and they are always doing their best to help. So are the hotel partners – we’ve enjoyed a great chat with the guy who takes hotel guests on helicopter tours of the city!

VIP Room - Hotel Concorde

Try to avoid dropping in without a reservation, especially during summer! You might get lucky, but it’s safer to book at least a week in advance!

Luxury room - Hotel Concorde

P.S. The room photos I chose are of the ones I actually stayed in and I can wholeheartedly say that, in real life, they look better than the pictures.

As you have probably guessed by now, I am all for taking charge of your vacation and planning it just as you want it to be. Being able to do it requires a few things: good knowledge of what’s available where you’re going, from hotels to places to visit to good restaurants, reliable advice from people who have been there before and a well thought plan that allows you to both experience everything you want, rest and have fun.

The new public beta release of social trip planner Stay.com gives you all that information: spots to check out on 50 major cities around the world, recommended guides created by Stay’s travel experts, a community to discuss your trip and to share your advice with, personalized travel guides you create from scratch with all the relevant data you need, from opening hours to maps and pictures of the place.

You can use Stay.com as your planning advisor: research hotel rates, book your stay online, then decide how to better fill your time at the destination of choice. To get a better idea of what you can get, here’s an example of a featured city, San Francisco. You can search through the tourist attractions yourself and use the available templates or start with one of their featured guides submitted by Stay members: one for active travelers, one for those traveling with kids and needing to entertain them, or maybe a special one featuring the San Francisco bay area is better for you.

All in all, Stay.com is a great and much needed tool for those taking the DIY approach to travel planning. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did when reviewing the services they provide Oh, and when you start using them, please let me know what you think!

More info on TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb or PRWeb.

All major online booking sites ask their customers to post reviews of the hotels they have stayed in. It’s a great way to have them briefly share their experience and help other customers have a clearer picture of the hotel they will be staying at. But these reviews are quite subjective and you always need to keep that in mind when you read through them. And always stop and think for yourself and decide if things said actually make sense. Here are a few aspects you should keep in mind when reading such reviews:

Review date – Old reviews (two-three years old) are not as significant. Try to compare them against newer ones. Other than being more accurate, you will also see the evolution of the hotel. Most of them get better and better over time.

Age and preferences of other travelers – If you’re a mature couple, what’s important for you might not be the same as what makes a young couple or solo traveler tick. Read all reviews but pay extra attention to those written by people who seem closest to your manner of thinking.

The general tone of the review – if something pisses people off, they tend to be a lot harsher with all other aspects related to a hotel. If the personnel is a little oblivious, they might also say the room was not that nice or that clean. They also mention what bothered them. To be able to tell if they are right or not, compare their take with other reviews where there was no trigger for anger or disappointment.

And finally, always compare reviews against what you know! And I have an example here. One day I was checking the reviews for a Turkish hotel I had stayed in for three weeks. And I bumped into this review complaining that if you paid in a different currency than Turkish Lira, the hotel had a ridiculous exchange rate. I started thinking. I remembered comparing the exchange rate of the hotel with that of the local exchange offices. Sure, there was a difference, but not a huge one!

As it happens to most hotels, it’s better to change smaller amounts and wait until you get to the exchange office. But the man in question had paid with a card and noticed a big difference between his calculations and what his bank had charged him. Now, the POS belongs to the hotel, but the commissions are those practiced by the Turkish bank and that in the card owner’s country and exchange rates are imposed by used card types (Visa and MasterCard establish and enforce exchange rates for international card payments). Not that of the hotel! So his recommendation to pay in cash for your stay was smart, but him blaming the hotel was not based on facts.

What other aspects do you think should be taken into account when reading such reviews?

Nowadays, you can find everything online: hotels, cheap flights, information on what to do in any corner of the world. With agencies and travel shoppers moving online, what’s really happening behind the myths? Are young travellers really shopping online only? Are travelers really moving back offline? Here’s an interesting piece on myths and the statistics contradicting them. Enjoy!

All my friends know I’m a Booking.com fan! I preach about it quite a lot. And although I put my love affair to test every chance I get by comparing destinations and prices, Booking.com is always my number one. I’ve booked hotels in Istanbul, Trier, Oludeniz, and the Golden Sands through them and they never disappointed me. So I decided I could whole heartedly recommend them.

That is why, soon after starting my very own travel blog, I also applied for their affiliate program and got in! So you’ll see a whole lot of them in my links and banners. But no matter how big of a fan I am, I promise to keep checking up on them and make sure you get access to the best offers out there.

And to prove I’m not kidding about being their hard core fan, here’s a photo I just had to take last summer in Amsterdam featuring my visit to…their headquarters (or one of he buildings they have offices in). I never went in. Will do so next time.

In case you were wondering, all the reviews I write are for hotels I’ve been to and I’d like to keep it that way. Writing about hotels one has never set foot into seems a little weird to me.

• Keep mixing the travel spell recipes!
• Love,
• The Travel Wizard

If travels are you passion, then you might like to think you’d recognize places from the photos you see of them. Even if you haven’t visited all major cities around the world yet, you definitely have plans to, so you’ve done your research and list of places to see.

If you think you’ve got that travel mojo and would like to put it’s sharpness and quickness to a test, what better way than Stay.com’s “Guess the City” contest? You have to guess 10 cities in a limited amount of time after seeing a collage of distinctive tourist attractions.

Besides being extremely addictive, the game comes with prizes aimed to please the travel addicts. Free one week hotel stays in major cities around the world. Stay.com states the contest is open to players from all over the world, but they haven’t yet disclosed the list of cities they came up with. Nor did they mention if you get to choose or they pick the city for you. It will all be a big surprise for everybody.

One more thing, don’t fear the competition. Yes, you give your friends a chance to win by telling them all about the game, but you get points for doing it, so the threat and the karma boost are leveraged.

The contest ends on July 15. So come out and play until then and let me know what you think of the game. I for one have played it dozens of times and I can barely make myself stop playing Hope you have as much fun as I’ve had.

There are dozens of hotel booking sites available online. Some are general, and you can find a hotel in every country of the world, some are region specific, built around a continent or a larger region and some are country specific. As you see, your options are unlimited, you can search and find the best deal ever. But how to choose wisely every time? Well, there are a few tricks to that.

I for one have started booking my vacations online about three years ago. It started with a sort of an accident: some friends were planning a vacation and used such a site to book our stay. I loved the simple process, the hotel, the fact that we had no major issues with the reservation. I have to admit I was a bit worried, but it all turned out perfectly.

What online booking sites are best at is putting you in charge of your holiday. You’ve already drawn up a budget, you know how much you’ll spent on transportation, sightseeing and food and now you have an amount of money to spend on a hotel. Where to book your stay? And what to keep your eyes open for?

First Ingredient: Research

You should start by selecting a few online booking sites to choose from. You can find online reviews and you can ask friends to recommend some. Do a quick search and work on trial and error.

Remember one thing though! Reviews of booking sites are not always about the best ones. They are sometimes about the newest challengers, so combine them with other resources in your research.

Second Ingredient: Setting up the right criteria

As you might have guessed, the cheapest deal is not the only thing you should look for. You should also keep an eye on what’s included in the room price, how far it is from your visiting objectives, how hard will it be to find it. Also, the price of not included services is important! If what you save on the room is spent on parking, air conditioning or other such services, it’s not the best deal!

Third Ingredient: Selecting a Couple of Great Sites

When you plan your own vacation, research and planning tend to get a little time consuming. So you need a list of top 2 or 3 sites to compare every time you need to find your hotel accommodation. For example, pick one with the most possible destinations, one that also has hostels or apartment rentals and one specific to an area you most frequently choose for your trips.

Third Ingredient: Keep an Eye on New Sites

New hotel booking sites are launched quite often. You should stay updated and make sure to check out the launch contests, special offers and new destinations. I for one have one favorite booking site, but always compare it with new kids on the block. In some areas, they are better, in others, my long lasting love still rules

Your spell is now ready! Stir all ingredients and say the magic words: I’m going on an amazing trip and I’m the one who organized it! All you have to do now is show up and enjoy every second

Your master in travel spells,

The Travel Wizard