Since Mary and I are certainly taking our Cocker Spaniel “Bella” on our SW trip, we have to find “pet-friendly” hotels/motels along the route. This pretty much eliminates the high-end establishments. The way we’ve been doing this is to use Google and just enter “hotels, motels, ‘pet-friendly’, and the location, e.g., Moab UT or Buffalo, TX. This has been OK provided you mostly avoid the “Cheap Hotel Finder!” sites that crop up at the top of the results. These sites have no idea if a hotel is pet-friendly or not and of course they do everything in their power to keep the actual contact info for the motel/hotel out of your hands.
For example, you know “Priceline.com”, that site that advertises so heavily on TV? The one with William Shatner? They popped up on a search and said they would find us pet-friendly hotels. So I went to one of their listed motels which said it’s prices were about $80 but on selection the rooms actually available were $130 for a King no-smoking. OK, I figure the premium is for the dog and I sign up. But then, thinking better of this, I figure I better check and (after much research) found the phone # of the hotel.
No, they are NOT very pet-friendly: they have a “a few” rooms in which they allow pets but the one I have reserved is not one of them. AND I can’t cancel my reservation then and there, I have to go BACK to Priceline to cancel the reservation—and apparently I have to call them. I find the customer service number for Priceline and of course I get a roboreceptionist and get to (a) listen to their advertisement (b) key in data working through the options; at one point they try to get you to go to the web to cancel (an option that for some reason wasn’t obvious when I had returned to the site), I persist and finally get a live person who was courteous and cancelled the reservation for a full refund—not always the case, apparently.
Bottom line: look carefully at the cancellation rules for these motel finder sites.
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