Riding through Eastern Europe
 

Hi!
I am planning a motorbike ride across Europe. I ant to start in Poland and end up in Greece for about a week, and then come back. I wanted to ride through the countries like Slovakia or Czechia, Bulgaria, Montengero etc to see some beautiful yet less known places. However, I have little idea about where to stop. Should I plan ahead and rent some rooms via AirBnB right away (I set off in October) or are there motels on the way that will be great for one night accommodation?
Thank you

Hello, and welcome to the HUBB community!

I've ridden my motorcycle through all of those countries, and never bothered to make a hotel reservation ahead of time. I just poke along until I decide I have travelled enough for one day (that usually happens between 16:00 and 19:00), then I start to look for a place to stay.

I've never ever had a problem finding a place to stay in over 300 nights of doing this in Europe. The worst thing that can happen is that you find yourself in a town that has some kind of festival going on, and you then have to ride another 20 or 30 km out of town to find a room somewhere else.

These days, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, I think it is very unlikely that you will find a festival going on.

I suggest you get a couple of smartphone apps that are used to find hotels. I use TripAdvisor & Booking.com (in that order of preference). I don't actually use these apps to book the hotel room, I just use them to find out what hotels exist near me (they all have a "find a place near me" feature that uses your smartphone's location to know where to look), then I look at the reviews for the place and I look to see what the price is.

I then go to the hotel in person and ask for a room. The price the hotel quotes at the front desk is almost always less than the price shown on the smartphone application. If it isn't, I just book the room on the smartphone while standing in the hotel lobby.

I doubt that you will find hotels to be full during your planned trip, but I do expect that you will find a fair number of hotels to be closed. The good thing about these smartphone booking apps is that if there is no price shown for a particular hotel, that usually indicates that the hotel is not open. Conversely, if you see a price quoted on the app, you can be confident that the place is open.

BUT: Before you go, do some very careful research about what countries will let you in, and what countries might impose a quarantine on you, or refuse you entry altogether. It is clear that the COVID infection rate is increasing in Europe, and you don't want to get stuck in a situation where you are in country X, and the next country on your path, country Y, won't let you in... then you find out that country Z, which you left when you entered country X, won't let you back in...

This is not a good time to be doing long-distance trips that cross half a dozen different countries, simply because you won't get any advance notice when countries decide to close their borders or impose quarantine requirements on new arrivals.

If you really, really want to get to Greece from Poland, consider routing Poland - Germany - Switzerland - Italy and then taking the ferry to Greece from either Ancona or Bari in Italy. That way, you only have 4 border crossings to worry about.

Michael

I would say that if you don't have any particular sights that you know you will want to see, then it's absolutely fine to just find accommodation as you go along. The tourist routes in all those places will be chock full of guesthouses, just ride to the next village and ask in the local tourist info in the rare case that signs are not plastered all over the main road.

That said, I like to plan out my trips, do some research on the best things to do along the route (including finding the squiggliest lines on Google Maps), and use that together with my comfortable daily range to book accommodation in advance. It may be the difference between overpaying for a mediocre tourist hotel, and riding a few miles out of town to a remote, reasonably priced and very cosy little homestay (with a proprietor who is very well versed in booking.com!).

Pre-booking also gives you the ease of mind and opportunity for experience in arriving early. Book a place within walking distance of somewhere known to be beautiful - and if you arrive early in the day, you will find it easy to park, change out of your moto gear, take a shower, and have a lovely stroll and a beer or two while there's still daylight.

Perhaps my best example of a day like that was when I started at the back end of the Grossglockner, rode across an Austrian pass into Northern Italy for a gelato breakfast (the shop had barely opened!), then went down some back roads into Slovenia, coming out at the south end of the Vrsic Pass - did that, stopped to stretch and buy a vignette at the village on the north terminus, then rode to a guesthouse I'd had pre-booked a couple of kilometers outside Lake Bled. I actually got there early enough that if I'd not had the accommodation, I would be seriously tempted to push onto Ljubljana - but instead I parked, put on my comfy soft shoes, and had a beautiful long walk all the way around the lake. Even made it up to the castle before they closed for the evening.

So there are definitely advantages to pre-booking!

The only thing I would add is always check the walk in hotel price against Hotels.com or Booking.com, on a couple of occasions I have found the on-line price to be half the walk in price, I have even bought a coffee and used the hotel's wifi to make the booking.

When I see that, I always tell them - and invariably they drop the price! Because remember, they also pay a fee to the website, so they get even less, so it's very much in their interest to give you a better price on the spot. In other words, talk to them :)

Has that happen quite a few times and sometimes the difference is considerable - like double. Unlike Grant’s experience I’ve often found the check in staff completely indifferent when you point it out so booking on line while standing at the counter has been the only option. Make sure your phone has enough charge to this though. We turned up at one hotel in the US only to find that our phones were flat. The receptionist refused a request to plug one in on the basis that the facilities were only for hotel residents.

I generally never make reservations, because I don't know in advance if in fact I'll want to stay in that particular town or hotel. If the riding is good, maybe I'll go further. If I get tired, or find a particularly nice town, I stop earlier. I find travelling any other way to be much less enjoyable.

I almost never have a problem finding a room, but have had difficulties on a couple of occasions (hello, Melbourne and Thessalonika!). I always found a spot eventually, but sometimes more expensive/in a worse location than I would have preferred. That said, I just returned from a roadtrip in the US and had difficulties finding campsites due to COVID-related issues (restrictions on lodging, closed campgrounds, lots of campers). Also, if you travel like this, I recommend trying to avoid tourist locations in peak season, could be more difficult.

Interesting - my experience has generally been the opposite: at least half the time, the walk-up price is less than the on-line price.

On a few occasions, when the on-line price has been lower than the walk-up price, the front desk staff have suggested, with genuine sincerity, that I try booking the lower price on line. Every single time this has happened, when I tried to book the advertised price on-line, suddenly that price was not available on the website... after going through the first few steps to do the booking, the website price suddenly inflated.

I have found booking.com to be the worst offender in this regard, which I why I prefer to use TripAdvisor to suss out hotel prices. TripAdvisor usually offers several different competing booking agencies to choose from, which means that TripAdvisor themselves have no incentive to low-ball a price.

Having said that, there have been a few occasions where a lower price is offered online, and when I have given the front desk the opportunity to match it (without me doing an on-line booking and the hotel having to pay a 15% commission), the employee at the front desk has been unable to match the price because "that rate isn't in the computer". In other words, the hotel management has not given the front desk clerk the discretion & authority to use common sense. When I encounter that problem, I usually go find a different hotel, not because of price issues, but because I've just seen a huge red flag saying "this place is poorly managed".

Michael

This is quite possibly not the case. Just like every other online aggregator (Uber, etc.), Booking.com spends a lot of money on advertising and incentives - meaning that on occasion, you will end up with an online price that is actually being *subsidized* by Booking.com. Not only are they not taking a cut on a particular booking, but the hotel may be getting more money than the customer is being charged - all for the nebulous goal of Booking.com capturing market share and driving out the competition (including the possibility of just showing up at the front desk).

If this seems incredible to you and you feel that this cannot possibly happen in real life, here's only one recent and amusingly told tale of online businesses operating in that way: https://themargins.substack.com/p/do...izza-arbitrage

Or maybe Booking.com has pre-purchased a large block of room-nights at the start of the season, and are re-selling those wholesale reservations to you at a tiny markup.

I can think of a couple more legitimate reasons for the front desk not being able to match or beat an online price. One is that the hotel is actually being *well* managed, and the management knows the likelyhood of filling up the rooms, and at what rates; the room that is not being given to you at a low rate may be kept back for, say, someone from the nightclub next door looking for a hotel room at 2am, and willing to pay full price - and the manager knows that is likely to happen.

Or perhaps the hotel has only prepared a particular number of rooms for the day, and even if they might technically have a vacancy, filling it may require calling out extra housekeeping staff the next morning - worth it at the walk-in rate, but a net loss at a discount rate.

Or perhaps - and I think this may be quite likely - the management has expressly forbidden the front desk from offering anything less than the desk price to walk-ins after a few too many of those cases ended up with the cash payment never quite making it into the hotel's books. ;)

One place I would definitely recommend to stay:
MotoCamp Bulgaria | motosapiens.org