Booking a hotel room is a little like buying a big-screen television. If you don't do your homework beforehand to find the best combination of features, quality, and price, you're likely to feel burned when you find out after buying it that another store had a better TV for less money. Getting burned with a hotel room is arguably worse because not only do you have to live there, the better deals are staring you right in the face, because they're probably the next hotel over. To avoid this situation, use some of the following tips on how best to book a hotel room.

Before Booking

To book a hotel room with the best chance of satisfying your wallet and your needs, you'll spend almost all of your time searching for the right place. To maximize these efforts you should take advantage of internet travel sites, consumer reviews, and online travel company. Follow these steps and you should be in good shape:

• Browse travel websites. Many trips and hotel bookings are now purchased through commercial websites such as engidatravel.com. Be sure to shop around sites for the best deal and don't forget to visit the hotel website itself. Individual hotel websites often have deals that don't appear on commercial sites. And be sure to read reviews of the hotel on these commercial booking sites.
• Take a look at cancellation policies. If you do book on a commercial website, be sure to research their cancellation policy. While most sites have stopped charging steep cancellation fees (sometimes the entire cost of the booking), you need to make sure that you can book on the site and cancel without a fee the hotel reservation if you have to.
• Read the reviews. Check out consumer review sites like TripAdvisor.com, which gathers and aggregates reviews of hotels by former patrons. TripAdvisor.com is a good resource because it organizes reviews by the type of stay (e.g., couples, business trip, young travelers, etc.) so that you can search for people most like yourself and see what they had to say about the hotel. Often, the reviews will speak to whatever attributes you're looking for in a hotel and you can make better decisions based upon them.
• Dig deeper on deals that are too good to be true. If a deal seems substantially lower than surrounding hotels, check to make sure the hotel isn't being renovated or there's not another reason for the low price (e.g., it's in a high crime area or is very old and run down).
• Look up the location. If you have a target geographic area, punch in the address into Google maps. You can zoom in to see exactly where it is as well as the surrounding area (the map will tell you surrounding stores, restaurants, etc.), and you can take advantage of Google's street view feature to see exactly what your hotel and surround area look like.
• Contact an online travel agent for exotic or remote destinations. If your trip involves a more exotic or remote location, you should probably consult a travel agent who knows the area, the culture, and the businesses in the area