How far ahead to reserve lodging in Switzerland?
A traveler is planning a two-week trip to Switzerland in July next year and is surprised by the early lodging bookings. They want to know if it's common for visitors to reserve accommodations nine or ten months in advance. Since their flights are booked, they're considering making room reservations now.
- Consider booking your accommodations now, especially if you find flexible cancellation policies.
- Look into booking hotels directly, as they often provide better rates and service than online aggregators.
- If you don’t find availability on one site like booking.com, check other options, as hotels release rooms to different platforms.
AI-generated summary-
I am planning to travel to Switzerland for about two weeks in July next year. As I was looking at lodging options, booking.com, Airbnb etc. I was surprised to see that there are places that are already booked for the time I will be there. I already made plane reservations as I found a deal I didn’t think I’d beat between now and next summer, so I know my dates and I could probably plan the whole trip out now. Do most people make lodging reservations nine or ten months out from a summer trip to Switzerland? For my last few trips I started planning and reserving in January or February.
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Hi JackDuggan and welcome to MySwissAlps!
Some people return to the same hotel or lodge year after year and book their room for next year at time of check out this year. I would be surprised that any hotel is totally sold out for July already.
Do note, that hotels only release a set number of rooms to each booking aggregator so if booking. com has no rooms, other companies may still have rooms available. Hotelscombined.com for example.
If your flights are booked and your dates are set then I’d go ahead and feel free to book rooms now (especially if you aren’t booking non-refundable rooms).
I’m sure you’ll find rooms available in January though if you want to wait.
Hi Jack,
In case you didn’t already, you can browse our manually selected hotels here: http://www.myswissalps.com/ho tels.
Hi Jack,
I am going in August 2019 & I have already booked all my rooms. Direct booking is bit less as compared to any hotels booking portal.
I second jatinsmehta. It’s always worth contacting hotels direct as they can usually match and often beat the prices of the agencies. I also have a theory, born out in practice, that direct bookers are treated better by the hotels: better rooms; better seats in the restaurant; better service from reception.
Swiss hotels also have quite late cancellation deadlines without penalty. Sometimes they’ll take a card number as deposit but sometimes not even that. Direct bookers are trusted too.
Andrew
Thank you very much for the replies and advice. I, too, try to book directly; often after finding dates and prices from consolidator web sites.
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