Chase Trip information needed

[Rebecca Robinson]

Hey can anyone give me list of good hotels to stay at? I am starting to plan a chase trip sometime next year. I got three weeks of vacation coming and I plan on using it for to chase.

I should also put in here that if anyone needs a chase partner, I will be happy to split the cost of gas,etc.

 

[Jay McCoy]

To be honest its hard to plan ahead on certain hotel chains. Many times its what is available when you finally stop in a certain city. My team prefers Comfort Inns but that is usually reserverd for down days. When you have been chasing all day and finally stop for the night so have many chasers and people caught in the storms and hotels can fill up quickly. We try and use our OnStar to book ahead once we know a general area we will end up but that doesnt always work either.

Last years we stopped in Dodge City after a full days chase only to find nearly every room in town booked. We found 1 hotel with rooms left (as did quite a few chasers). It was not a good experience. Bad smells, Dirty rooms, crappy air conditioning and a roach infestation!! The bar of soap in the shower was used! still had hair on it from the previous user..yuk!!

Another big issue is Memorial weekend holiday makes getting rooms even harder. Also near the end of May is high school graduations that also tend to fill up hotles (family etc..)

The 1 big requirement we always try to find is it must have high speed internet!! That is unless there is nothing left but if we have a choice thats priority #1. #2 is clean!! Main thing is be flexible and be ready to take what you can get. There is no way to make reservations even a week out let alone months. Even day of you might end up way off from where you thought you would be.

 

[Dan Robinson]

Jay pretty much covered it. You can't plan in advance for hotels at all, until the day of. You'll never know where you'll be at the end of the day. If we have internet in the car, we'll reserve a room with hotels.com as soon as we have an idea of which town we'll be nearest to at the end of the day (usually as soon as the chase is over). You can usually save a lot of money that way and avoid the ritual of driving around towns at 2 and 3 AM trying to find a hotel with rooms. Many GPS programs have the hotel phone numbers listed, you can call ahead and reserve a room that way too.

Wifi is a big priority too. Usually someone in our group has cellular internet, so if we absolutely can't find wifi, we can at least get some data for the morning forecast on their laptop.

Our worst 'booked hotels' experience was after May 22, 2004 in Nebraska - our group ended up finally finding in a small hotel in Yates Center, Kansas at 4AM, after nearly 5 hours of searching for a hotel starting in northern KS. KU and KSU graduations were that weekend and every hotel within 150 miles of Lawrence-Topeka-Manhattan was booked.

 

[Tim Vasquez]

If you're going to try to plan hotels, you should go to http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotels-g191-United_States-Hotels.html and do a search... they have the most exhaustive collection of hotel/motel reviews. For example this is a search result for Guymon.

Tim