My wife and I are planning our first trip to France and Spain for the month of October. We intend to spend several weeks driving round the country, preferably spending much of our time in smaller towns and villages and choosing our lodging each night as we go. (As sailors say, "We have no itinerary and we are going to stick to it.")
What are the best resources (print and/or online) to find lodging and restaurant recommendations in these more rural areas?
For any small town or village that Rick covers in his guidebooks, I'd start with his hotel listings. You also have the option to just stop and check things out as you drive. If you arrive in a town while the local tourist office is open, they can help with accommodation listings. www.viamichelin.com shares their hotel and restaurant recommendations online, as well as driving routes. Google maps can also help you find "hotels near xx town," etc., which may be the easiest way to search by location. On the less quaint side, it's nice to be aware of chain hotels such as from the Accor group.
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Chuck, you may find this useful as well:
http://en.gites-de-france.com/
logis-de-France.com may be helpful.
Accor doesn't have the presence in Spain that it does in France and even then it's limited to the larger cities.
The small, usually family-run, hotels in Spain are called hostals (note spelling) and are both interesting and a real deal.
The easy way to do it is to look for chambre signs in France and habitacion or cuarto signs in Spain. I've spent years mucking around both counties without a reservation or list of any kind. The same idea applies to most other countries. As Laura said, the TI also works well, even if it's a bulletin board in the middle of the village. When all else fails walk in a bar or bakery and ask. Most of them don't have an internet presence of any kind except for maybe the town website. It's pretty simple if you ignore the fact that the darn internet exists.
There is a series of "Back Roads" guides published by Eyewitness Books. They'll put you onto some of the villages that don't appear in the more standard travel books. The recommendations for Gites and Logis are good ones. Both have websites so that you can check out prices and amenity levels.
You could also check booking.com. You might check it before you leave home to get an idea of whether they have the areas you might be interested. We use them for most of our travels and rely on the reviews and ratings. You could use it as a guide and then just deal directly with the hotels and B&Bs since you're winging it.
The best sources would be Booking.com, Venere.com for lodging and Tripadvisor.com. for both lodging and restaurants. Look at all three and start with the one with the format that you find easiest to use and if that doesn't work try the next one. You can also use Rick's guide book recommendations The problem is that while they are very good recommendations, there are relatively few recommendations and oh so many people using them. The result is that even in October they tend to be heavily booked.
Google maps is a great location driven method. If I am researching I select a possible town the search the map for hotels near that location. I then research the hotels on TA & Booking.com. It I am there I just search hotels near me and then do the same. This is how I always pick our lodging - especially when traveling by train - we prefer to be near the train station -this method lets me see everything near it. Sometimes changing your zoom level will add/remove properties. It also has the street view in cities so I can see what the street & building look like and in the country I s=can at least see the sat view and check out the surrounds that way.
If you plan to do this I would not go without a list of hotels in areas you hope to alight and then calling ahead a day before to book the room -- otherwise you run the risk of crummy dumps, and spending way too much time finding them. We have had great luck when I planned our trips and lodging; our few attempts to play it by ear have lead to aimless driving around until late at night looking for a place to stay or eat and general disappointment in the quality of what we found on the fly.
You can rely on Norma's suggestion of Logis de France. These are independently owned mom and pop hotels, often with a restaurant, but they are inspected and rated by the Logis company. You'll find a lot in small towns. Very reliable. You can reserve a day or two ahead, one hotel calling the next.
The other thing about Logis de France hotels/inns is that there is usually free on-site parking. We have probably stayed at 20 or more Logis de France places over the years without a single complaint on our part.
I echo Logis...we've had very good results with them. Their Paris real estate listings are fun to browse as well!
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