Hotel reservations needed in Burgundy?

Will you be traveling by car or using public transportation?

Traveling by train to Beaune and then renting a car for day trips in the area.

In March I think you'd be OK reserving a day or two or three ahead in Beaune. You might look now, or soon, for some candidate hotels on the web and see what their availabilities are, especially on weekends. Check periodically before starting your trip. If you start seeing them fill up, then make your move. But I'd be surprised if you need to plan very far ahead that time of year.

Of course if your hearts are set on one particular place out in the country or in a small town, you should probably nail it down as soon as you can. But if you're flexible, don't worry about it. I like reserving ahead, even if only a day or so, just so I don't spend time on arrival searching for a room.

I doubt that you would need advance reservations unless you're focusing in on a particular property with only a few rooms. Burgundy in the late winter/early spring is not exactly a hot spot of tourism.

One thing though: it's not unusual in that part of Burgundy for hotels (and some restaurants) to be closed until later in the spring or summer.

I'd reserve a hotel.

You may be more gifted at finding great little price acceptable hotels in Europe on the fly but I am terrible at it. I almost always get very nice and charming places at a reasonable price when I plan ahead; on the few occasions we have tried to just grab a place on the road we have done laughable badly. There was the time we had a list of places and went to 6 hotels before finally finding a place for the night; the one we ended up in had a poured concrete platform like a prison with a foam mattress on it for a bed and was beyond basic. We were grateful to have a place to sleep that wasn't the car. This was in May. On another occasion we ended up with something like the Bates Hotel where they stole our strawberries from the table at breakfast (I had to go to the kitchen and wrest them back -- we had brought a carton on the road) and we were the only people there. It was a creepy place. And then there was the time we had the Ibis which extended over the highway and we had trucks rumbling underneath our bed all night. We have never found a treasure trying to book this way.
This past year we had a list at a couple of potential stopping places driving south to the Dordogne from Paris (after flying in from Russia that morning. We booked a couple hours ahead on the road; the place was not very good but had a good restaurant). The place we had carefully booked ahead further south was terrific -- lovely town, hotel room with river view etc etc. Planning ahead just works better.

If you want flexibility I would have identified a few hotels along the way and book a day or two ahead as you go and to the extent you can book places at places you know you will be well in advance.

We had a similar experience to the one Jane described. We arrived in Holyhead, Wales without a reservation--not a single decent B&B had a vacancy. We had visions of sleeping in the car and were considering the parking lot at Tesco since it seemed well lit. Finally we found a place on the main and very busy road with major truck traffic. The owner told us he had security cameras in the parking area and we did not dare to leave anything in the car. The door to room did not lock, towels looked used, trucks zooming by all night, etc. It was cheap but we never travel like that now.

Well, it's interesting reading others' input.

I can share an off-season report in southern Burgundy from 2016. My wife and I were looking at houses to rent in the area, so we stopped for the night in a little town west of Mâcon. It was a medieval town and the hotel was in an old 15th century carriage house near the city square where only residents are allowed to drive their cars. Very quiet with beautiful illumination of a medieval bell tower outside the Hôtel de Ville.

We stopped by the front desk to request a room and the owner/chef of the hotel's restaurant handed us a key. I asked if he wanted to run my credit card and he declined, saying we could take care of it in the morning.

No credit card. No ID. The place runs on trust. Something I can't say I have ever encountered in the U.S.

The place was quiet, clean and pleasant, and had a very good restaurant. And it was inexpensive -- here's an example: my wife and were perusing house listings in the bar area downstairs, and we asked for two glasses of red wine, which came with an appetizer plate offered without requesting it, for 4€. Total. In the U.S., one glass of the Burgundy wine we had would have cost in the range of $6 to $8. For one glass.

So -- it's hard to go wrong by reserving ahead. But it's not exactly required in the off-season, in my opinion.

You can get a room calling morning of, that time of year. That's not so say you shouldn't reserve earlier if you like, but an on-the-fly, weather dependent itinerary is perfectly feasible.

I biked around Burgundy in early April one year and the only place I had any problem was a small where I had not called ahead and the owner was not in. My bad entirely.

I went in early May, 2017. I had reservations but I could have easily booked last minute. It was still cold and the region seemed largely deserted (exception was Beaune). The towns were nice but it would have been better with a chance to warm up and flowers/vines to start growing. In March, you're there even earlier. Personally, I won't go back to Burgundy until at least early June and probably no later than mid October. I wouldn't want to be there in high season but early May was too early.

We were in Bretagne in May of 2017. We had our initial hotel (Hotel les Voyaggeurs, Pleneour-Langvins) booked ahead of time - a wonderful but not fancy hotel in a small town. For the rest of the time (2 nights in Rennes, 4 nights in Chartres), we went through booking.com. Our approach is to find really cheap places, as we do not go to France to sit in a hotel room. We stayed in a Hotel Ibis (business-class hotel like Motel 6 in the US) and in a hostel in Chartres. Both were fine, for under 70E per night. My wife is good at this. She does it 1-2 days before the booking is needed. Since you will have a car, finding an inexpensive and not-fancy hotel in the outer areas is a feasible strategy.

Thanks for all the advice. We may book a hotel in Beaune for the first couple of nights and then play it by ear. We are hoping for a warm spell. And the wine tasting will be fun even if it is cold.

I think what it comes down to is that there are two types of travelers: those for whom the lodging place is an important part of the travel experience, and those for whom it is just a means to an end. (I'm firmly in the second category.) If, when you imagine your vacation, you see yourself in a lovely, charming room looking out on great scenery, etc., you may not be happy with the results you get from grabbing a last-minute room.

I've spent a total of over 700 nights in Europe. When I think of bad lodging experiences, I remember two rather unclean rooms (both super-cheap places in Italy back in the 1980s), a straw mattress in a London youth hostel where the windows were kept open all night in late May (1972), two times when there was nothing available in my price range in Bologna and I had to get back on the train (1980s), and a night in a converted hallway in St. Malo when my ferry was cancelled and I had to scramble (1980s). Note that all of those dates are pre-internet.

Now that I can look for something online a few days ahead of time, I've had no quality issues, just a few places where I was as centrally located as I prefer or felt I might be paying somewhat over the odds. But I've also gotten some unusually low prices (usually on a weekend) in fancier hotels when demand was low. My rooms have overwhelmingly been short on charm, which is fine with me, because I value flexibility.