Accommodations no longer have prices

I wonder if its harder to offer reliable pricing in the age of Booking.com and VRBO, where prices change daily and weekly, based on various factors? Maybe a base rate for Dbl isn't as accurate as it used to be? In addition, maybe he thinks its easy enough to Google the places he describes and get up to date pricing, since so much of travel is done online now anyway :shrug:

I think it's a tradeoff between maintaining accuracy and immediate obsolescence as soon as a print version of a guidebook hits the store shelves. It would take a tremendous level of effort to constantly stay on top of changing rates and do quality control on any printed text. Why limit yourself to only a single guidebook for hotels when there are many comparison sites like www.booking.com with a much larger inventory that can be sliced and diced using various filters, allowing for side-by-side comparisons? I've never counted on guidebooks for selecting lodging (or restaurants) - getting live info online is typically more accurate (plus, as an added benefit, you can read recent reviews). Larger hotels also use dynamic pricing to set hotel rates, maybe moms and pops still have flat rates that can be published and counted on.

Agnes said what I meant ;p

Agnes nailed it.

Interesting that you use the books to find lodging. I never do these days, although I will take Rick’s input on neighborhoods, I search for my own lodging where I can get those details or simply punch in the parameters so that my search is targeted.

What I love Rick’s books for are logistics (like where is the laundromat or how do the buses work?) that few sources cover, and the detailed self-guides to sites and museums. His walking tours are super, too. I also read his restaurant section although increasingly diverge especially in larger cities.

With the advent of the "internet" and instant accommodation prices at the touch of a keyboard - listing prices in books is pretty much a waste of paper.

Imagine you are a guidebook editor with books covering multiple countries and 100's of cities. You list 1000's of hotels. How in the world can you even keep up on their prices each year as well as know what each hotel is like from year to year? Using a guidebook is the least efficient or accurate way to find a hotel.
I know that some people on this forum believe that the Rick Steves team check each hotel/restaurant/tour/museum/activity in their books every year, but this is impossible. It is also all out of date before it ever gets published.
Use the internet for up to date reviews and prices on anything you want to see and do. Faster, easier, more accurate.

Guidebooks are out of date before they are printed, so shouldn’t be your source for room pricing.

Many places have dynamic pricing these days, so giving a wide price band wouldn’t help you much anyway. Take the Premier Inn chain for London. Rooms start at £49.50 so their website says. Tomorrow night will cost you £145. Booking ahead for December, a Saturday night at the same place is £141 and the following night, a Sunday, it’s £40. Yes, £100 difference one night apart. No guidebook can meaningfully cover such a range.

Websites such as Booking.com make booking rooms so much easier than it used to be.

Agree with Agnes. We’ll generally only use a guidebook to look for accommodation suggestions if we’re traveling without reservations and arrive into a town we didn’t know we’d be stopping in.

Yep, Agnes nailed it. The challenge with 100% accuracy applies not just to hotels but to attractions as well. Entry fees, visiting hours. ticketing procedures.etc. can change right after a book has gone to press. It's always best to double-check details with an attraction's own website. Hotel prices can also swing a great deal depending on season and special events.

Like some of the others, we never use guidebooks to choose hotels, or restaurants either, for that matter.

JD, I agree with you. I especially miss (and fought for) details about which hotels had true single rooms, and which "family rooms" might be better described as triples or quads. But Jessica's answer is closest to the reason for this decision. While it always took a lot of work to get hotels and other services to name next year's prices in advance, it's really the additional competition and flexibility of the online booking engines that have made the range of prices for any one location almost too wide to be relevant.

Thanks to all for your feedback. As noted in my original thread comments:

"And yes, I always knew they were going to be a bit out of date, but this was a good way of starting to determine where we would say."

I understand what might be the justification. Thank goodness that not all other travel books are following the RS lead.

Bottom line, my comments were less about why it was done. Rather, I was hoping to get the attention of someone at Rick Steves enterprise so they could understand the value of price information to some of us. And yes, I did send the same comments in an email directly to the Rick Steves email address, albeit no reply to date.

About 1/3 to 1/2 my accommodations are from the RS book, the rest are from booking.com, etc. Having the price information, even though out of date, gave me a huge jump on my planning. We all don't plan the same way!

To get around the lack of this information, I am actually using the 2016 RS Italy book.

Thanks again for the feedback. It does not solve the problem with the RS books, but I felt someone had to comment on this.

In actuality the REAL loss that will occur from not listing the prices is not to the tourist or guidebook reader it is to future generations of second hand bookstore haunters and garage sale attendees...

Think about finding that 1930's National geographic in a big pile of them at .50 ea. Open it and the first advertisement was almost always for a Car or a Cruise. Then you realized you could buy a luxury car for $3900 in 1938. It was a trip back in time. It gave context and perspective.

That's what we will lose. None of these data bases or even operating systems will be around 50 years from now. A great deal of "Micro-History" will be lost. No one will know what it used to be like.

Even today the printed word is valuable for the future.

I am no Luddite. Everything I do from banking to communication to business and research et al. is done electronically. And it is precisely this that has made me realize what will be lost.

I say put in a price range if for no other reason just for posterity's sake.

This is a HUGE lose and makes planning using the Rick Steves guides
much more difficult. I now have to look up each individual place I was
considering to get these specifics.

I disagree. I don't see this as a huge loss at all. If a property has an interest to a traveler because of the RS descriptions of it, it takes a moment to go online to search for pricing at the time of year one wants to go. As mentioned by Agnes and maybe others, one can also go on booking.com or other search engines to find competitive pricing and then contact the innkeeper to see if she/he will offer the same price so the property can keep 100% of the rate.

I use guide books, basically Rough Guide and "Let's Go" but not merely for determining prices. It's immaterial what the exact price is; it could be very well out of date but other pertinent information relative to the trip is what I am looking for. For example, the Pension where I stay in Berlin listed its price in " Let's Go" in 2007 as 35 Euro.

Now that price is up to 45 Euro, still unbeatable for what you get (Preis-Leistung Verhältnis) relative to that type of accommodations outside of a dorm room in a hostel, which as an option I never used in Berlin. I didn't arrive in that Pension until 2009, still at 35 Euro. How many years did the price stay like that, keeping in mind the book you used was "outdated?"

Likewise with Rough Guide when we were in Gdansk in 2003 and Torun in 2005 and chose the Pensionen from " Rough Guide: Poland, " the 2000 edition. For Poland we did consult also with "The Lonely Planet."

Good comment from aarthurperry -- old books provide historical framework. I grew up with a "Book of Knowledge" set from my father's childhood (about 1910) and was amazed to find the picture of the planetary system did not include all the further planets -- really brought home the idea that there were things yet to be discovered. (Not so good for doing a science report, though.)
Use booking.com to see what's available on the dates I want to travel in the price range I'm prepared to pay -- guidebook just points me toward suggested areas and relative price ranges.

I used Expedia to check hotel prices in Frankfurt during February at a typical hotel, the Movenpick Hotel Frankfurt City. Prices ranged from $111 to $494 for the same type of room, depending on the day. During March prices ranged from $85 to $531. Which price should the guidebook use?

Consider that Steves' guidebooks are the most popular in the US, probably by a huge count. You may do better looking for a similar hotel rather than one from the book.

We used to plan our trips and use the RS hotel recommendations, with the prices listed. So at least we knew if hotel was in the $100 range or $300 range when looking at hotels. The $, $$, $$$, and $$$$ definitions are in the last chapter of the book (the post promoted me to look for it).

I’m now using booking.com for the majority of our stays. And unfortunately, the Rick Steve hotel recommendations are a thing of the past in our travel planning. We’d never been led a stray.