Pre- Paying Hotels

I would not do this. Why do you want to give away your money sooner than you have to?
Most people don't want to pay in advance, as there is a small risk you may arrive at the hotel and find it is not as good as advertised. But many hotels insist on a deposit, or full payment, when you book.

As long as you have a receipt to prove you have payed, I do not see any risk of them demanding payment again.

I would first carefully check your booking.com agreement. Some bookings will be pay the property directly and some will be paid through booking.com charging your card.

If your booking is the first - pay at the property, then talking to the hotel to arrange will be fine. Print your receipt just in case they don't remember you already paid.

If your booking is the second - booking.com charges your card, this is where you may hit trouble. If you arrange to pay the hotel directly and this isn't communicated to booking then they will charge you as per the agreement. I don't know how to ensure this doesn't happen.

I've had both types of arrangements and both work fine. On my last trip I had a hotel that charged through booking.com, two apartments that wanted cash on arrival, and one apartment that went through booking. Pretty even split.

We only pre-pay under two conditions- if the hotel offers a substantial discount for pre-paying and if we have purchased trip insurance to cover loss due to cancellation. Otherwise, don't do it.

Some Expedia reservations offer small discounts with cancellation allowed (typically 24 hour) with prepayment. I have printed copies of the reservation showing that I pre-paid. Given that those reservations are paid by credit card, I've assumed that a credit card intervention would apply should their be a problem but have never had a "charged twice" issue.

A number of years ago I booked a London pre-pay/no cancellation room months in advance because the pre-pay pricing was less than a half of the cancellation allowed price. Again, payment by credit card and carried printed copies of receipts. I would hesitate to wire funds.

If it's a matter of the hotel taking cash payments only, and you don't want to walk around with a lot of cash, just withdraw euro from an ATM when you need it. Make sure your bank knows you are using your card for travel.

Why would you want to? Even if it's refundable you'd have your hands full getting your money should you need to cancel. The only time I've seen pre-payment mandated is for non-refundable rates. For refundable reservations a charge is usually put on the credit card you submitted and it's refunded if you cancel withi the time allowed.

I am thinking that there are funding/currency issues given that sajans is from India. It could be that with the rupee / euro conversions, there might be some advantage to locking it in at a current exchange rate.

The reason we were looking at doing this was because we don't want to carry that much cash with us- we're a group of 11 doing a two weeks trip, so the hotels charges are amounting to a reasonable amount. We had done a similar arrangement during our trip to Seychelles where we pre-paid the hotels.

However , after posting this query here I got a response informing me that paying via credit card gives a worse currency rate over a travel card. So we're looking at getting a travel card for our accommodation expenses.

Thanks everyone for your inputs!

What do you mean by "travel card"? If you are talking about some pre-paid card, then don't do it because you will have problems getting people to accept it. I don't know what kind of credit cards are available in India, but in the US it is fairly easy to get a credit card with no foreign exchange fees.

Were you going to wire cash to the hotels? Why not just pick hotels that accept credit cards instead of cash? That way, you don't need to worry about cash at all for your lodging.

Agnes - I'm referring to a forex travel card which will be preloaded with cash- basically a debit card that will work internationally. It's giving us the best currency rates. We'd used it on our trip to the US and had no trouble having it accepted. Have our credit cards as back as well. So, should be sorted! Thanks for your inputs :-)