Rhine and Mosel travel in May

I just had a bad experience with Booking.com last night for the Mosel. Every hotel I was interested in, it said was full for my dates. So I wrote the hotels, and each responded to me this morning with rooms to rent. I would deal directly with the hotels either by email, calling, or have someone else call for you. Booking.com, which is recommended by a lot of people, didn't give accurate or real time information to me for this time.

Well, booking.com seems to have a somewhat tarnished reputation over on Trip Advisor. Most of the time I recommend www.hrs.com due to their more liberal cancellation policies and decent customer service. I have yet to see anyone post a complaint about them. http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g187337-i301-k2304795-Can_we_trust_the_published_rates_of_Booking_com-Frankfurt_Hesse.html

Re: all the comments about booking.com...booking.com is one of several distribution channels for a hotel to unload its rooms (one can always go on the hotel's website or use other consolidator sites), so the number of rooms allotted to booking.com may not represent the entire inventory (just that the number of rooms one can book through the site has been exceeded). Only the hotel itself is likely the authoritative source of what's available or not.

Most towns in Germany have a website - www.(town name).de. There will be a tourist page that will likely have a list of the town's places to stay. Many have a way to find out the places with vacancies. I used these services to book the 4 places I will be using on my next trip. Note: for some towns where there is an English language listing, the list can be shorter than the German version!

Hotels and B&Bs are probably using the "no vacany" ploy on booking.com for dates when they are confident of filling their rooms and don't want to pay a commission to a middleman. A quick call or email to the place might be all it takes for the owner/manager to find a vacancy, after all. Since I don't like to deal with middlemen of any sort, I always go directly to the hotel/b&b web site for bookings. I have booked through booking.com only when I could not find a website. Sorry if this goes off on a tangent, but re TripAdvisor, there seems to be a campaign against booking.coom in TA's Germany forum. There has been a series of carefully timed complaints every few days by one first-time user, then another but never from users with lots of posts or anyone with a lick of travel experience. In every complaint, the person blames the hotel-finder, not the hotel or themselves, for problems with the hotel. I really wonder if this is 20 or 30 first-time users who never comment on anything else or one or two trolls using multiple online identities. One reason I trust Travelers' Helpline is it makes a greater effort to keep out the trolls.

"20 May through 25... During this time we will rent a car and drive from Dresden to Trier." Why not just plan your route and pick a couple of towns as bases for taking daytrips? Then you can be spontaneous about the places you visit instead of the places you sleep. That's a long trip. Will you make just one overnight stop prior to the Rhine/Mosel? Bad Hersfeld (or thereabouts) is close to the centerpoint of your journey. It and several other nearby towns comprise a section of the "Fachwerkstrasse" or "half-timbered-house road": FACHWERKSTRASSE You might look into either Boppard (Rhine) or Cochem (Mosel) for the Rhine/Mosel. I don't see anything wrong with Booking.com except that it's extraordinarily useless for the "Privatzimmer" (private B&B's) you are looking for. It is best to consult the town listings - though these aren't always in English. Cochem's guest brochure includes all kinds of accommodations and is HERE. Boppard's Privatzimmer are HERE (won't link - copy and paste address): http://www.boppard.de/index.php?id=7&L=1

"Bad Hersfeld (or thereabouts) is close to the centerpoint of your journey. It and several other nearby towns comprise a section of the "Fachwerkstrasse" or "half-timbered-house road":" Let me give a recommendation to this region. It's one of the most scenic in Germany, particularly the Waldeck kreis of northern Hessen (used to be it's own independent principality back in the day), but it seems to be completely ignored by most foreign tourists, except the Dutch. Beautiful towns (some walled), many castles (more than a few of which are well-preserved in their orignal state), rolling hills and low mountains, plus one of Germany's national parks.

Thank you to all the folks who responded. Real life actually got in the way, but things have settled and we can continue with our trip planning. Sorry for the delay, but our gratitude is undiminished.

FYI, the owner of the B&B we stayed at in York last summer really was not happy with Booking.com or any of the intermediary companies, since they charge an outrageously high fee, apparently. I used Trip Advisor to choose my places ahead of time and then contacted them directly to book, which got me some really nice discounts!

Zimmer is German for room, and Zimmer, or Privatzimmer, is used to describe a room in a private home, pretty much the same as Bed and Breakfast (breakfast is almost always included with this kind of accommodation) in this country. Frei means available, so Zimmer frei means "vacancy". You can't stay in a Zimmer frei; as soon as you book it, it's Zimmer belegt (occupied). I stayed for five nights at Pension Pauly in Boppard and would recommend it. It's on the list given by Russ. Pension Pauly is very close, just a couple of blocks up the hill, to the train station. It's run by a thirty-something couple with two kids. I was surprised to see that they list "Englisch" as a language; when I was there, they never spoke a word of English, even when I struggled a little with German, but maybe they were just humoring me.

You should look at Bavaria Ben's suggestions for rooms. I've stayed a couple of times in Bacarach, and his room reviews are right on. See: http://www.bensbauernhof.com/accommodationsrhinemosel.html
Or, www.bensbauernhof.com

We can add Russ and Denny to The List of Likely Suspects...

Thank you once more for the helpful information. I'm especially glad to see tips for finding rooms other than the major engines. While I have had generally good experiences myself, I didn't imagine they would be too useful for the smaller establishments we may be looking for. Russ, if I could figure out what we want to see I would happily do so, but the options seem endless so we want to be as flexible as possible..take the road less driven if it looks neat..but still be able to find a place to hunker down. The Timber Road sounds fascinating and we will definitely be looking into that. I had thought we would make a beeline for the Rhine and spend several days/nights there, but it seems there is so much to see en route. I truly appreciate the helpfulness of posters on this site. And, Eileen: I know I have been on somebody's list before, and certainly more than once, but I wonder how I made it on to yours! :-). Thanks again to all.