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 Find Europe Deals and Features
Planning a Trip to Europe in 10 Steps
Best Ways to Save on Your Trip to Europe
 Share Your Most Unique Lodging Experiences!
 If you're looking to tap into the local pulse on your next trip to Europe, one of the best ways to do it is by choosing your lodging wisely. The difference between staying in a heavily starred "guidebook hotel" and an agritourism farm at the edge of an ocean cliff on an unmarked road can be dramatic. At the former, you may get great room service; at the latter, you eat with the proprietors at the family table.
The challenge is, of course, to find those special places to stay. The obvious choices show up on the booking engines and in the guidebooks, but how do you find anything else, and in particular the right place for you?
With the euro once again setting records against the dollar -- it topped $1.50 for the first time last week -- you might as well get your money and time's worth, and hit out for the real places where Europeans sup and sleep. Here are some offbeat tactics for finding off-the-beaten-path lodging this year.
 Maps on Steroids
The upside to using a mapping application such as Google Maps, MapQuest, or Live Search Maps to find lodging lies in the ability to search not by price, name or major city, but by location. More importantly, you can search a region rather than merely a city -- so if you want to stay in the countryside near a major metropolis, you can see many lodging options throughout a larger geographical range.
So say you are headed to the Guggenheim Bilbao. Instead of putting "Bilbao" into a booking engine and clicking endlessly through a list of hotels within the somewhat drab city limits, you can navigate to the Bilbao area to see lodging options both in and around the city itself. In a place like Bilbao, the surrounding areas are beautiful and worthy of attention on their own merits; staying in the outskirts is great way to have it all.
Using Google Maps can offer the same pitfalls as using an iPhone -- it can be difficult just to figure out how to use the thing well and to capacity. Luckily, it's not too hard to find lodging in Europe by using the following steps:
Navigate to the area in which you would like to stay
Choose "find businesses"
Type "hotel" into the search field
Similarly, with Mapquest you use the "Find Nearby" feature, and with Live Search Maps you can use the "Business Categories" option.
Other search terms I have used with considerable success: agriturismo (and the English agritourism to a lesser extent), bed and breakfast, inn and hostel. Note that complete search results may not all appear on the map immediately -- use the zoom tools to see smaller and larger samples of the search results.
The search results show location and hotel name, often include links to the lodging Web site when available, and even offer links to reviews from sites like TripAdvisor.com, 11870.com and more.
If Not Google Maps, Then...
Well, Google Earth. When you are feeling adventurous and are inclined to weight lodging choices heavily toward location, Google Maps is outdone only by Google Earth. Google Earth requires that you download the free software onto your computer, and functions as a stand-alone application -- you don't load it into your Internet browser, but instead start up the application just as you would any other software such as Photoshop or Word.
Google Earth works similarly to Google Maps, with a couple of advantages. First, Google Earth lets you use checkboxes to determine what amenities and attractions it will display as you view the maps. So you can choose the checkboxes for a few different types of attractions -- let's say in this case museums and lodging -- and the map will display the location of those places.
Second, unlike Google Maps, which displays only those establishments located in the original location you searched, Google Earth will load all appropriate establishments anywhere -- worldwide, really. So as you navigate through the map, new lodging options will show up with every zoom and drag you make. You could very nearly plot out a trip the length and breadth of Europe by dragging the Google Earth maps and plotting out your lodging as you go.
One note: As you zoom in and out when using Google Earth, the displayed lodging options change. Particularly when you zoom in tightly on a region, often considerably more choices are displayed than when you take a wider view of the area. So as you scan the maps, if you see an area that looks promising, zoom in and let the new results appear; you can do this repeatedly almost to the limit of Google Earth's zoom capacity and still see new results.
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