How do we find a place to sleep ?
How do we find a place to sleep ?
Norsk utgave (Norwegian
edition)
As you can see from the page Where do we sleep ?, there is a vast number of sleeping alternatives. These will of course vary in style and standard, but one thing for shore: You will always find a place to rest your head and tired feet.
Places and methods to find a place to sleep can be listed like this:
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When the ferry arrives at a certain destination the first thing you usually recognise is the large number of "salespeople". These are representatives for everything from camping grounds to hotels. On the most popular islands up to 50 salespeople can great you at the ferry terminal. They bring beautiful pictures of their accommodations. With these as a starting point and an excellent sales talent they will do the outmost to convince you to stay at their place. Frequently you will meet them several times and they will yell at other competitors to try to get your full attention. It is all a little bit chaotic with the screaming and yelling.
Luckily, the Greek themselves has realised that this is not a favourable situation. Therefore there has been a change the last few years to place the salespeople in restricted areas. The harbour polices now watches their behaviour. At Paros it has been built a shelter where the salespeople are placed and where they shout through open windows to get your attention. This has made it much more easy to get on shore than just a few years back.
It is off course very easy to understand why the salespeople are so eager. Most of them have put considerable amount of money into their projects and without any guests they will go bankrupt. Our personal experience is that when we have tried the alternatives offered by the salespeople we have been disappointed. The photos look fine but you can’t tell the smell of the lavatory using a picture… Personally I recommend to use the method presented in this document entitled "Find a place yourself". Still, we have met families that have been very satisfied dealing with salespeople, especially after a mandatory price discussion. One family consisting of 2 grownups and 3 girls aged 10 to 15 had been offered an apartment at a price of 30€ which was supposed to be the correct market price. The family turned down the offer which was immediately changed to 25€. The family was still not interested. After a while the family was offered a price of 20€ and accepted the offer. The apartment was nice and they had saved quite a bit of money…
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| There are numerous travelling agencies at the islands, even the small island of Antiparos have at least 6. |
At all travelling agencies they can help you to find a place to stay overnight. They will call around to their own contacts to find out if anything is available after you have told them what you are looking for. The price offered is probably a little higher than if you had found the place yourself but you can sit down an relax while other people is doing the work for you. The travel agency will also usually provide the transportation for you. Most of the time you will have to pay for the first night at the travelling agency but this is included in the final bill.
This is an OK way of finding a place to sleep. If you are a group of people travelling together one person should do the job. The rest can go down to the beach or find a place to eat while looking after the luggage. The person who is finding the place do so carefully by looking at several alternatives and checking them out. When a good alternative (with respect to placement relative to the beach, centre of the city, night life and with respect to room standard and price) has been found, find the rest of the group.
This is the way I do it when finding a place to stay. AEGEO INN is a place we found at Antiparos using this method.
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| We found this add in a window display at Ag Anna at Naxos. |
To elaborate a bit more to why we choose to find our places to sleep ourselves. There are many reasons. First of all, as previously mentioned, we have had some bad experiences using other methods. Staying only one night at a place after not being satisfied, also give you a bad feeling when telling the salesperson that you are leaving sooner than expected. This person might have driven you many kilometres to his place and given you excellent service. Secondly, our personal demand for a certain standard have changed over the years with a growing family and better economy. We have also been more experienced in finding good sleeping accommodations and all this adds up to our preference of doing thing our own way. We therefore spend a little extra time when arriving at an certain location and use the rest of the stay enjoying ourselves.
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As a example we can tell the story when we found a good place to sleep over in Athens. We had never before found a hotel that really satisfied our needs. Therefore I had, for the 1997 summer decided to spend some time finding a hotel that we were all pleased with and it took me approximately 3 hours to do so. I started searching in the Plaka-area and moved in the direction of Syntagma. There were many rooms for rent but none of them satisfied my demand for price and standard. I walked several kilometres and checked between 10 and 15 hotels. I even took the subway to the Omonia-area to take a look there. Here I finally found a hotel that satisfied a demands, which basically self controlled air condition, TV (the children) and renovated the last few years. This hotel satisfied all our demands, was member of a recognised chain of hotels and even was the cheapest of all the hotels we had tried. Now we have a hotel to go to every time we visit Athens unless its fully booked.
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| Inside the windmill we rent at Sifnos. |
There also exist at least one more method to find places to sleep and that is to use your local travel agency and let them do the work to reserve room for you before you go to Greece. In this case you should preferable have the name, address, phone number to the place where you want to stay. This can for instance be found using Internet or using the lists for Greek travelling agencies. Just ask them to send the information to you. Tips from friends who already has been to Greece should be used along with the modern possibility of sending e-mail to this homepage provider or other people which name you might find in my guestbook. Still, to book places to sleep from your own country is a little out of touch with the main idea behind Island Strolling. This should be done "on the fly" in the true spirit of Island Strolling. Remember you will always find a place to sleep.
Also there is another point to be remembered: The price you pay by ordering from home is almost always max price for a given season, while if you get the place is Greece you will pay the market price of the hour. A small example. For the hotel previously described in Athens we paid 25€ for a double room at the end of June. Just after we arrived back home we got an e-mail asking for a recommendation for a hotel in Athens. Of off course gave told the writer about our preferred hotel and also told him what we had paid. The following day we received an answer saying that the hotel now demanded 50€ fro the double room. This was the correct price and equal to the maximum price the hotel could charge in this given period. This points out the vast difference between a possible market price and full price.
A short note in the end:
If you walk around with backpacks you are shore to attract women and children belonging to places where rooms are available.
| Back to Where do we sleep ? | Further on to When do we Island Stroll ? |
| Back to Island Strolling in Greece | |
| Please write in our Guest book, or read what others have written | |
| If you have any tips, advice or memories from island strolling, or if there is a question you haven’t found the answer to, use the discussions group. | |
| Thanks to Kjell Inge Gjesdal, Oslo, Norway for his translation into English! | |
| © Jan Bergtun, 3. January 1999 | Updated, 12.20.2007 |
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