When traveling, once you figure out where you’re going and how you’re going to get there, the next (and often trickiest) step is to find the right hotel. This task becomes even more complicated when you’re traveling with young children. Through all of our traveling around Europe, I came up with a pretty good system to find the right hotel after our first few situations that were not ideal.
Traveling with little ones makes picking the right hotel even more important. Because you can’t just jump in a taxi without proper car seats and because lugging car seats around while you sight-see is not usually an option, location is everything! When traveling around Europe, we rarely took car seats unless we were renting a car. Most major European cities have fantastic public transport or the touristy areas are small enough that walking everywhere is doable. All the cities we visited even had train or bus service from the airport.
On our first trip to Paris, I picked a nice hotel in an ok location that had breakfast and was a great price. It was close to the Hop On/Hop Off bus that we planned to use so I was pleased. Until we got there and we realized the bus stopped running before we wanted to head back in the evening and the buses only circle one way which was often the opposite of where we wanted to go (all info I could have found online had I known to look!) so we ended up walking back to our hotel each night, about 2 miles and my pregnant body wasn’t happy.
After a similar hotel mistake in Brussels where I chose a hotel in the UN district and we had to take the bus everywhere, I devised a plan for picking the best hotel and it worked for us each time after that. It’s a simple process that has a few steps and takes a little time, BUT it’s time well spent to ensure a great location when you get there!
Here’s my method to ensure you find the right hotel every time:
Step 1: Visit sites like TripAdvisor to explore what there is to do and make a list of what you want to do and see (my Family Trip Planning Pack can easily help you keep track of everything).
Step 2: Map each attraction you think you might want to visit.
(In London I used a map of the underground system to determine where we should stay. Since I was 9 months pregnant with Sugarplum, I wanted to make sure we were close to public transport in order to get everywhere we wanted to go and save my poor aching, tired body!)
Step 3: Search for hotels that meet your individual criteria and budget (I liked Booking.com when we were traveling around Europe). We always looked for triple rooms with included breakfast for as cheaply as possible, which is not the easiest thing to find in European city centres!
Step 4: Map the hotels on the map with the attractions. 
(When we took our next big trip to Madrid, I used Google Maps to map the locations of attractions, printed it out and marked the hotels on the map to discuss the options with hubby.)
Step 5: Focus in on what you really want to see, what is most accessible from each hotel and then pick the hotel that meets all (or most) of your needs!
