A hotel finder can be a wonderful and a terrible thing. It's a wonderful thing if it helps you locate hotels and motels in countries or areas you are unfamiliar with. It's a terrible thing if you simply book the hotels and motels because you found them on a hotel finder!

There has to be common sense aplenty when using a hotel finder. I'm sorry, but you really should do some research apart from the hotel finder site. For instance, is the location really as convenient as it sounds in the writeup? Is the information up to date and current, or has the property recently been hammered by an unforgiving hurricane? Is that gorgeous beach they describe still there, or was it a victim of the last big storm?

The conditions at hotels and motels can change drastically from year to year or even month to month. I know this--I travel a lot. Not long ago we stayed at a beautiful resort in Mexico that had one of the most beautiful beaches of all the resorts along that strip. A month later the entire beach was gone! It was the victim of a savage hurricane. Guess what properties were having huge sales and last minute deals? We had some friends that bit on the deals, they didn't check with us, and when they returned, they were very disappointed. The lesson here, use a hotel finder, but always do your research before you go and check it all out with some human references, just to be sure. (Many Internet links provide updated visitor evaluations of properties.)