Fall is here, and so is college tour season. Turn it into a vacation!
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/travel/5-tips-on-how-to-make-college-tours-fun-vacations.html
The author’s kid must be quite the superstar with the collection of colleges being visited 
Not a bad article, actually but every once in a while I’d double-take at lines like (emphasis added)
EconoLodge is, apparently, for the proles.
I have to admit that shared mother-daughter snark and mutual eye-rolling made our college tours a lot more fun than they would have been if we had taken things too seriously. >:)
I’ve come to believe there is a direct coorelation between the difficulty of scheduling a visit / finding the place / parking, and the numbers and types of unnecessary bureaucratic nonsense and roadblocks kids encounter when enrolled.
This is slightly tongue in cheek, and based on a very small personal sample size of my own three kids and their friends.
The author seems like a female version of Neal Gabler.
I had to snicker at the line about asking the college students where they eat. Of course we would. After all, your student isn’t going to dine at the celebrated four-star restaurants … they will want to know the best pizza/tacos/burgers at the lowest prices. And the 24-hour restaurant with the best coffee for when you want to pull all-night study sessions with your classmates.
I have a high-school freshman so we haven’t started official college visits yet, but she has had the opportunity to be on various campuses for one reason or another (including a couple of times when we stopped top in a college town for lunch on our way somewhere else), and we try to at least get information and feel for the campus. It’s already helped her add and subtract schools as possibilities.
Hampton Inn is cheap? OK, sure if I use reward points…
Actually, I preferred to book Homewood Suites just because it gave D17 a little extra space. They run about the same as Hampton Inn in most towns.
WHen we hit Burlington on our college road trip, Hotel Vermont and even most of the chains were too expensive for us or already booked up. So we made a reservation at the Ho Hum Motel ( seriously!). 8-|
priceline was my buddy when it came to booking college road trip hotel rooms.
Hotwire for me, but with our very limited budget, we wound up at a fleabag or two.
Ha, we booked Hampton Inn for our first kid. For kid #3, we were Comfort Inn at best!
Don’t forget College Tour Bingo. http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1837440-college-tour-bingo-p1.html
I booked hotels based on proximity…I figured that if the kid was going to go to school there I wanted to check out the closet hotel for us 'rents. Some were inexpensive, some not so inexpensive. My favorite was actually a hotel on the edge of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff run by their hospitality program.
We tried first to stay at hotels where we earn points. I thought there was something to be said for a fairly consistent hotel experience so the kid wouldn’t associate a nicer hotel with a given college. Not always possible, but that was always our starting point. And we could earn & spend points that way, too.
@intparent - I travel occasionally for work, so I always look for places I can either earn or use points. The first question I ask is “Does Southwest fly there” followed by “Is there a Hyatt or Marriott property?”
When I took my D a couple of years ago, we stayed at one very nice hotel (booked late and didn’t have too many options), one pretty nice hotel using points, and two “budget choices.” One of them (a Super 8 along I-81) turned out to be clean and just fine for a decent night’s sleep. The other was…bizarre. While changing for dinner, we noticed an odd odor. Turned out that the trash in the kitchenette hadn’t been emptied and was full of chicken wing bones! Front desk moved us to another room in a different wing, which looked much nicer. But when we got back after dinner, the door wouldn’t unlock (key card problem). It took them about 2 hours to get a maintenance person to cut the lock mechanism off the door so we could get our luggage. In the meantime they moved us to an even nicer room, but we were both too weirded out to enjoy it. I still think part of the reason my kid didn’t like that school was the hotel experience; it was like a sign that this was not the place for her.