The following post has been sponsored by HotelCalculator.com. If you’re interested in having your website or travel-related product reviewed, please contact me.

I’m not always the traveler that books his accommodation ahead of time, but if I were, HotelCalulator.com would be a handy way to go about it. It is a hotel search engine; a tool to find accommodation in virtually any city on earth. It combs through thousands of choices and narrows them down in accordance to your specifications. Then it points you to the site where you can easily and securely book your night’s stay.

Let’s say I was living in Madrid (ah, how I wish I were still living in Madrid), the pulsating heart of Spain and I wanted to take a little jaunt over to the artsy Catalonian capital, and was feeling a little too fancy for couchsurfing. Yes, that’s right, I want a hotel in Barcelona for the weekend. Here’s what I’d do:

How it works

I’d first go to HotelCalculator.com and punch in Barcelona, Spain and the dates I was interested in.

My search scours through a possible 1068 hotel choices and yielded me 509 available rooms. I can then narrow down the search by different criteria: price, location, amenities, rating, and type, depending on their importance to me. It even gives me the option to see results in nearby towns and to display the prices in the currency of my choice. In addition to selecting and making a shortlist of top hotels, I can also click Map View in order to see the relative locations of my shortlisted selections on the map.

HotelCalculator iPhone App

But what if I didn’t have my laptop? Good question. Luckily, I’m standing on the corner mooching free wifi from a nearby café, performing the same search on HotelCalculator’s free app. I tap in the same info and voila, I get the same results. If you’ve already arrived in your destination and haven’t had a chance to search for a hotel yet, use the “search for hotels in your location” option. You can then book it right on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Download the app directly from the AppStore or via the HotelCalculator homepage.

Features

Currently HotelCalculator.com searches over 100,000 hotels displaying the price of accommodations from 28 other hotel reservation agency sites. The database includes hotels, apartments, hostels, and guesthouses in over 13,000 cities worldwide, ranging from budget to luxury accommodation.

The bottom line

HotelCalculator is an intelligent and efficient hotel search engine, which saves you time. But it is very similar to a host of other hotel search engines out there doing the same thing. However, not all of the others have apps like HotelCalculator, so that is a plus.

Additionally, I think the site is well laid out and slick looking, while being fairly straightforward and easy to navigate.

Visit HotelCalculator.com to book your next accommodation.