Most of the places worth staying in are booked by people who planned late, not early. The trick is knowing which parts of a trip reward flexibility — and which ones punish it.
Flights and headline attractions are the rigid parts: prices climb as seats and slots disappear, and no amount of patience brings them back down. Everything around them is softer than it looks. A room two streets from the old town, a table at eight instead of seven, a Tuesday instead of a Saturday — small trades like these usually pay for a whole extra night.
- Lock the flight first — it is the only price that reliably moves against you.
- Hold a refundable room early, then keep watching for something better nearby.
- Leave one day with nothing booked on it. Every good trip needs somewhere to put a surprise.
What to spend on, and what to skip
Location beats square footage almost every time. A smaller room you can walk home to at midnight is worth more than a suite that commits you to a taxi twice a day.
A host in Lisbon put it better than we could:
Guests remember two things — how easy it was to get in, and whether they slept. Everything else is decoration.
Pictures do a lot of the deciding, so it is worth knowing how to read them:
A few things worth checking before you confirm anything:
- Whether the cancellation window closes before or after your flight becomes non-refundable.
- What the cleaning and city fees add — they are often a tenth of the total.
- How late you can arrive, if you land in the evening.
Get those three right and the rest of the trip tends to take care of itself.
Code should look okay by default.
I think most people are going to use highlight.js or Prism or something if they want to style their code blocks but it wouldn't hurt to make them look okay out of the box, even with no syntax highlighting.
What I've written here is probably long enough, but adding this final sentence can't hurt.
Hopefully that looks good enough to you.
We still need to think about stacked headings though.
Let's make sure we don't screw that up with h4 elements, either.
Phew, with any luck we have styled the headings above this text and they look pretty good.
Let's add a closing paragraph here so things end with a decently sized block of text. I can't explain why I want things to end that way but I have to assume it's because I think things will look weird or unbalanced if there is a heading too close to the end of the document.
What I've written here is probably long enough, but adding this final sentence can't hurt.
