www.CostaRicaTicas.com

As many of you know, finding hotels in less-traveled areas of C.R. can be difficult.

The standard Google/Opera/MSN searches always lead you to web sites that feature one or two hotels in each area, and of course the web site makes a commission if you stay at one of those hotels.

The problem is that there are over 100 hotels in San Jose alone, and one can seldom find a list of more than 20. Even the best list I found, and the only one which listed the Kax and Nuevo Johnson, was limited.

A search for QQuepos for instance showed the Kamuck but did not even list the Malinche. 1costaricalink shows the Presidente and Balmoral, but doesn't list the Morazan. What gives?



Is there some sort of master list of hotels listed by region/province/canton/municipality? Surely the CR government maintains such a list.

If anyone has a link to a more complete listing of lesser-traveled hotels, please list it here. Even lists in Spanish are welcome. Has anyone ever stayed at the Hotel Campesino?


Thanks!

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Pura Vulva! Wandering through the dark, I am El Ciego.

Check out Tripadvisor.com and type in Costa Rica. You can then go to each province of CR and there will be all kinds of hotels listed and even ratings for lots of them.

I'd like to second that recommendation of http://www.tripadvisor.com. The thing I like about them other than the large number of places listed (97 hotels for SJ alone) is that unlike the other listing sites that have an interest in promoting the places listed on their site, the reviews on tripadvisor are by actual guests and include both good and bad reviews (although not all places listed have full reviews). A good example is this review from Tripadvisor that I re-posted on this site a few months ago http://www.costaricaticas.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=46497&highlight=tripadvisor#46497

Some websites from my favorites list:

http://www.centralamerica.com/cr/hotel/#sanjose
http://www.southerncostaricahandbook.com/links.php
http://www.hotels.co.cr/index.html
http://www.1costaricalink.com/eng/hotel ... on-eng.htm
http://www.amerisol.com/costarica/lodging.html

Along with tripadvisor.com, some other informative sites include:

http://www.virtualtourist.com/
http://www.fodors.com/
http://www.frommers.com

They all have reviews and forums to research.

Prolijo,

Trip Advisor is a cool site in many respects, but a search of San Jose, Costa Rica yielded 22 hotels, not 97. Sadly, the reviews of the hotels tend to be for big chain places...this is not the simple list of hotels with addresses and contact information I'm actually looking for.

However, it is a cool site. Allow me to paraphrase one newbie post, so as to avoid copyright infringement. The paraphrase is vvery close to the language, style and typing of someone named nomad333:

hey yall I'm going to costa rica with a buddy bot I don't want to be around no gringos. Like, is it safe for me or will some1 pull a gun on me when I walks into the club and were can i go to see the pretty ladys but no gringos. is it cool for me and my 20 year old buddy i'm 20 to to go into like were the chicks are but i don want to be aroun no gringos.

Nice. Stay home, bubba.



Among the 22 hotels listed, only six were in San Jose proper. YMMV; maybe I'm just too blind to access the site properly (it happens).

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Pura Vulva! Wandering through the dark, I am El Ciego.

The sites that Pachuco listed may not have as thorough listings in one place as you were seeking, but put them all together and even after overlaps you can get quite a list. For example, Frommers, which I also use had 35 hotels listed including 14 downtown and another 7 in either San Pedro/Los Yoses or Sabana/Paseo Colon. Trip advisor has many more listings than any other site I've seen and comes closest to what you were describing. Unfortunately, I think it must be your interface that is causing your problems. I actually got 97 hotels when I just did the search PLUS another 15 B&B's and 6 "Other". A quick browsing of those 97 places revealed may be 20 or so that were what could be called well outside the SJ autopista, including the Best Western Irazu, Tara (Whitehouse?), the Cariari, Hampton Inn by the Airport and 2-3 REALLY misclassified places in Jaco or La Fortuna Obviously the chain places and the more popular (and expensive) places are also going to be the ones that pay to be listed on more reservation sites, have more exposure on the web or even their own websites. There are also plenty of places (usually the locally owned budget priced places) that either have no web presence or do not have the money or sophistication to get websites that come out high on search engines. Sometimes those types of hotels are your best bet, particularly if saving money is one of your goals and you usually don't even need a reservation to get a room.