Hello Spain! an Insider's Guide to Spain Hotels: An Insider's Guide to Spain's Hotels $40 to $80 a Night for Two (Hello! Budget Hotel Guides) (Spanish Edition)

Book contains 500 channing hotel listings for 26 cities in Spain under $99 a night for two. It includes family rooms, restaurants, websites, tips on making hotel reservations, getting hotel discounts, packing unusual items.

Best guides for those on a real budget in Europe. Margo Classe of LosAngeles set out to find cheap hotels in France, Spain and Italy. Ask her to describe a hotel room decor and she laughs. I look for basic comfort, cleanliness and a central location where you don't have to have a car, she said in a phone interview. The question is, can you have a private, clean, charming room with your own bathroom for under $100, and the answer is yes. She includes 170 hotels in Paris alone. Classe and her husband spent $30,000 publishing her books; nobody pays to get in a book, and she has seen very place she writes about. -- Milli Ball, The Times-Picayune - Sunday, December 27, 1998

Hotel hoppers traveling on a shoestring should check out this series of guides to affordable lodging in major destinations. Accommodations listed in these books range in price from $40-$90. All three books also provide tips on packing, time, language and events with a few extra pages for note-taking. The handy fax form seems as if it would be extremely useful to people booking their own accommodations. A bit congested in terms of layout and therefore a little difficult to access, these first edition guides still appear o be extraordinarily useful.

Linda Watanabe McFerrin is a Bay Area poet, novelist and travel writer whose work appears frequently in the Examiner Travel Section. Bookings appears the second Sunday of each month. -- Linda Watanabe, San Francisco Examiner - October 1998