Where to sleep in Taiwain?
There are a lot of hotels and B&B available throughout Taiwan and they are mostly affordable. We have learnt that we don’t spend much time on our hotel (room) during a road trip, so for us the extra services like a gym, pool, … are not important. During a road trip we mostly arrive around late afternoon or early evening and we check out immediate after breakfast. It means we don’t reserve time to enjoy any of those, so we avoid paying for them if we don’t use them.
Book up front or not?
During a road trip we avoid booking hotels up front. Like this we are flexible and we can stay as long as we want or move on when we feel like it. For our road trip in Taiwan we only booked the hotel for the last 2 days in Taipei, as we knew we wanted to end our journey here. We select our hotel for the next day during the end of the day while having a little apero moment or when we conclude the current day. It is certainly something to take into account it will take you some time to find a hotel during the trip. For our convenience we using booking.com with some filters to quickly come to a suitable hotel. It would be cheaper to book directly at the hotel, however, not all hotels support instant booking or might take a little longer to confirm the booking. As we want to book a hotel in less than 30 minutes, we stick to booking.com and accept we pay a little extra.
It’s important to note that we were travelling in the shoulder season and only need 1 bedroom. If your travel company is bigger or you travel in peak season, it might be less convenient to find a suitable hotel.
Parking
It is busy in the cities and public free parking is often not available or at least not closeby. When searching for hotels we added the free parking filter on booking.com which assured we could park our car overnight. You might want to double check if it’s onsite private parking as some hotels seem to list free public parking as well, which means you are assured of your own spot. We experienced this during our first night in Keelung where we ended up parking in a public parking garage which was an extra cost. For the next days we paid more attention and always had our own spot.