Add Apartment or Resident Hotels to Your Inventory of Options for Overnight Accommodation

Smart business travelers are usually aware of so-called apartment hotels, residence hotels, or serviced flats -- hotel-like structures in which the units are one- or two-bedroom apartments with kitchens and separate living room facilities. These are usually entitled to full hotel services -- daily maid service, central telephone switchboard, laundry done for the occupant (for an extra charge). They are usually rented for fairly long periods, but are occasionally available for one week and less if units are empty. And because of that occasional availability, they should be kept in mind by all travelers, business-oriented or not. That's because they often offer good prices: as little as $70 a night for a studio, as little as $100 and $125 a night for a two-bedroom flat.

Most of these apartment hotels are marketed directly by the chains that own them. To rent a Candlewood Suite (a major chain of residence hotels), you go to the website of Candlewood Suites. For a Residence Inn owned by Marriott, you contact Marriott. But too few travelers are aware that two big websites -- one in England, the other in Germany -- are active in offering independent residence hotels that aren't connected with chains.

The bigger of the services is Apartotels.com located in Britain, which claims to offer several thousand different apartment hotels or residence hotels scattered around the world. But for Europe-based apartment hotels or residence hotels, I have recently found excellent options in a German-based service found at www.apartmentservice.de . Though clicking on that address will access pages of information set forth in German, you have only to click a "translate" box at the top of the main menu to obtain an English language translation of the entire site. Though more than half of its 122 listings are in German cities, there are also 19 such hotels listed for France and at least one apiece in virtually every other European capital (other than London), ranging from Vienna to Athens, from Warsaw to Rome, from Prague to Copenhagen, and from Brussels to Basel to Barcelona to Budapest.

Keep them in mind for your next European trip.