How to Find LGBTQ+-Welcoming Places to Stay

We have one big trip a year, two short ones, and a six-year-old who still needs a bath before bed and an eleven-year-old who has started asking why some countries have different rules about families like ours. Budapest last April, four of us, seven nights, and I got the accommodation wrong in a way that cost us €340 and a full day of the holiday.

So this is the order I actually work in now, which is not the order I used to work in, because price used to come first and price now comes fourth.

Before I look at a single room price

Four things, in this order, and none of them take longer than twenty minutes:

Whether the country’s national tourism board has a current, dated statement rather than a page last updated in 2019.
Whether the booking site lets me filter on something more specific than “LGBTQ+ friendly”, which as a binary tickbox tells me almost nothing.
Whether the property has reviews from the last nine months, and whether any of them are from same-sex couples travelling with children.
Whether the hotel’s own site uses the word “family” anywhere in its room descriptions, because that is the tell I missed in Budapest.

That last one sounds like nothing. The place I booked had a rainbow flag in the lobby photographs and a “family room” that turned out to be two doubles and no cot, and when I asked at reception they told me, without any hostility at all, that the cot was for married couples. I am not making a political point. I am telling you I paid €340 for the last three nights somewhere else.

The middle part, where I stop trusting the flag

Badges are marketing. Vetting is slower but it is what I do now.

I read the one-star and two-star reviews first, not the fives, because a hostile property does not usually hide, it just gets reviewed by people who did not expect it. I check whether the same-sex couple reviews mention the front desk by name, since “the woman on nights was lovely” is a real signal and “great stay!!!” is not. And I look at how the property answered, because a hotel that replies to a complaint with a paragraph is a hotel that will pick up the phone for me at 11pm with a tired six-year-old.

I also pull up the best time to fly Budapest – Tel Aviv screen for the following spring, roughly 11 months out, not because we are going but because the search screen gives me a sense of which months the route is busy, and busy months mean accommodation gets tight and I lose the ability to be picky. On that route, April and August fill first; late May had 40% more rooms showing when I last looked in January.

What I will not do to save €200

I will not book a non-refundable rate. Ever. The €340 lesson taught me that the flexible rate, usually 12-18% more, is the price of being able to leave. On a €1,900 seven-night booking that is around €280, and I have paid it three times since without once needing it, which I count as money well spent.

I will also not use a whole-apartment listing as my first choice with kids, because there is no desk to ask, and the desk is the entire point. Our fallback is a chain with a published equality policy and a phone number, and a train rather than a flight if the connection is under five hours, which for us it usually is.

The variable that decides it, every time, is whether I can get a human on the phone before I pay.