Website regarding hotels along certain highways?

Question

Is there a website where you can easily obtain information about all the cities and all the hotels/motels that are along a certain highway in a certain area? For example - we'll be traveling from Canton, OH to Charlotte, NC on I-77 and we want to just drive until we're tired...and I want to have an idea of what hotels are where along the way...

Answer 1

I'm not as sure about websites, but if you're a AAA member (which is a good idea, with roadside assistance and all of that), you can pick up "TourBooks" at any AAA office.  They contain AAA-approved listings in most areas you'll come across.  They've been a great source for finding lodging for us in many, many years of road trips.  Best of all, you don't need a laptop with Internet access in order to get the info.  You just open the book a few hours before you stop, and find some candidates.  You can then call ahead, or pull into town to see how the place is before you commit.

EDIT: Well, here's one relevant website I found regarding I-77 hotels, but it's far from an exhaustive list:

http://www.i77travel.com/

Seriously, go to your AAA office and pick up the TourBooks and maps for the places you're going to visit.  Places with AAA-approved listings appear in red on the AAA map (and there are MANY of them), just look along your selected highway.  Then, when you find a red-printed town, look it up in your AAA TourBook, and there will be a comprehensive listing of hotels/motels in that town.  It'll show rates, amenities, contact information, just about everything you need to make an informed decision; it'll be at least as detailed as any guide specifically about I-77, and it'll give you additional options in case you need to stray from I-77 for any reason.

Here's an example of that workflow:

You're driving along I-77, you started late in the day.  You pull out your AAA map to see which towns are down the road around the time that you'll be stopping for the night.  You see that Charleston, WV is a big place, so you pull out the AAA TourBook and look up Charleston.  Looking through the listings, you see some places that might work, and you find that a few of them are close together.  You pull out your cell phone and call the listed phone number of your choice to make the reservation.

Or, when you decide it's time to stop, you just pull into town, at an exit where there were many listings in the book, to see if they have anything.  If the town looks seedy, you get back on the highway and stop at the next place along the way, usually no more than 15 minutes down the road.

In short, the wealth of information in that (free with membership) combination of maps and TourBooks will be more than enough to help you make a good call.  You'll also ensure that you're staying in places that meet AAA's standards as far as satisfactory locks, things like that.

It's worked for us in about 20 years of trips, and we've almost always gone the drive-until-tired route.  It's worked in places as remote as Canada's Yukon Territory.  Really, we haven't found a better way to do it yet, even with easy web access and things like that.  Go to your local AAA office get the TourBooks and maps for the states you'll be passing through, and see what I mean.

Then again, there's a really good chance that you can do the Canton-to-Charlotte run in a single day.  It's under 500 miles, and on the Interstate, it should be a good one-day hop unless you get a late start (say, after noon or so), especially if you're not the only one driving.