Wowza! I'm not usually one to complain about costs, but some of these hotels are out of their mind with what they are asking. Maybe I was spoiled with super cheap hotels last summer. Some of them are also including tricky cancellation policies.
An example, the Courtyard in Kennesaw wants $270/night for the cancel anytime rate (compared to $220/night with the "you are screwed if you need a change" rate) for the first weekend in June.
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Try Air B&B. Not sure what's available now, but several years ago I rented a place in Cartersville for two months. It was the summer between son's HS jr & Sr years, and he played a ton of tournaments in Lakepoint area. Got an entire basement studio with private entrance and hot tub for < $500/mo. We live 3 hours away, and he actually spent a good chunk of the time there by himself during the weeks when we were home at work.
We started using Airbbnb.com for all of our trips to watch our son and it is very reasonable and very comfortable. May not work with a large family but we stay in Knoxville in a nice house for $103 total for weekend.
@TerribleBPthrower posted:Wowza! I'm not usually one to complain about costs, but some of these hotels are out of their mind with what they are asking. Maybe I was spoiled with super cheap hotels last summer. Some of them are also including tricky cancellation policies.
An example, the Courtyard in Kennesaw wants $270/night for the cancel anytime rate (compared to $220/night with the "you are screwed if you need a change" rate) for the first weekend in June.
Apologies if you're not a drinking man, but I advise you to have a couple of stiff cocktails before you shop for your rental car.
I will agree on the previous post. We were looking for wife plane, car, and hotels for this weekend in College Station. When flight is the cheapest of the three, life is bad. The cheapest car rental was $67 a day with several add ons (put there by them not us) the cost was $412 picking up on Friday returning on Monday. I can't imagine a week long rental.
Everyone is trying to recoup losses - it's called planning for the past /-|... For different reasons I was looking at the costs of airbnb, sonder, and vrbo - it was eye opening to say the least compared to previous usages of the same services.
$1500 on hotels and it does not include a butler...what the heck. Yes, I am emptying the top shelf before shopping for rental car. At this point, I am really considering the 15+ hour drive.
Crud. We usually drive as the furthest tournaments are 8 or 9 hours away. There is one this summer in Greenville that we were planning on renting a car for a few days. After seeing a couple posts I decided to look around. I think I'm going to look into having my car shipped to Greenville instead of renting!
I haven’t rented a car for a while. But I read it’s outrageous now. I remember when we did East Cobb and Fort Myers back to back over ten years ago I spent more on me to attend than my son to play.
Can't help much with the car rental but I will triple down on Airbnb... recently found a decent place 20 min. out of Hilton Head for $40 while my brother paid well over $300 for a resort room close to the beach, this even on a weekend. We also found a place for $65 at a stopover in Columbia that included breakfast for both my wife and I, was in a very nice home in a safe neighborhood. Both dog friendly, no less. You have to watch the extra fees but deals can be found!
@cabbagedad posted:Can't help much with the car rental but I will triple down on Airbnb... recently found a decent place 20 min. out of Hilton Head for $40 while my brother paid well over $300 for a resort room close to the beach, this even on a weekend. We also found a place for $65 at a stopover in Columbia that included breakfast for both my wife and I, was in a very nice home in a safe neighborhood. Both dog friendly, no less. You have to watch the extra fees but deals can be found!
What are the typical extra fees to watch for? Do leave your dog there if you go out to dinner or do you always have your dog with you? I’d be afraid mine would chew something, or bark and cry until we returned.
Turo is a reasonable option to traditional rental cars.
@TerribleBPthrower posted:What are the typical extra fees to watch for? Do leave your dog there if you go out to dinner or do you always have your dog with you? I’d be afraid mine would chew something, or bark and cry until we returned.
With Airbnb, VRBO and others, there is the stated nightly rate and then, the host has liberty to ad other fees such as cleaning, service, occupancy taxes and other, etc. You usually have to go into the listing to see the extra fees. Most are minimal and/or reasonable. Some are excessive. I like that airbnb shows the total (less Airbnb take) as a sub price on the original listing page.
With pets, it is case by case and you would want to have some dialog with the host. I think it would be unusual to expect to leave a pet unless you have a crate setup or something similar. Our lab is extremely well trained and crate trained. Still, we are very much inclined to take her with us for the day. We have seen (but not used) on rare occasion a set up where the host also offers to pet-sit. If there is any concern that your pet would chew or bark, you have your answer, IMO.
@TerribleBPthrower posted:Crud. We usually drive as the furthest tournaments are 8 or 9 hours away. There is one this summer in Greenville that we were planning on renting a car for a few days. After seeing a couple posts I decided to look around. I think I'm going to look into having my car shipped to Greenville instead of renting!
If you plan it right you can make Greenville in 8-9 hours.
Hrm, haven't started booking our PG trips for GA and FL yet. Was anticipating low rates. Guess I was wrong.
NYC right now is the worst. $175+ per day for a midsize.
@TPM posted:If you plan it right you can make Greenville in 8-9 hours.
The challenge with this trip is my son was going to do a camp the day before in the northeast and we were going to fly to Greenville after the camp. My wife was going to fly out of west Palm and meet us there.
I had been looking at hotels for trip to East Cobb in June. We initially booked a hotel in Marietta. Not an ideal price, but not a deal breaker either. But then I found a house on AirBnb that was much cheaper and in a less congested area. Sold! Not having to fight 50 other families for a washing machine had me sold right away. I am hoping when we go back for the WWBA tournaments we can grab the same house.
For rental cars, I consider myself lucky. My company has a contract with National. So we have rates locked in plus Emerald Club access. So I have been able to book cars at pre-covid prices.
@ARCEKU21 posted:I had been looking at hotels for trip to East Cobb in June. We initially booked a hotel in Marietta. Not an ideal price, but not a deal breaker either. But then I found a house on AirBnb that was much cheaper and in a less congested area. Sold! Not having to fight 50 other families for a washing machine had me sold right away. I am hoping when we go back for the WWBA tournaments we can grab the same house.
For rental cars, I consider myself lucky. My company has a contract with National. So we have rates locked in plus Emerald Club access. So I have been able to book cars at pre-covid prices.
Where is the AirBnB you found located? I saw a couple solid rentals in Kennesaw. The early June event is at Lakepoint, so that would be pretty convenient for us.
@TerribleBPthrower posted:Where is the AirBnB you found located? I saw a couple solid rentals in Kennesaw. The early June event is at Lakepoint, so that would be pretty convenient for us.
We are staying up in the Canton, GA area. Some people on this board suggested looking in the Woodstock area and north of there.
I bet it would be fun to rent a house on Lake Alatoona for the WWBA week
@TerribleBPthrower posted:I bet it would be fun to rent a house on Lake Alatoona for the WWBA week
One of the guys on our team had his camper trailer at a campground on Allatoona.
If you don't mind driving a bit farther, there are also rental houses up on Lake Arrowhead. This works out great if you can get games scheduled at Reinhardt.
We stayed for years at Lake Allatoona Campground. Very nice facilities and a lot of baseball player's families stay there. About 5 minutes from Lakepoint. They have a couple of cabins for rent.
@PitchingFan posted:We stayed for years at Lake Allatoona Campground. Very nice facilities and a lot of baseball player's families stay there. About 5 minutes from Lakepoint. They have a couple of cabins for rent.
Any chance you have a link to the cabin rentals? I went through the campground website and only see info on general campsites.
Allatoona Landing “may” have cabins for rent. Check Wilderness on Allatoona as well.
Allatoona Landing Campground https://www.allatoonalandingma....com/campground.html
If you want a once in a lifetime trip, not cheap. A friend a few years ago rented a houseboat for the week of WWBA.
@PitchingFan posted:Allatoona Landing Campground https://www.allatoonalandingma....com/campground.html
If you want a once in a lifetime trip, not cheap. A friend a few years ago rented a houseboat for the week of WWBA.
When you say "not cheap," what are we talking here? $5k? $10k?
Thanks guys for the cabin tips. Those look like a lot of fun.
I think it was about $3,000 for the week. But that was pre-Covid so who knows now. Hard to find if I remember right.
$3k is reasonable depending on the quality of the houseboat. I'm really digging the Lake Allatoona cabin idea though.
We rented an Airbnb right on the water at Lake Allatoona for WWBA one year. An upstairs garage apartment. It was for a week, but we just left after 6 days when we were through with the tourney.
There was a local family that was headed to Florida several weeks ago for spring break and booked her airfare first....then couldn't find a car rental at any price. Finally booked a U-Haul van.
That is thinking out of the (batters) box!
@TerribleBPthrower posted:$3k is reasonable depending on the quality of the houseboat. I'm really digging the Lake Allatoona cabin idea though.
Let me know if you stay there or on the lake and I can swing by and we can go for a boat ride.
@Shoveit4Ks posted:Let me know if you stay there or on the lake and I can swing by and we can go for a boat ride.
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Is it not the case that WWBA is pay-to-play, i.e., you must stay in one of the hotels designated by PG or will be ineligible? That has been our impression.
@NotMadeOf$$ posted:Is it not the case that WWBA is pay-to-play, i.e., you must stay in one of the hotels designated by PG or will be ineligible? That has been our impression.
That is what they say. But it's not enforced. Our team stayed all over the Ft Myers area last year.
Last summer we actually received an email from PG while at a Ft. Myers tournament asking us to verify our hotel. We ignored the email. He still played.
@NotMadeOf$$ posted:Is it not the case that WWBA is pay-to-play, i.e., you must stay in one of the hotels designated by PG or will be ineligible? That has been our impression.
So, here's what the rule was in 2017 and 2018, when I was our team's hotel rep. I asked them several times to confirm. They required that each team have the number of rooms in an official hotel to house the equivalent of the whole team 4 to a room, plus coach. Thus, if your team had 20 players, you had to have 5+1=6 rooms in official hotels. They didn't care who was actually staying in the rooms, it could be 6 families, whatever, they just required 6 rooms for a 20-person team.
I have absolutely no idea if PG ever checked. Some other tournaments did check, and I got phone calls asking about who was staying where.
@TerribleBPthrower posted:Last summer we actually received an email from PG while at a Ft. Myers tournament asking us to verify our hotel. We ignored the email. He still played.
Similar instance at the 14u National a few years ago. They kept emailing and emailing asking to confirm our hotel reservations. I finally replied back and told them we didn't book a hotel through the options they listed and we booked hotel on our own. Never heard anything back after that.
I don't even think we received any emails about hotels in Ft. Myers this past summer.
