How to go on holiday with no hotel

I am having a tiny bit of a crisis. Its nothing life threatening but to be fair, I get stressed so easily that it doesn't need to be. I mentioned in an earlier blog post about going to Belgium for my 2 year anniversary and I had just paid a down payment on accommodation and booked a flight. You might be thinking so far so good but really that's around when everything started to go wrong. So I took responsibility for booking the flights with himself chipping in later, he's in the middle of getting a business up and running so it seemed like a fair exchange. Unfortunately because I do not have the high flying career I hoped for at this point in my life, this means I did not have a whole lot left in the budget for booking accommodation. Luckily for me the internet has a few options in store for this kind of thing and I went onto a third party hostel website that allows you to book a room in advance and only pay a deposit of 12-15% up front. I picked a hostel that seemed to be within our price range and offered a private room and with a go ahead from my other half I booked our three nights. Right now you might be thinking that's my job done and surely all that's left is for me to sit back and relax while putting some spending money aside. Unfortunately that's not how my story goes. It seems I did not pick the best hostel because under pressure and panicking about finances, I did not think to stop and read the reviews. I only realised this was going to be a problem when I checked my online banking several hours later and saw a charge for my deposit plus a pending charge from the hotel taking the remaining balance. And so it began.

 I got on the phone with the hostel booking site straight away to get it sorted it out and they promised to investigate. Two days later the payment was taken out of my card, a payment I couldn't afford to make at this time. I called the hostel booking site again and they told me they had contacted the hotel and I just needed to email them with my details and a refund would be organised. I made numerous attempts to contact the hotel and got no response. By this stage I was annoyed and a little panicked about my choice of accommodation. I called the hostel booking site again and again and from they were telling it seemed like they were having difficulty contacting the hotel or that the hotel was reluctant to refund me at this point. Finally today I got an email from the hostel company saying that the hotel had agreed to refund me and to contact them again if it wasn't in my account in the next week. I'm also getting a refund of the deposit I paid the hostel company because they have decided to not process bookings for this hotel any longer. This leaves me with one major problem.

 In 25 days we will be staying in Brussels for three nights and we currently have nowhere to stay. Tonight I have €5 in my account which wont get me very far, rooms are filling up and accommodation is getting more expensive the closer we get. I get paid this Friday and I would have some funds available to make another booking, all while watching my bank account expectantly for signs of my promised refund. I am worried that everything nice is going to be outside my budget and I really don't fancy sharing a room with strangers. I'm also a little concerned that this refund will not arrive when it should and I can't exactly do without it. I'm starting to think that going away was not the best idea I've had this year. Hopefully we will work it all out and it wont be a complete nightmare. But regardless of how things turn out, I would recommend that if you are going to Brussels that you don't book with Hotel Francois, no matter how cheap their rates might seem. 

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