Whether or not you are a businessperson travelling to a town to conduct business or a vacationer keen to see the sights of a certain urban center; it's likely you'll have specific standards when it comes to accommodation. What is more, regardless of whether you're looking for accommodation in Johannesburg, Tokyo or Berlin you'll probably need it to be situated in a handy position and possess a reasonable variety of comforts and services at reasonable tariffs.
The inhabitants of a town will likely be able to list a few suitable accommodation venues and where they're located without giving it much thought because they're familiar with the town they reside in. An inhabitant is also likely to know what is a good deal regarding lodging since they're accustomed to the 'going rate' and recognize what constitutes value-for-money in their own unit of currency. On the flip side, to a person who is planning on going to a town they've never visited before, finding suitable accommodation in Johannesburg, or anywhere else for that matter, could be a challenging task.
A printed travel guide will probably provide you with a list of accommodations and places to visit along with a rating and an average cost bracket. Even so, it can be difficult to get more than a basic idea of the available lodgings and what they are likely to cost you from guidebooks because they are usually pretty limited and incorporate few photographs. Naturally, a to-scale map will tell you where things are located however it can be hard to judge how easily you'll be able to travel around an urban area from an one-dimensional map. Let's make use of the town of Johannesburg to illustrate to clarify this point...
Johannesburg is usually a sprawling town arranged over a wide geographical area. The city proper is not so much found in just one location as spread throughout a series of municipal districts and it is easy to make the error of thinking accommodation in Johannesburg is a lot more located than it is. Moreover, notwithstanding the fact that this town is not as badly congested with regards to traffic as certain other advanced cities the general public transportation system in Johannesburg is crude at best. It's very hard for a visitor to get around this town without paying through the nose for a personal taxi service. The ramifications of this are that a visitor may think that the reasonably-priced accommodation in Johannesburg they have identified is centrally-located when in reality it is not and there's no easy way of getting to or from this place of lodging without condiderable exertion and expenditure.
Luckily, the web now takes a lot of the hassle out of of finding reasonably-priced and conveniently-situated overnight accommodation in a city you are unfamiliar with. You can now utilize Google Maps to assist you to familiarise yourself with the layout of a town before you visit it. What's more, most lodging venues possess websites these days with photo galleries which give you an idea of what your accommodation will actually look like, and you can use an internet foreign exchange converter to change the price of the accommodation to your own currency.