Share bathrooms

A room with "external facilities" (shared bath down the hall) always costs less for this minor inconvenience

Cardinal law of European hotel rooms: you pay more to have a private bathroom in the room.

If you don't mind sharing the common bathroom down the hall, you can easily save 25%–50%. Just like that. Just for being willing to carry your bathroom gear down the corridor, and for occasionally have to wait a bit for someone else to vacate the facilities.

In most places (aside from hostels), you usually share the hall bath with one or two other rooms—at most, four or five other rooms. Frequently you get it all to yourself; there was just no space to install a bathroom in your bedroom, so you have to use a private one out in the corridor.

(Most hotels, especially in historic centers, were not custom-built but rather converted from existing buildings, many of them actually pre-dating the entire concept of indoor bathroom.)

What's more, in the vast majority of hotels even the bathless rooms come equipped with at least a sink, they just lack the shower/tub or a toilet (and some even have the shower as well, just not the commode).

That means for simple ablutions and the hand-washing of your clothes you're still all set.

And don't worry, you can still hear nature calling from just down the hall. 

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