[holiday] rooms for st. valentine's day fantasists

Whatever your status this coming Valentine's Day weekend, you might enjoy clicking around the hotel website Room for Romance. It's a collection of intimate hotels, almost all in Europe with a few from Australia and Morocco thrown in for good measure. These are small properties, each one more charming than the next. I like the funky looks of Miller's Residence in Notting Hill. Each room is named after a romantic poet, Byron, Blake, Browning -- and that's just the B's. I think I'd chose Shelley for me and the boy, since that's the name of his Russian tortoise.

Caveat emptor: I can't vouch for the website. There's not much "who, what or where" under the "about" link. I'd do a bit of research before booking through the website and consider booking directly with the property if I didn't learn more about its bona fides. It can help enormously to work with a site like this, provided it's reputable, especially considering the European differential when it comes to hotel reservations. Case in point: I booked a hotel in Rome last summer through Small Luxury Hotels. At check-in, the front desk wanted to charge me for a missed night -- which was due to a national train strike. (Those Italians.) When I said I'd take up the matter with SLH, the front desk obliged.

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