VRBO usually requires 4 nights minimum.

We stayed at a Residence Inn on Amelia Island - I have to say the hotel staff was amazing and the 1 BR suite we got was nice BUT they were overbooked and put us the first night in a 1K - we were traveling with two kids who need their own Queen but were too young to be left alone in a hotel living room and I sure as hell wasn't sleeping on a sofabed for what they were charging. Another family we met had to go to a different motel their first night and it really made me leery of booking with them with kids.

We travel a good deal, mostly US, Caribbean, Europe and Asia. It's always amazing to me how difficult it is to find a room with sufficient bedding for our family of 6. How hard is it to have a suite with one king bed and a room with 2 queens? Pretty hard, apparently. Usually we get a king suite with a adjoining queen double room. But it's always very expensive.

Anonymous wrote:I booked a one bedroom suite at a Residence Inn, and when I got there, they said all the one bedroom suites were booked, and that they could not give me one. I had to take one where there wasn't really a divider between the king size bed and the sofa bed. This is a real issue for us because dh has insomnia and uses CPAP. He is usually up 2 hours during the middle of the night, and he wants to watch a movie or move around and have a snack. I am not booking with Residence Inn again after this.

This is very odd and not very good on that particular Residence Inn's part (they are franchises). I am the PP from above who has probably stayed at 20+ Residence Inns and I have never had that happen. I would not rule out Residence Inn because of this one experience. I hope they comped you something or gave you a lower price since your room was essentially a step down!

We always stay at Staybridges to get a suite.

I recently got 2 discount rooms via priceline. I did some research to figure out the likely hotels and made sure they had connecting rooms. We ended up with 2 connecting rooms, which was perfect (having 2 bathrooms was nice) and less expensive than a suite.

There was a good Washington Post article a few months ago about this suites-with-kids issue -- author basically said she always stays at an Embassy Suites because there's always a door:
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-04-11/lifestyle/38460181_1_embassy-suites-hotels-heat-wave