If you're traveling to an unfamiliar area, and especially if it's last-minute, and you aren't wedded to one particular hotel brand (or they have no availability), then finding a decent room is currently a big pain in the butt and there's no good centralized way to do it.

booking.com frequently appears at the top of searches for "hotels near..." and other third-party travel sites, like tripadvisor, link to it.

They've done a good job of getting their site in front of eyeballs. Like others, I've tried them, and like others, found them to be awful and now actively avoid them.