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Booking.com halts payments to hosts over IT technical maintenance (nltimes.nl)
95 points by jb1991 on July 17, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 105 comments



Am I the only one thinking that they are masking a cash flow problem?

Unless H/W is failing it seems to me that an existing system could just keep rolling along. If there is a capacity problem throw more H/W at it. I suppose if the S/W is poorly designed some intervention would be required. I once worked at a shop that had years of transactions clogging up a database when daily information was critical and perhaps monthly would be useful for reports.

As others have mentioned, incoming payments are processed but not outbound.


No, definitely not. The first and only time 24x7 missed a check payment and blamed their IT department was enough for me to start a 'plan B' and that ultimately saved the day. Of course their outward messaging was the everything was absolutely fine right up until the moment they were declared bankrupt.

Likewise 'IBill' and a couple of other cases besides. Regardless of origin: if they really have IT issues that can cause this then you should find an alternative. Unfortunately the 3rd party booking sites are so few in number when it comes to volume that your options are very limited.


I very much doubt it. They’re a huge company doing very good business: they have easy access to capital so even in a liquidity crisis they would have no problem addressing it before anyone noticed. If they’re insolvent, that would be one hell of an achievement and seems completely implausible.

The far more likely explanation is that their payout system is a heap of junk (as are so many systems).

https://ir.bookingholdings.com/overview/financials/quarterly...

You could get very rich shorting them if you believe they’ve run out of money.


> If they’re insolvent, that would be one hell of an achievement and seems completely implausible.

The problem is that their signal is completely ambiguous.

They're enacting maintenance during the busiest season.

So we're already at odds with what a serious company can be expected to do. Unless there's a serious reason.


Their most recent quarter shows a steep year on year decline in earnings. If there is hanky lanky in the books, it’ll show up in a down year.


Why speculate when we can inspect their financial filings?

https://ir.bookingholdings.com/financials/annual-reports/def...

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4611920-booking-holdings-ca...

I see positive net income and a positive net change in cash and cash equivalents.

“Net income for the quarter amounted to USD266 million, compared with a net loss of USD700 million the prior year quarter. Net income per diluted share was USD7 compared with a net loss of USD17.10 the same quarter a year earlier.”

“For Q1 2023 (quarter ended March 2023), Booking Holdings reported revenues up 40% YoY on a reported basis (47% on a constant currency basis) to USD3.8 billion, on the back of a 44% YoY increase in gross travel bookings which amounted to USD39.4 billion for the quarter, and a 38% YoY increase in room nights booked. Booking's performance outpaced rival Expedia (EXPE) whose gross bookings rose 20% YoY to USD29.4 billion the same quarter.”


Booking.com let someone create an account with my email address, register a room in Russia, then charge 20k a night for it. I called them the minute I saw it happening, they said they would take care of it. I still have the booking and the amount owed on the account (which I password reset and took control of).

So something is wrong with their system.


That’s really frustrating but what’s the intended angle here by the fraudsters? It’s just an email address.


The email address isn't what's important, what is important is the payment details associated with the account.


If they created the account, how did they get your payment info?


I think you're misunderstanding. They used the OPs email address and their own payment info, aka a 'joe job', it looks as if the OP is the one defrauding customers, but actually it is - probably, that could be yet another level of misdirection - the owner of the bank account in Russia.


I don’t think I’m misunderstanding. Since when is an email address used as a legal form of identification? If anyone can use an email address to sign up, OP isn’t liable for that.

They’re best off reporting it and ignoring it. Unless, of course, they used OP’s payment details.


Is there anyway to block your email to be registered into a website?


email addresses are strings, if the website where the registration is being made makes no effort to validate the email address is controlled by the user session registering it, how do you suppose to block it from happening?


Not that I know of; it's rather frustrating when you're constantly receiving some other person's correspondence (in spite of reaching out to them and asking them to update it).

From airline tickets, to bank statements, to collection agencies, to McDonald's HR portal, to HomeDepot invoices. Plz make it stop...


Booking.com is pretty awful on the backend. For instance they would often have line items in a payment that weren’t attributed to any reservation. Which is a pain in the ass if your accounting system assumes all payments will always be associated with a reservation.


Aren't they a Perl shop? That shouldn't matter, people can make it rain with, say, TCL in some places, but it must be hard to find engineers if that's the case.


They are Perl and no remote.


Source: You made it up

As someone who interviewed for a role last year, they're mostly migrated to Java / Python for backend services, some Go getting introduced as well. And half of my interviewers were working remotely from Spain / France / UK / etc.


Amazing job security really for those that work there


ironic being a travel website.


Google having a competitor for Zoom, FB once being so into meta, Apple promoting Vision pro as game changer yet none of them dogfood their own products, to integrate work from home. I guess building something is not the same as doing what works for them. Yeah, ironic, but that how businesses work, I think.


If you’re working for any of those companies even if you are in the office, more than likely you are working with people in other offices on your team.

But then again, I have no idea about how colocated the teams at Apple and Google are.


The difference is that Google, FB, Meta and Apple all have remote work policies - and depending on your role can be full remote.

Though yes, Apple/Meta as of late are trying to get people back in Office. Google I hear still lets you do full remote.


Full remote at Google is now mostly grandfathered employees. It is basically impossible to transition from in-office to remote.


Based their recruiters on LinkedIn I'd say they are Python/Django.


I think you might be right. Their GitHub org [0] has very few Perl repositories now, if that is a useful signal. They don't seem particularly crazy about open source though so I'm not sure how to read that.

0 - https://github.com/bookingcom


They're using Perl for some stuff, at least the first version of the website used Perl. One random example:

https://medium.com/booking-com-development/how-we-spent-two-...


Working with Booking.com as an affiliate over the years I have experienced so many broken things and a sheer indifference / ignorance from the company. For instance, their referral program was long abused by scammers who would place a hotel booking using stolen credit card and then claim 5% cashback via numerous online cashback services. Book a €5000 resort stay using someone's else card and get €250 out of it almost risk free. Fraudsters with the IP addresses from Palestine were happily exploiting this and Booking's anti-fraud systems were largely non-existent..


What is an online cashback service?


rakuten


Thanks, I wasn't aware of this type of service. Just so I understand the scam right, it sounds like in the above scenario it would be Rakuten left holding the bag?


Yeah we had a pretty high level of fraud come in from them. They really ought to have better controls on it as its well known that carders test cards by making hotel and STR bookings.


Curious how they need a 10 day outage on the outbound payment side, but not the inbound payment side which must be significantly more complex!


Why would the inbound be more complex? Inbound they're basically taking credit cards, and while they probably have a few card processors they use and some complexity around taking different cards via different processors in different countries, it's not too complex.

Outbound, they're paying into bank accounts (more complex), in many different countries with different protocols for bank transfers, with significant reporting and auditing requirements, invoicing, etc. Also paying on different timescales for different things – whether bulk purchasing inventory, paying for on-demand bookings, etc. Payment terms will vary by many factors including who the payee is. Some payees like large chains may have their own accounting systems that need to be integrated with.

I'd have generally assumed that outbound would be much more complex!


I believe it was sarcasm; of course they’ll continue collecting money and not paying people during maintenance, because who doesn’t want more money?


It was sarcasm but I still would hazard a guess that the public facing payments are harder than the backend payment runs.

A few thoughts as a non expert:

They might take thousands of bookings for a single hotel, so the volume of inbound payments is significantly more.

Public facing payments have to operate 24/7.

They have to deal with fraud and bad actors.

Transactions need to be real time rather than batch.

They need to support all kinds of international payments.

They have to take payments over web, mobile and call centres.

They have to support PCI and GDPR compliance on the customer side.

I’m sure neither side is easy at their scale, but B2C sounds much trickier to me even though there are opportunities to outsource on both sides.


In the USA, they pay hotels through prepaid credit cards. CC is attached to each reservation. And the hotel charges the card on the day guest arrives.

It may be complex, but they only give hotels 5 days for reconciliation, and won't accept any changes after 5 days.


Ah yes I've heard about this. That's yet another mechanism and more complexity. I'm sure they aren't doing this for every payee though.


agoda & priceline are doing for all the hotels in the USA for years.

Booking.com just started now. They just started this year where guest pays to booking.com and they send it to the hotels. Until last year, they didn't collect payment from the guest.


This is some new definition of the word "need" that I am unaware of. Methinks a liquidity problem is the true culprit.


Unless they've been doing shit like paying for promotion discounts in a "snowball" pyramid scheme - which I don't believe - they should not have a liquidity problem, quite the contrary, as people pay weeks to months in advance.

The interesting thing is... what's with the hosts who get into financial difficulties after 10 days of delayed payments. I get it that three years of a pandemic, the consequences of the Ruzzian war, and inflation have been a drain on everyone's reserves - but not even ten days of runway? Holy shit.


It's not 10 days; it's (up to) almost a month:

> payments for guests checking out from June 28 would be delayed and all paid out in one go on July 24.

That said, it sounds like payments are normally delayed by 10 days from checkout.

Of course, apparently some payments "could be delayed until August", so all I can say with authority is that this is a mess.


Okay now that is an entirely different amount of mess (and completely unacceptable), still troubling to see businesses having such a low amount of runway. I mean, anything could drive them into disaster at that point, even an unrelated natural disaster cutting off the roads to the village or whatever.


Came across this thread as I am owed well over 60 bed nights by BdotC. Say what you like about lack of runway, bear in mind that I bore all the costs for this accommodation upfront, some of it since May. Everything. If I had let those rooms out on another platform I would have been paid on check-in.

Why are they robbing the little guys, what is going on with their cash flow? A switchover can happen overnight, with the right planning, there should be no need to delay payments by 3 months!


While I lack direct first-person experience, I've heard some pretty harrowing tales about the state of booking.com's backend over the years from multiple independent sources, which makes me think that "technical reasons" is at least plausible.

Also, from a quick search, Booking seems to be doing fine financially.


100% has to be a liquidity issue. I am guessing that they invest the funds in trust in overnight markets and someone has had too many losses.


They are sponsoring FIFA women's football world cup 2023. Definitely, not bankruptcy or liquidity issue.


That would be quite the story, as I have the impression that Booking is absurdly profitable.


That's what they said about Van Moof, and plenty of other companies that ultimately went bankrupt.

They had a pretty bad loss two quarters ago:

"Net income was $266 million, compared with a net loss of $700 million in the prior-year quarter"

https://s201.q4cdn.com/865305287/files/doc_financials/2023/q...


payments to hosts over IT techni...

Please visit this group in FB which was created to register all the concerns from hosts and guests from all over the world. We can collectively work together to fix this situation. https://m.facebook.com/groups/1316864141779135/


Hahah, I wish. Booking stock is at an all-time-high at the moment, and we could have made very good money if they indeed had a liquidity problem.

Poor tech + poor timing. Take off the tinfoil hats.


To be fair, payment in is probably handled completely differently through a payment service provider as card payment, where as payment out probably is bank transfers, which I would imagine is not as easy.


Seems more or at least equally realistic that someone screwed up and now Booking.com won't admit that they are scrambling to fix something on the backend.


Scrambling implies something quick. This has been going on for too long to use that term.


If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck


They don't lose money if they slow down their payouts but they do lose money if they stop accepting money.

Basically, they can just down outbound payments for 10 days and not really lose any business. For most places it's probably not going to be that much of a problem they need to wait 10 days for a payment. If you can do something and it makes your life easiler why not?


They're setting their priorities straight.


I hate using these systems, hotels.com is another subpar example, at least as a customer, with only half working systems. It seems silly to me as a customer that the booking system, is also responsible for handling payments. I fully understand the lure of getting paid upfront, and the sociological impact on customers in regards to cancelling, but boy is it annoying me as a customer. I find it way easier to just pay at checkout, at the hotel. Now, not everyone is a hotel, and in those cases it might make sense.

There, I'll turn of the grumpy old man now.


Most people still think Hotels.com, Vrbo, Travelocity, Hotwire.com, Orbitz, Ebookers, CheapTickets, CarRentals.com, Wotif, and Trivago are separate companies, yet they are just Expedia brands and sell Expedia inventory. For the most part, all of them exist only as marketing brands and use the Expedia backend. I used to work for one of those brands and when we were all laid off during the transition, we were not allowed to tell our customers the brand was becoming Expedia.


It’s right on their website that these are Expedia brands.

https://welcome.expediagroup.com/en/about-us/about-expedia-g...

On the other hand, there are other companies not owned by Expedia who use their backend like AmexTravel.


it's not on hotels.com

The majority of the guest don't know about it.


It's right there on the about us page: https://www.hotels.com/lp/b/about_us?pos=HCOM_US&locale=en_U...

If you're a member they've been sending emails about how they're merging the rewards with Expedia's reward system.

Perhaps you're right that most guests don't pay enough attention to realize, but it's not a secret.


it's not visible to the guest. Sure you can look for it but that's not what visitors do.


I stay at a lot of hotels. I never use a third party portal. It’s hard to make last minute changes if not impossible and dealing with the hotel directly about any issues is much easier.

Last year, I was in San Francisco for a hybrid business/personal trip where I extended my stay on both ends, brought my wife and of course I paid the difference.

I booked the week at the Hilton San Francisco Financial District. We got there and it was a dump. It was late, we stayed one night, checked out the next night and moved to the Parc 55. That would be nearly impossible if I booked through a third party.

On top of that, you don’t get hotel status benefits or points booking through a third party. We were upgraded free to the “fitness room” with a gym inside the room as a Diamond member of Hilton and the points went toward free hotel stays.


But then Hilton are a prime example of charging way more on their site than through third parties. I can save 30% regularly with third parties. How much do I value their continuously downgraded loyalty scheme? Not much. In the UK even the basic rooms seem to be good enough so I don’t chase upgrades.

And the good hotels still thank me for being a loyal member and link my number to the booking on checkin (oddly occasionally I get the points too)


Hilton does price matching.

Also, I understand outside of the US, credit card rewards aren’t as lucrative. I get 20x points per dollar from Hilton for staying and an additional 14x from Hilton for using my cobranded Amex Hilton Aspire card when paying Hilton directly.


Mm, sounds good in theory! In my experience, third party sites deliberately show less room information/a partial room description I imagine precisely to prevent successful price-match claims. Though I can't say I've ever submitted one - I just assumed the third parties kind of work with the hotels to make it hard to claim.

And yes we have much less lucrative CC rewards here. Here, Amex are partnered with Marriott (ew. not many good ones in the UK) and you only earn 6x


Amex partners with both Hilton and Marriott in the US.


Ok? I was just pointing out the point multiplier difference


I use booking.com and I seem to pay about half the time at the hotels, so you can technically just pay at checkout at the hotel if you choose ones with that option.


It's actually a bit more complicated than this. It's not just about where you pay as a customer, it's also about the business model under which you're buying.

If you pay Booking, it's quite possible that Booking are acting as a reseller and buying wholesale hotel rooms to then sell to you at a markup. In that case Booking are the merchant, and who is ultimately responsible for the service. If you pay the hotel, Booking may take a fee but it's essentially commission, the hotel is fully responsible for the service and are the merchant.

None of this should really matter to the customer, but it does when things go wrong. Liability is different and consumer rights can be different if you're buying internationally or paying online vs in person.


> it's quite possible that Booking are acting as a reseller and buying wholesale hotel rooms to then sell to you at a markup.

They don't do that and none of their competitors do that. Booking.com charges hotels 15% in commission on their sales and that's it.

If you reserve through Booking.com, they are 100% responsible towards you for the reservation, and the hotel is 100% responsible towards Booking.com


> They don't do that and none of their competitors do that. Booking.com charges hotels 15% in commission on their sales and that's it.

This is how Expedia worked for many years. Booking didn't start out doing this, but I think both are now large enough that they all do a bit of both.

Some googling suggests Booking may not be buying wholesale directly, but may be just listing inventory from other wholesalers.

There's a good episode of the Acquired podcast on Booking.com that goes into some depth on their business model if you want more info.


Booking.com owns priceline & agoda.com

Both expedia and booking.com know better about the market condition than the hotels.

When they realize that rooms are selling fast in the area, they sell the room as prepaid rooms. If the nightly rate is $100, they sell it for $120-150 and they pay hotels $100 - 15-18% commission.

They also buy google ads in the area for the top results during that time. Most guests don't even realize they are clicking on their ads.


> When they realize that rooms are selling fast in the area, they sell the room as prepaid rooms. If the nightly rate is $100, they sell it for $120-150 and they pay hotels $100 - 15-18% commission.

I've never seen Booking.com do that with any hotel no matter how high the demand, and I have never heard anybody in the industry having experienced that. What do you base your claim on?

That would make little sense, since the proposal of Booking.com is to always offer the cheapest rates.

However they do buy a ton of Google Ads for hotel bookings.


Booking.com doesn't do opaque rates but agoda and Priceline are different.

I'm very hands on at my hotel. Sometimes guest shows us how much they have paid. There were times when someone handed the guest receipt showing how much we got paid and they come back saying why they were charged more than the receipt. Older guest brings the printout of their booking.

Booking even had a unique website for my hotel. We had to involve the franchise to get it shut down.


Having the same owners is very different than saying that Booking.com does something. For one, each property owner decides who he or she partners with for sales. Your property won't be on Agoda or Priceline unless you've made a deal with them.

> Booking even had a unique website for my hotel. We had to involve the franchise to get it shut down.

Unless you're talking about listing page that they have for each property, I have a hard time believing this. Only if the previous hotel owner made some kind of thing together with them.


Only for the record, 15% and up, often nearer to 20% (it depends on country and particular agreements).

Responsability varies greatly depending about what is the issue at hand.


And this explains why CapitalOne can give customers 10% back on hotels booked their portal…


And this is why you should always book directly with the hotel.


Depends greatly on the hotel. Some of them won't even give the same discounts to direct customers that they give through booking.com


I think there is no issues in bundling software to provide a turn key solution, that way the customers can focus on their business, not the complexity that comes with digital solutions.

with that being said, I'm pretty sure marketplace regulations (such as booking.com) forces the marketplace to be out of the money flow. so this should be on the PSP side, it's strange that booking.com is halting payments this way.

another point is that they're collecting 4% interest on money that's not theirs ... I wonder if they plan on paying out the interest.


> I find it way easier to just pay at checkout, at the hotel

Of course. And it's much easier to frivolously book and cancel rooms if you don't need to pay up-front.

Charging at booking time gets rid of a lot of guests who make "maybe" bookings, making it easier for real visitors to get their accommodation. That's the reason most hotels are moving to that model.


From my little experience inside hotels, the amount of people making "frivolous" bookings is small, and the normal policy (bar particular times of the year) of hotels is to allow free cancellation if done within reasonable time before arrival (one or two days in advance).


It depends on location, but in my experience about 20-30% will later cancel if they can reserve for free. Upfront payment reduces this a lot, even with free cancellation and refund.


Definitely a different market/location/kind of customers/whatever, I would say 2-3% at the most.


It looks very simple from that brief article. They hold the cards and can get away with it. I'd imagine they aren't so tolerant if the same hosts are delayed with their fees and payments.


Reminds me of VanMoof, whose messaging a week ago was:

> We have temporarily paused sales to catch up on the production and delivery of existing orders. Rest assured – this has no effect on servicing.

... and then news broke that it's on the brink of bankruptcy.


yeah, except Vanmoof is not even publicly traded while Booking has a $100B market cap on NASDAQ with 'profitable as fck' credit rating.

just poor tech capabilities & timing. nothing deep here. (not a speculation.)


>> temporarily paused sales

I interpret that as... we have laid off the entire sales team


Whoa, yes. Nothing for 3 weeks. I'm owed £1900 so far.

Their back-end systems must be horrendous - I've maintained an integration for years that works off their PDFs and they keep making little tweaks, adding lines here and there, renaming columns, adding odd lines that refer to charges they "forgot" to collect months before.

I'm going to contact a few future bookings and say that booking.com have not been paying their bills, and to see if I can get them to rebook direct.


Came across this thread as I am owed well over 60 bed nights by BdotC. Say what you like about lack of runway, bear in mind that I bore all the costs for this accommodation upfront, some of it since May. Everything. If I had let those rooms out on another platform I would have been paid on check-in. Why are they robbing the little guys, what is going on with their cash flow? A switchover can happen overnight, with the right planning, there should be no need to delay payments by 3 months!


Most people here are missing, what is in my opinion, the most probable reason: It doesn't affect their bottom line.

If this was affecting guest checkout, it'll be resolved within hours with execs being all over it.

But this affects outbound payments, same as if it was affecting refunds. There is no legal requirements here (with penalties) and hosts are hostage to the system. The alternatives are not much better (if not worse) due to the enshittification of the whole IT sector.

Welcome to Web 4.0. I guess we'll be missing Web 3.0.


You are definitely not the only one suspecting a financial problem in booking.com. I am a host in Greece and I am experiencing the delay regarding payouts from the company. I have complained but getting no qualified response. Very frustrating and worrying


I think delaying payment for almost a whole month is due to their extremely dominant position on the market and little to do with "IT technical maintenance".

Pretty much every big system at a big company is a "pile of junk", but they had all the time, money and resources to improve it. They didn't, the question is: Would Booking.com act the same way if they were a small player in a market with a dozen big players?


> They’re also displeased that Booking decided to do its maintenance now, in the busy summer season.

The busy summer season... as half of the earths surface is in winter.


is "IT Technical maintenance" poorly worded coms for "ransomware"? because that's what it looks like from here.


Or simply a lack of operating cash and they use this to jump across the shortage hoping nobody will notice.


How many independent hotel booking companies are there these days?

I can only think of only 2: Booking Holdings and Expedia Group.

Are there more?


Please visit this group in FB which was created to register all the concerns from hosts and guests from all over the world. We can collectively work together to fix this situation.

https://m.facebook.com/groups/1316864141779135/


There's also e.g., HRS Group in Germany [1] - albeit much smaller with a revenue of about 200M €.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/HRS_Group


Booking and Expedia are the same company as mentioned in another comment here.


Which post? I think this is a misunderstanding.

Booking Holdings and Expedia Group are two different, publicly listed companies.


That smells like a hack.




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