This reminds me of a job I once had that was about 50% travel; the company required employees to charge travel expenses to their personal credit cards, saying they would be reimbursed. The company consistently dragged its feet on the reimbursement, sometimes for several months. They scrutinized reported expenses to an absurd level, or simply refused to pay. I once had a layover on a flight (because the company required the least expensive flight, which was generally not direct) that was cancelled. I was stuck in Denver for 9 hours, waiting for an available flight. I got something to eat and reported it as a travel expense. Denied; I was told the expense didn't occur in the city where I was working, so it was personal, not business-related. A colleague had her credit card maxed with business travel charges, and could only afford to make the minimum payment for several months. She requested the company pay the interest on the carried charges. Take a guess how that went? Denied. She ended up quitting, and last I heard the company refused to reimburse her because she was no longer an employee. I ended up quitting, too. But yeah, this article reminded me of that situation. When it's known that you're basically powerless to collect on a debt, you can expect to get screwed.
I suppose many of us are lucky to work in high-margin software businesses. I spent 15 years often travelling for work (typically very distributed companies) before the pandemic. Four separate companies. Everything paid on my personal CC. I preferred it that way so that I could optimize the flights/etc to make it fit my personal life. Everything reimbursed swiftly with zero questions since I never did anything really stupid. The only real bottleneck was myself; filing all of those damned receipts for every trip.
Having some kind of centralized travel booking service that "took care of everything" would likely have caused me to find another job. For one company I did a monthly 6h travel + a few days of hotel + 6h travel thing for a decade. Not being in total control over that would simply not have been feasible.
I have no idea how people doing a large amount of travel for stereotypical low-margin large companies manage to get by.
> Having some kind of centralized travel booking service that "took care of everything" would likely have caused me to find another job
Having worked at both kinds of companies, I vastly preferred having a travel agent that took care of everything.
For example: one time I had a later flight with a layover. The initial flight was delayed on the tarmac before takeoff, and immediately upon landing, a person called me telling me there were no more flights that evening to my final destination, but they'd already booked me a hotel near the airport and the first flight out in the morning to my final destination, and asked me if I'd like any modifications. Perhaps someone else who wants more control would like to handle that stuff themselves, but for me, it was a massive luxury to have an experienced professional automatically smooth over any problem I encountered during my travel. I certainly didn't miss keeping all my crumpled receipts and submitting expense reports either.
In theory, having a third party would be nice. In my experience, it's merely added substantial friction to the process. Any changes required going back through the third party, which means waiting to talk to someone for changes that I could normally do online.
A great example of self-service actually making things worse for people. There are many, many more of those, and it leads me to believe that software's transformation of the economy isn't as positive on the net as people seem to believe.
This is the reason why I refuse to pay for any work travel expenses with my credit card.
I once worked for a company that had a similar travel process. When I was asked to travel, I insisted that my VP have his assistant schedule and pay for everything. When I arrived at the hotel on one trip, the hotel asked me for a credit card to pay for the booking. I stepped out of line and called my VP to have him fax his card info to the hotel.
I understand this wouldn't work for everyone but I think it's ok to question the policy and see how much flexibility there is. In my case, I was able to avoid taking on personal liability for my employer's expenses by pushing back and working with my VP to find a solution that I was comfortable with.
While it's legal for employers to require employees to use personal credit cards for work-related expenses, it's a huge labor code violation not to timely reimburse employees for such expenses.
As in, huge mandatory fines on top of reimbursing employees for 100% of their costs (including interest and other charges incurred related to late reimbursement) type of violation.
If you're not willing to name and shame here, please report it to the state's Dept of Labor if this was within the past 5 years so current employees can be protected.
if this is US, file a wage claim with local state government. Reimbursement for expenses while traveling is valid.
Depending on the state you can file many years later after you've left the job. So feel free to get a new job and file a claim with a spreadsheet of what they missed.
From the time you arrive at a departure airport, to the time that you arrive at the destination airport, is general considered “paid” (non-exempt) travel time.
However, to my knowledge, there is no federal law that an employer is required to reimburse you for any of your travel-related expenses. (Which is, in itself, ridiculous.)
why wait until after you quit? before you quit you get to use your worktime to deal with the lawsuit (just because) and if they harass you at work for suing them, you add that to the lawsuit. if they fire you, add that too.
I'm trying to think how I would ideally set up such a system. The person traveling is in the best position to determine the most cost effective way to travel. Ideally you could somehow determine or negotiate ahead of time what travel expenses should be and then just pay that to the employee. Then they would just travel as they like and either pocket any savings they can find, fly cheaper if they value their time less than the saved money or pay extra if they value flying first class.
The way Google did it was that you listed where you were going and what dates and they did some sort of magical formula to figure out your max allowable costs for the trip. They were always well above the minimum costs. For every $2 below the cap, you got $1 to be able to exceed the cap in the future. It ended up working out so about every 5 economy trips you could do one business class trip (depending on how economical you were). I felt like it aligned the incentives well.
«A Booking.com market manager in south-east Asia admitted at a recent industry event that payment delays were caused by the installation of a new payment system. Staff salaries were also affected, she said, explaining it as a risk they had to take.»
It seems like there is a misunderstanding of who is on the taking and receiving end of risks
Sad to see the top comments in the thread not even bothering to discuss the technical reasons and legal implications behind this .. and instead everyone wants to just discuss unrelated anecdotes about their personal travels.
The story here is about how booking.com is screwing over hotels and hostels, not guests. Someone should create a different thread for that, because apparently people have a very strong need to tell their tangentially related stories.
You've seen how discussions work in real life right? There's no requirement to stick to some topic at hand, it's a free-flowing dialogue. That's what you're seeing happen in this discussion board too.
Real companies have competent adults build and test this type of thing so they don’t stiff their vendors or miss payroll. It’s not an area where you should let techbros move fast and break things.
It’s booking.com, they are notorious for not being competent adults. Just check out this article about their working conditions [1] (you might want to google translate it you happen to not speak Dutch).
> the developers complain about Perl programming language, which forms the basis of the online platform and to which, according to them, is held far too rigidly. Criticism of Perl may even result in dismissal, according to an anonymous source.
If this machine translation is correct and the statement true, then this is borderline hilarious. I know that some companies keep their languages dearly, but that's taking it to the next level.
> Criticism of Perl may even result in dismissal, according to an anonymous source
That statement is absurd. You can't dismiss an employee in the Netherlands for such a stupid reason. I used to work in their HQ as a developer, and complaining about Perl was always water cooler talk.
Perl used to be a really popular language for cgi scripts. So much easier than writing them in C! I can't describe how amazing PHP was at the time of its inception. While I have trouble picturing somebody starting a big website in perl today, it's certainly plausible that momentum prevents a switch pretty much indefinitely.
All the newer stuff is in Go or Python (thank God), but there's an acrophyal story about someone asking Octave Klaba, the founder of OVH about any regrets he had, and he allegedly responded "maybe using Perl was a bad idea".
A Booking.com market manager in south-east Asia admitted at a recent industry event that payment delays were caused by the installation of a new payment system. Staff salaries were also affected, she said, explaining it as a risk they had to take.
From an earlier article:
In the company’s August results, CFO David Goulden said there were "lower than expected" IT expenses in the second quarter of this year, in part due to phasing IT spend into the third quarter, but did not outline what this IT expense included.
It's interesting to see prevailing negative sentiment about booking here. My experience is completely different: usually a very nice place, no surprises, two times the host has done something wrong (cancelled my reservation or didn't respond) booking support was very quick to help me.
On the other hand I consider Airbnb to be a scam enabling company that does everything to screw the customer and appease the hosts. Their reviews are worthless as they remove mentions of problems regularly and you will never know what you're getting until you arrive at the location. Forget about getting your money back if the host screws you as well - they will string you along from one support call to another and then pretend none of this happened.
It's no surprise shady hosts prefer Airbnb to booking as it's easier to keep your trap offerings online for longer.
I had a few horrible experiences with Booking.com and the others where I'd arrive at the hotel and they'd never heard of me, or I'd ask for an extra day in person but the hotel couldn't help me because I didn't book directly with them, or they didn't serve breakfast but Booking said they did and the hotel was in the middle of nowhere etc.
I finally wised up. Hotels basically hate guests who book with a service like Booking.com and they will not lift a finger to help you if anything goes wrong.
Now I use Booking.com, Kayak, etc to find hotels in the general area I need, then use google or DDG to find the website of the hotel (a process much easier said than done because the booking sites SEO the hell out of search engine results), then book directly with the hotel or its parent chain.
I guess this will never satisfy everyone, because my experience is the opposite. I've been using booking.com for about 10 years and the only things that kinda went wrong were when I didn't. So yeah, I've not had to test their failure procedure yet, but at least I've never experienced anything I booked not being available. (I had one hotel take my card payment on arrival and it was also done via booking but I blame the weird hotel here, booking refunded without problems).
I wish someone from the accommodation industry would tell us all how the central booking system and most hotel chains are abusing everyone, from inn and hotel owners to end customers. Their contracts are pure gold, in the sense that they cloak all possibility of independence under a thick cover nothing can pierce through. Tourism, they are killing it, literally.
There are multiple GDSs, and AFAIK neither Expedia nor Booking.com use them. The space is way more confused and competitive then your comment implies. The best writeup I've seen on the space is https://www.altexsoft.com/blog/hotel-api/, if you really want to dive into the details.
What do you mean by "central booking system"? As far as I know (working on a rental car contract for a couple years), there are just various travel industry standards for bookings and whatnot.
GDS.
A Global Distribution System is a worldwide reservation system that acts as a conduit between travel bookers and suppliers, such as hotels, other accommodation providers and other travel related services.
I mean there is only one pipeline, to which are contributing many actors, like big agencies (booking, expedia), car rental, airlines, etc. Together, they act as one.
I've taken to calling hotels directly and dealing with them, or their chain's booking, as they offer the same or better rates usually, are more accountable, are more willing to refund or cancel without problems, and are much more interested in keeping you happy and wanting to come back.
I am a full time digital nomad and stay in a ton of hotels. I have once gotten the same rate directly, usually it is 20-30% higher. Hotels basically force you to third parties.
Do they think that direct callers are more invested in their specific hotels while price comparison site users will just pick someone else if the price is too high?
Or the people handling bookings at the hotel have no discounting authority and don't care where you're booking from as it's not their problem anyway. "If you say it's cheaper on the Internet go book there!"
My last experience dealing directly with the hotel, I called to cancel. Later, they tried to charge me for the whole trip. The whole system was to just call a person, with no confirmation provided.
The hotel did not give a rats ass about how happy I was, if I wanted to come back, and were not accountable. They basically gaslit me. The person pretended I was crazy or stealing, and I would surely have proof otherwise.
In most systems, you get some kind of ticket notification. I really felt I would be better with any portal system. I know booking can be shitty too, but dealing with hotels individually just seems worse to me.
By the way, they finally only charged me for one day. Chargeback rejected. Assume all of your chargebacks will be rejected if you don't have evidence. They WILL side against you, in favor of a large hotel at least (I don't think they were a chain either).
In Dominican Republic I was told to just use an online booking site as it was much cheaper than doing it in person. Their own site was also more expensive than expedia.
On flip side, I bet if you are Thai native speaker foreigner in the US you will also not necessarily find it easier/cheaper to negotiate with hotels directly compared to Booking etc.
Not my experience, especially when you actually break down the cancellation policies (which booking aggregators will sometimes charge extra for) and whether they require payment up front or at the time of arrival.
When I last did this, for a vacation, the cost at an aggregator was less if there was no cancellation allowed, and more if the option to cancel was added (but to a couple days before I believe), and needed to be paid at time of booking. When I called, I got a rate slightly less than the online+cancellation, I was able to cancel up to 24 hours in advance, and I only needed to pay on arrival, meaning I didn't tie up a few thousand for a few months.
There's also always the option to state the rate you found online and see if they are willing to match it. It's not like there usually some magic involved, if they're willing to offer it to an aggregator, why wouldn't they at least consider offering it to you direct?
> It's not like there usually some magic involved, if they're willing to offer it to an aggregator, why wouldn't they at least consider offering it to you direct?
The magic is actually being given the direct authorization to give you a matching rate or if not then having to get management to authorize that rate for you. That depends entirely on the hotel. Some employees might also recognize a deal seeker as someone who's also more likely to be picky and complain more and so would rather deny your price negotiations and avoid working with you if they have the choice depending on how filled they already are.
Yup this is nonsense advice. I will say in most cases, it seems around the same. I highly suspect most hotels aren't prepared to negotiate over the phone.
As I said elsewhere, the hotel's support can be even worse, and amount to them basically robbing you.
It wasn't advice, it was an anecdote about my experiences from doing what I describe. People can use that as advice, while knowing it's based on what I've experienced and not a wide survey of how the industry works.
>> as they offer the same or better rates usually
> I will say in most cases, it seems around the same.
The same what? Price? Wasn't that what I was describing? Or are you referring to some other aspect of it that I'm not connecting?
To further ground my statement, I'm generally dealing with larger name hotel chains or tourism spots that deal with repeat visitors, not random small or independent hotels. Maybe that matters.
To my eyes, most this thread seems like a missed opportunity for people to examine why sometimes dealing directly seems to work well and why sometimes it doesn't, and which types or brands are better than others in this respect. I think that would have been a much more interesting conversation. (I know you did contribute somewhat along these lines as well, I'm more criticizing the thread in general, not your specific replies).
Their support is pretty bad.. they refused to refund a £20 booking when the hotel was 500km away from where it was shown on the map. There were no other contact options, so I took them to the UK Small Claims Court... They paid up before the case went to court.
> A Booking.com market manager in south-east Asia admitted at a recent industry event that payment delays were caused by the installation of a new payment system. Staff salaries were also affected, she said, explaining it as a risk they had to take.
What do you mean a new payment system? How do you not create a fallback for this situation when you're dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions?
I mean I am willing to give Booking.com the benefit of the doubt here in case that is actually the root cause, but it doesn't compute for me. You don't just throw thousands of people (who drive business for you in the first place) under the bus by not properly preparing for a software rollout.
You still have the old system or whatever it is that you were using, how hard would it have been to detect an issue if they did a A/B or a gradual rollout at first.
As a Booking.com user myself - I am pissed that this is a thing.
Start from the axiom that computers don't make mistakes. Then change to a new computer system at lower cost, because it's cheaper and computers don't make mistakes. So cheaper is better. Don't need a roll back plan, all computer systems work fine.
Then put on your best surprised expression and wait to see if you manage to unwind the errors before a competitor exploits them.
It is fascinating how much faith people have in computers, even after at least a decade of watching them fall over. Sure it crashes a lot but it couldn't get the answer wrong.
My last hotel booking had offshored their entire customer support system to a 90s style chatbot. Walk the state machine in circles kind of thing.
Booking had a real person pick up the phone, know stuff, and fix it. Not a native English speaker but still far more helpful than the software alternative.
why was hertz practically issuing arrest warrants? Because they can. Malicious artificial intelligence is here. The boring part is its these faceless bureaucracies they behave (intelligence?) without responsibility or repercussions whatsoever. That AI bogeyman your think of, its just going to be these kinds of companies blaming it on amok algorithms, in place of which is now some sort of 'failed process'
As a general rule, the reason a company does something nefarious is that it knows it can get away with it.
We need to fix the broken & corrupt legal systems so that companies have not just equivalent penalties like individuals would (the equivalent of jail would be that all profits go to the state for the duration of the "jail" term), but be given even less leniency/benefit of the doubt since massive companies have way more resources to investigate & comply with laws than individuals do.
Very simple solution: the US should implement prevailing parties clause (prevailing party wins legal fees by default in a lawsuit) as law of the land by default.
We had a guy in Australia trying to use our trademark, in the US they would call my bluff and I would have to spend tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to sue. In Australia we sent a polite letter, outlined our case that was pretty clear, reminded him he would pay our legal if we escalated and made it clear we would, and the result was immediate.
In short, companies shouldn’t be incentivized to play game theory on whether or not you will sue me if I trample your rights.
That sounds like an amazing way to empower corporate legal bullying and copyright trolls, and ensure that no single entity could ever take a company to court ever again.
Big company threatens to spend $100 million on the lawsuit to make sure they win. By outspending you they exhaust your funds and win by default. Then you go doubly bankrupt when you have to pay their legal bills.
That’s not how the calculus works actually. Today a corporate bully can safely count on you being a rational actor (and not spend $1mm to win $400k) and push the envelop of competition and appropriation of data and trade secrets with limited recourse. Under a prevailing party construct, the risk of doing so is enormous.
Thus, in instances where they are objectively wrong, they lose big. In instances you are objectively wrong, you lose big. In instances where it is not black and white, where there is merit to both sides of the argument, you settle. All this is achieved with little intervention by the courts.
In places where "loser" pays (such as the UK), rates are capped at fairly low hourly levels and hours are also capped (or at least there is a known "reasonable" number of hours for a particular type of case).
Note also that the "loser" factors in offers to settle. So if I offer you $10,000 to settle and you refuse and the court awards only $5,000 to you, you are the one that has to pay my legal bill, even though I am the one that "lost".
If one party wins, they do not have to pay the legal fees of the looser.
Settlement offers have no bearing on this.
If one party wins, their (reasonable) legal fees usually are paid by the loosing party. Except if the judge orders both sides to pay their own.
If you offer £10k settlement, and I refuse, and I win £5k, you’d have to give me £5k, plus pay my and your legal fees. What I don’t get to say is you offered £10k so I want that instead.
> the equivalent of jail would be that all profits go to the state for the duration of the "jail" term
For punishing corporations (for whatever legal reason) I would rather see a percentage of c-suite compensation for a time period (including end of year bonuses) confiscated, maybe along with a fine based on profit (so stock values are hit as well, so that both can't be used to avoid penalties and also to signal to the market it's a bad idea).
The problem with fining a company is that often you hurt a lot of the lower ranked employees that had no power and often no knowledge of the problems, and usually weren't involved in any way, sometimes to the point where they lose their jobs if the company is hurting to a much larger degree than the people running the company do, which is why punishing corporations is sometimes hard.
We need to incentivize and punish the people that actually decide the problematic policies and actions and not those that just happen to be in proximity and/or are linked financially, to the degree that we can (obviously it's hard and no perfect solution exists).
Why do you think it's any of the employees that are at fault, even the c-levels?
Fine the investors. Everyone who owned a share when the violation occurred takes a lick.
If you go after c-levels, what will happen is they'll devise some sort of time deferred compensation avoids the penalties you want to impose. The board needs a CEO after all, and CEOs are reluctant to run a company if they know they'll just have their paycheck confiscated.
I mean that's effectively already how it works: a fine to the company is a fine to the investors, because they own the company (more precisely, a fine represents money which is not getting paid back). And clearly that isn't enough, because this stuff keeps happening, that's why the GP and others are brainstorming alternatives.
A fine to the company just eats away a little of the profit. Maybe the dividend is lower next year.
A fine to the investor is literally taking money out of their pocket. Before they receive the dividend check. Even if it nets the same to them in the long run, it will feel different. It will be true punishment rather than reduced reward at a later date.
Just because you have no sympathy for the large corporations doesn't mean they should be treated unfairly, and going to jail because of actions that actually weren't in your control is definitely unfair.
Corporations are made of people, and can by large multinationals, or small mom and pop operations with a few tens of people (or less). Should someone that has a company that runs a few ice cream shops in town go to jail because of actions of people under them? Because it's not like it's always going to be something that was condones or expected from management, and while I'm okay with monetary damages that don't aim to dismantle the company entirely even if management didn't really know what's going on (that's maybe a good way to make them care and pay attention), I'm not okay with sending them to jail because of mismanagement.
Not only is that unfair, it would have a huge chilling factor on entrepreneurs. And not just the startup kind, the people that want to open a restaurant or run a small business.
And to fully put this in context, this is under an article about booking.com paying slowly. You think jail time is appropriate for that? What if they're having cashflow problems? If they aren't and it's intentional, how do you distinguish this from that?
Not even just compared to individuals, but even to smaller competitors. If a smaller company acted like Booking did here, they'd be sued into oblivion or out of business in no time. Same with a shop that sold counterfeit goods as casually as Amazon or an app store seems to, or one that fired people as suddenly as Twitter/X did those months back.
The problem is that laws are basically just 'suggestions' if you're rich/your company is rich, and life altering consequences if you/your company is not.
There should actually be jail time for corporate leaders that break the law, and the potential of being forcefully removed from office or the company itself forced to shut down if poor behaviour continues.
I think it's even more true in this situation. If you or I owe the IRS $2000, they're gonna come after us and get all their money. But if EvilCorp owes the IRS $200-million, the lawyers will argue about it for 3 years, and in the end, EvilCorp will end up paying less than half of the original amount.
Oh, the EU shows that even the biggest corporations can be brought to knee if they pull off too much bullshit. Apple had to introduce USB-C and will have to open up their App Store and NFC interface, Meta got slapped with a billion dollar GDPR fine, Microsoft to this day has to sell European versions of Windows that don't come with a media player or that allow everyone to choose their default browser...
The EU is protecting it's citizens. You don't have to spend very much time comparing the EU (and Europe in general) to the US to find differences in philosophy.
US has a very individual centric attitude where everyone is an temporarily inconvenienced millionare and Europe has a much more collective attitude. I will take the European attitude over the US one any day of the week (and I'm from neither, I'm Antipodean).
But look at what "to compete" means in the European point of view, look at how they see the practices that you describe as "being competitive": nefarious, unethical practices to fuel growth for the hell of it. If they can't compete on some short-term, enshittification-causing metric, fine by me.
Aside from the fact that booking.com is a Dutch company (although Booking Holding is US, so who the hell knows any more as I have no idea how that all fits together...), no one is forcing anyone to do business in Europe. If you don't like the rules then don't play; that's fine, no hard feelings.
That's how it works everywhere, including in the US.
What you DON'T get to do is set the rules for OUR countries. Several of these companies have been under the misapprehension that's how things work, and they are being (slowly) cured of that delusion (far too late, but better late than never...)
You can phrase it in whatever way you prefer, but GP's point remains - a fine measured as a percentage of global revenue has been demonstrated to modify huge corporations' behavior.
FWIW, I think the EU's recent legal behavior is only about 1/3 foreign-company envy. There's a lot of misguided do-gooderism and a large dash of control-freakery, too, not to mention intelligence and LEO wishlists.
The EU has actually enforce anti-monopolistic laws, even if it's quite slow. You should compare history of the food industry in Europe and in North America, I think this show well how much the US politicians changed over the last 50 years.
It's a wonderful business model. They are effectively just a proxy for scheduling and payments, where they take no risk and trim a bit of revenue off as payments fly by. Their biggest hassle is probably the moderation of reviews.
This sounds like a trigger for hotels to treat booking.com customers poorly. I imagine people would be better off booking somewhere else. I would suggest directly with hotels but that pretty much always costs more money than booking through a third party so maybe Expedia/Hotels.com or something.
I used it a whole lot when I was doing the nomad thing but avoid it now if I can help it at all. I can recommend the trip.com app if you want actual support when you have any issues. With booking you're on your own, it's terrible. Unfortunately they usually have the most options though.
I've 2 times out of 2 successfully done credit card chargebacks against Booking.com for their customer support's tomfoolery when their "third party hotels for whose actions we are not responsible" messed with me.
You processed my credit card, so now you're gonna deal with my refund too.
I stayed at a hotel that had bed bugs, the hotel was uninterested in refunding us or giving us a new room (I had only been in the room shortly before discovering them). I went back to Booking.com and they said I had to be refunded via the hotel and they would only act as arbiters. After showing proof the hotel wouldn't refund me, they continued to not refund.
To really add insult to injury I wrote a review of the hotel explaining the situation and it was removed!
They instantly flagged and deleted my review claiming I only stayed one night (I did – in a sleeping bag no less) instead of four. This claim from them actually helped in the chargeback.
I made the mistake of telling the apart-hotel owner in Turkey I work in IT, so he would knock on my door at 2am and Whatsapp me over and over to help him solve router problems.
"It's urgent"
"Can I talk to you?"
"Can you please come downstairs? Just 2 minutes." (it's 2am)
"There is a big problem" (with me not being willing to pay a network tech to deal with my IT problems instead of badgering my guests)
No thanks. I had booked a month and left after a week.
Why would booking.com keep you as a customer if you're going to chargeback? Many retailers seem to treat a chargeback as some sort of horrible unforgivable curse.
I assume their processes are so broken that they have no idea who is and isn't doing chargebacks, and also they couldn't care less. The Casino keeps winning on average anyway.
There is other good discussion here about booking direct vs resellers so I won't rehash it, but I just wish savings or other benefit were passed on by booking direct more often, e.g. room upgrade priority or breakfast. I've had that experience with airlines before having status.
Seems like this is just more enshitification, which is the general direction that everything on the internet is taking. If you think about it, it doesn't make any sense for Booking.com to pay its bills because then they'll just have less money.
I'm not touching booking.com again, and I recommend anyone else to stay the hell away.
Made a reservation a few months ago, searched for hotel rooms that would allow bringing a dog, and got a confirmation via booking.com that said everything was ok. But when I arrived at the hotel, I was informed that they don't allow dogs at all. And since the reservation was made through booking.com, there was nothing they could do about it. So I ended up paying for a hotel room that no one slept in and have been given the silent treatment from booking.com since then despite several contact attempts.
I have to ask, why use 3rd party booking sites at all? From what I can tell, the prices are usually the same as the hotel... needlessly adding middlemen into the booking process.
Because there are hundreds of hotels with a hundred different websites or no website at all in any given city, and hotel rooms are largely fungible. I want to sleep somewhere and I have a budget. Searching hotel by hotel is infeasible even if you can find them, and you often can't.
A "middleman", or search engine, or discovery system, or price comparison site, is worth a lot to me and to most travellers.
Edit: it's worth a lot when you... don't speak the language in the country the hotel is in... when you want the consumer protections of the country you or the middleman is based in... these sorts of concerns are much more of an issue in some parts of the world, and this might be reflected in the fact that Booking.com grew up in Europe.
Yes, but you don't have to book with the search engine. I search with hotels.com and then book by calling the hotel. Every other time I used hotels.com or booking.com the booking didn't exist when I arrived at the hotel...
I would generally rather book with a bigger company, especially when travelling abroad where I may not be knowledgeable of local language, customs, or consumer protections. If I buy from Booking UK I get UK consumer protections, even if that hotel does not provide those. In some parts that's worth a fair bit. Calling the hotel only works if you speak the language. I've also only ever seen identical pricing when I've checked hotel websites.
Perhaps perspectives are based on whether you're booking domestically or not. Domestically you get the same protections, same language, not much benefit. In the US most of the market is domestic.
> Perhaps perspectives are based on whether you're booking domestically or not.
I've had the best success when traveling abroad booking directly. Anyone in the hospitality industry is going to have someone on staff with enough English to assist you, and most of the nicest places are smaller hotels that often don't work well with big booking companies.
> If I buy from Booking UK I get UK consumer protections
I worked in a travel startup (not Booking), there's a lot of fine print to all those "protections" that will leave you high and dry in most cases.
Only use 3rd party apps for search, never book directly through them especially, in my experience, for International travel.
I'll take letter-of-the-law fine print consumer protections over "eh, sorry" any day.
You're right that we're lucky as English speakers, there's often someone to help, but that's not true of most other languages. Small places can provide some of the best experiences I agree, but finding them and getting in contact can be difficult.
Booking get 15% of the transaction so it makes sense to ask for 10% off when calling the hotel directly (which increases the profit of the hotel by and saves you some).
Eccept that is breach of contract with the booking service and can cost them the contract[1]. Since everyone is using booking.com or hotels.com, they will quickly shut down due to no customers. Hostage situation.
[1] At least last time I looked into it. Haven't had a change to travel since a few years.
I just tell them that I saw a better deal on gestures broadly the Internet and they give me some discounted rate.
This happens all the time with every single type of service provider, why would some shitty service like Booking.com get to mandate no one can offer any other discounts?
What, just because there's some sort of aggregator service out there that you've partnered with you are not allowed to offer coupons, discounts, or your own booking services yourself? I would find that VERY difficult to believe.
Plus, based on what we're hearing everywhere, potentially losing your contract w/Booking.com seems like a blessing.
The hotels are required to have the same price on direct contact as they post on hotels.com so no. But I can be certain that there is actually a room waiting for me when I arrive. I have been standing there enough times with a booking confirmation in hand but the hotel not finding any booking and out of rooms. So far they managed to get me somewhere to sleep even though they have had to pay to house me at another hotel a couple of times.
They have to have the same price for “non members”. You can sign up for free to the hotels loyalty program and book a lower price.
You also get points if it is a chain hotel that can be used for future stays. The points can be worth from 7% to 20% of the cost based on what combination of base points, credit cards, and status you have.
This varies, some inventory is bought "wholesale", other inventory is on-demand reselling. Booking has a range of terms and systems for different regions, types, volumes, etc.
Now I'm curious, what countries were those hotels in? Never happened to me in Europe (from the top of my head: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, England, Scotland, Czech Republic, Croatia) - just over 50 bookings/different hotels.
Google Maps shows hotels and prices now. That's what I've been using lately. I book on the actual hotel website. Always choosing the cancellable booking option in case plans change. Often it's the only option, but not always.
The problem is that hotel rooms only appear fungible: a space that is a rectangular solid, with a bed. Sounds easy.
However, in reality, people want more than a place to lay immobile for roughly eight hours. These are not commodities. Check-in time. Check-out time. Type of bed. Bathroom? Bathroom with tub? Bathroom with waterjet tub? Pets? Dogs? View. Floor. Proximity to whatever. Bedbugs. Television, microwave, refrigerator, coffee pot, hair dryer. Free wifi? Breakfast? "Continental" breakfast?
If "hotel room" were some kind of spec, it might take years to hammer it out. And then hotels may or may not be honest about their rooms, or even understand the spec. Then there's the periodic keeping the listings up to date. "We had to take the TV out last week, it was on the fritz." "This room was upgraded." When was the last bedbug check? Finally, who is the system of record for any given room? And then the discount policies, wowza.
Looks fungible, really isn't. These aren't pork bellies.
I really don’t care about any of the things you mention. I literally only want a room with a bed and a bathroom. And maybe I’ll sort my three stars and up or something.
There’s a lot of variability, but it’s also pretty impossible to know at a non-commodity level unless I’ve stayed there before or do a ton of research.
I’m not going to trust anything online for the latest bedbug check. Id like to know, but let me know how they factors into your decision making process.
That’s the great thing about booking directly especially with a chain hotel. If you don’t like it, you can cancel the rest of your reservation and only pay for the time you are there. With travel portals it’s much harder.
Even if you’re not happy with the response from the hotel - and I’ve never had a problem with a chain hotel making things right, I can call corporate customer service.
These are all the reasons I said "largely" fungible.
You're right there's certainly no formal spec here and everyone is going to have the things they care about that others may not, but for any given person there are going to be many places that satisfy their needs, basically interchangeably.
I've been using Booking.com, and then booking via the Hotel's site after I find the one I want to stay at. I suppose you could Google to find their number if they don't a website.
I search and then call/email the hotel directly to see if they want to give me a lower price for buying directly so they avoid 15%+ commissions to the travel agent.
How successful are you? I assume that the person picking up the phone does not care about the extra booking, nor do they have the authority to offer spot deals.
Not the op, but it's the opposite, at least in the UK. I worked in hospitality as a yoof, was manager of a small hotel and a receptionist in big (independent) 5 stars. I absolutely did care about extra bookings because I got a big commission on walk-ins and a smaller commission on phone bookings. I also had leeway to discount rooms on a sliding scale down to "barely covers the cleaning costs" levels on the night. As a booker if I have the time I still call places up and can usually get a decent discount if they have availability, especially off season or last minute.
I have tried this but most of the time its the same price, sometimes it is more. Even standing in person at hotel the person at the desk cant even match the online price. Not empowered to.
I stay loyal to two hotel brands - Hilton and Hyatt for the most part.
The very reason I don’t use third party portals is because it’s always a hassle when you need to make any changes.
Last year I booked a week at the Hilton San Francisco Financial District for a hybrid work/personal trip.
We arrived late that night and we were not impressed. We went downstairs the next morning, shortened our stay to that one night. Paid it and moved over to another hotel - the Hilton Parc 55. This would have been much more of a headache if not impossible going through a third party portal.
I’ve also increased my stay by a day before arriving and the published price had changed. I called the hotel and asked them to extend my stay by one day at the original price - no problem.
I was a customer of the hotel, not the third party portal.
In my specific case, I am Diamond with Hilton and Globalist with Hyatt. I would get no status benefits or points for going through the portal.
That incident in S.F. I mentioned? When I changed hotels I got an upgrade for free to the “fitness room” with a gym inside the room.
That sounds cool but I'm not sure how realistic that would be for most people, esp. international. There are about 2-3 hotel chains I can think about here in Europe where I have had more than one stay, i.e. where I used the same chain in a different city.
JFTR, my last stay in Prague I paid 80 EUR for a perfectly fine Hotel room, the cheapest room in the Prague Hilton I can find (being flexible for whole Oct+Nov) is 130EUR, usually more like 140+, close to double.
So I suppose if I had to just take a different room in a different hotel every fifth time (and that never happened to me) I'd still be about equal with the price.
Availability: Often, booking sites like booking.com have reserved bunches of rooms at hotels that you can only book through their site. So the hotel's own website might show "no rooms available", while on booking.com you can still book. Many hotels even have given up on their own website and only offer rooms through booking.com.
Price: The hotel website often is no cheaper than booking.com (I guess thanks to very one-sided contracts), and sometimes only gives you a better price if you join a "club" and give them permission to spam you, sell your data, etc.
Payments: booking.com is shady, but less shady and far less broken than a random hotel website where some credit cards might not be working, your CC data turns up in some data dump "found" somewhere, or payment is held by the CC company because you are the first person in months to directly pay to that hotel's website.
Language: booking.com offers an interface and descriptions at least in English. Many hotel websites are only in the local language plus maybe some awkward machine translation that leaves lots of important points to guesswork, especially in the payment flow.
Convenience: booking.com at least offers some kind of searchable database of hotels so I can easily compare them. The hotels themselves make this rather impossible.
I do make a point to try to book via a hotels website after having found it on booking.com. However, in more than half of the cases, for the aforementioned reasons, I end up going through booking.com after all. So while lazy users might be a large part of the reason for the existence of booking middlemen, the hotels do have to bear their fair share of blame here.
As far as payments go, I have been surprised, when booking through booking.com
(especially in foreign countries) to see my full credit card details printed in plain text on the Booking.com reservation email that the proprietor printed out and referred to when I checked in. This even when I indicate in the reservation that I intend to pay in cash or with contactless on-site.
While it makes sense to take a card to guarantee against a no-show, it’s always felt a little slimy to me that they make it feel like they, rather than a random property someplace far-flung, are the ones who would collect the fee if I didn’t make good on the reservation—and only if I actually didn’t show up.
It looks like they still pre-emptively give out your full credit card details directly to every property in plaintext, but that they might now make a notional effort to record when the property accesses the CVC?
I agree, this is why I book through Booking as well, it's usually cheaper than calling rhe hotel directly. Plus, I get discounts in the Booking app with repeat bookings, just like a hotel chain club.
I've regularly scored things like 70% off regular price when booking the day before.
They continue to advertise their regular full price on their official site and other mainstream sites that business travelers use.
But they advertise at a massive discount on certain discount sites that attract budget travelers.
They want to fill the rooms, often in response to last-minute cancellations, and they hope they get lucky with somebody at full price first, but they advertise budget prices on budget sites because a deeply discounted rate is better than no money at all.
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.
> I have to ask, why use 3rd party booking sites at all? From what I can tell, the prices are usually the same as the hotel... needlessly adding middlemen into the booking process.
It can be worse. I once called the hotel and didnt realize I was calling Hotels.com (which used a tricky website to make it seem like I was calling the hotel.)
Worse, the [Hotels.com] agent pretended to be a the hotel reservation desk. I gave him several discount codes (my consulting company code, my AAA code) and each time he said it wasnt reducing the price. That got me suspicious...because my consulting company Accenture always had discounts.
So I asked the person outright, "do you work for the hotel, which company do you work for, etc" and learned he was a Hotels.com employee.
Based on this, i'd note that Hotels.com might not be the same price but might actually even be more expensive that booking direct with the hotel.
I want a middleman to hold my money, if the host fucks up, he will not get the money. That’s why you use escrows, but Booking.com doesn’t act like an escrow, so don’t use it.
One data point, but it was only 2 days ago. I needed a place to quarantine while I was the only one in my family who caught covid on a trip, so I went to the hotel a few blocks away and asked about their rates. They told me that the lowest they could go was $183. I asked why Google showed 6 third-party sites advertising their rooms at $135 and they said those sites reserve rooms in bulk and they aren't normally refundable. So I booked the room with credit card rewards points for about $120/night and everyone was happy.
I always thought that booking direct got the best rates also, but that seems to be incorrect, at least in this case.
Convenience mostly, and I've sometimes gotten better prices that way.
They make it easy to see available options in a city and compare prices. And making the reservation through them is often easier than getting in contact with the hotel.
I have never ever found a hotel to have the same or cheaper prices when booking directly on the hotel website. I travel in Europe.
For my last booking the difference was almost 20% (340€ at Hotels.com, 420€ direct booking). I don't know if they enforce some most favourable pricing rules or what, but one of the booking sites is always the cheaper option.
I would prefer to book directly so that the accommodation gets all the money, but I'm obviously not going to pay that much more just out of generosity.
For me booking.com has always been cheaper than booking directly with hotels.
I do a lot of motorcycle travelling without a plan. I often do not know where I’ll be at the end of the day, just a general direction.
Late afternoon when I have a better idea where I’ll end up before it goes dark I’ll look at booking.com, find some hotels/motels that match my criteria and head to them without booking.
Countless times I’ve turned up and said “I found you on booking.com and it says you have vacancies, I want a room” only to be given a price higher than booking.com. Some reluctantly negotiate down to match it, some look confused how booking com can offer the price they are while I book through booking.com at the hotel desk as the hotel won’t match the price booking.com are charging.
If you just walk in off the street, hotels will quote you the "rack rate," which is going to be higher than anything you can find online, even on the hotel's own website.
I just got back from a trip to Japan where I stayed at a lot of non-western brand hotels. But when I went to their sites directly, they were obviously all in Japanese which I don't speak. I could've relied on Google translate to book directly but I'd rather book through a 3rd party site in native English. Which I did.
A mix of Expedia, Agoda, and Priceline! As far as what I looked for in a hotel? Mainly just good reviews and pictures that looked simple and clean. I figured that I wouldn't spend a ton of time in the room! I liked the Tokyu chain of hotels. Stayed in a couple and they were very clean
The middlemen argument isn't valid anymore. Hotels have for the most part forfeited their right to sell directly. Which means whatever they do, they still pay full commission to whomever they are under contract with, unless said booking concerns 10 rooms or more.
Funny, I always look for hotels that do not allow dogs, as most of the time the rooms tend to smell like a wet dog, or sometimes feces.
I appreciate people who want to travel with their animals, but saying "we allow dogs" then not having rooms designed to ameliorate the issues with such a policy - hard surface floors everywhere and thorough cleanings - is unfortunately very common.
Yes, and it's the same issue with accessibility. My wife is in a wheelchair and we always call directly to the hotel to make a reservation, rather than going through these services. It only took one time to never make that mistake again.
I worked for a travel startup for a bit, it was by far the most toxic org I've ever worked for with a smiling disdain for their users (meaning they would chat about how much they loved users while actively implementing features that hurt them). I learned talking to other people that this is pretty par for the course for travel companies in general.
The biggest lesson I learned there: never book through a 3rd party for travel.
For airlines the price is already dictated to not be lower than the airline offers, you're far better just working through your favorite airline directly. It makes it much easier change plans, and anyone who travels a lot will agree not all airlines are equal. I've learned to have a favorite airline and not worry as much about lowest prices.
Hotels can be cheaper through a third party, but imho, not worth the hassle of having your trip depend on an untrustworthy middle man.
At most, use 3rd party tools as search engines, and then just book directly.
I didn’t get my refund after a trip was COVID cancelled in 2020. The money had already been paid to the hotel, and the hotel owner (in Marrakech) only wanted to promise me I could come back in 2021. So they are not acting as an escrow as I thought.
CC charge back. I had this during covid with an online travel agent that decided aeromexico was the one I should get refunded by while aeromexico didn't want to know me.
He who takes your money has the responsibility. The travel agent cried foul but what are they going to do.
booking.com allows guest bookings without verifying email address by design, so I had a booking added to my account that was nothing to do with me.
Couldn't cancel automatically. Support only seemed to be able to do the same I could. I assume the booking was some kind of fraud or credit card test -- anyway, the result is my account is suspended and support won't respond to me.
So who is responsible for the listing on booking.com? I always figured it was the hotel who managed the listing on the site, similar to e.g. AirBnB, but if I understand you correctly it's completely separate and booking.com is responsible?
Or: obviously booking.com should have gotten back to you, but I'm also not entirely sure the hotel also didn't just fob you off with a bullshit story for their own mistake.
For reliable travel with a dog, I highly recommend BringFido. I’ve done two cross-country trips with my dog and BringFido delivered both ways. Half the reviews in their app are just from dog owners talking about the hotel experience from that perspective.
So you tried calling Booking support by phone and they didn't pick up? I ask because I personally had to call their support before a couple of times and they responded almost immediately. You do need to provide booking ID for that to happen though.
Contrast to Airbnb, which was so bad I deleted my account in.
Contrast to Agoda, which after charging my debit card required government ID scans within 2 hours-- or immediate cancellation & no refund. Stay next morning in foreign country, what if I was on the damn plane already? Never had an account with them and probably never will.
This is what Mr Chargeback is for. Had a similar experience with them and my CC refunded it. I had flights booked with them as well so they refunded those too! Basically got 3 nights in Reykjavik for £290
UK at least you just fill in a form and it happens. Basically "I paid for something, I didn't get it, I contacted the vendor and they did not deal with it, I want my money back"
Seems reasonable for reducing friendly fraud. In the US you just get your money back no questions asked and it's up to the merchant to provide proof that they provided the services/product as advertised
Isn't retaliation for chargebacks a violation of most merchant contracts with the credit card companies?
The one time I have had to request a chargeback I was basically told to contact the financial institution[1] in case the merchant tried anything funny.
[1] In this case Nets A/S who acted as a middle man between my bank and VISA. But I assume my bank would have said the same thing if they had the agreement directly with the CC company.
Suppose it is true, I would like to know what you would do after your account is banned. You are not a part of that contract so you cannot sue the merchant. And credit card company likely won't bother with a lawsuit because there is one person affected by this.
I look for hotels on booking.com and then deal with the hotel directly once I find something I like. There's no good reason to include booking.com in the process.
The "competitors" who would benefit the most from this article are the individual independent hotels who have to eat the cost of stays booked through booking.com and aren't part of a big chain network that has a big enough legal team to be taken seriously.
Are you saying that Media does not publish articles unless a multibillion dollar corporation or its multibillion dollar competitor needs one? That sounds newsworthy itself!
They don’t care about screwing up because they dominate the market so much. They’re enjoying the benefits of the existence of little alternative to them.
No, not a monopoly. AirBnB is clearly a competitor in this space despite the various differences in targeted properties, and Google Maps also fills in this space.
You could call them rent-seeking middlemen, but not a monopoly.
Tough in (western) Europe they seem to have an strangle hold on almost all hotels.
Sure AirBnB is there as well but they're not really usable (in my opinion) regarding hotel room. And Google maps often just brings you back to an Booking.com page
> And Google maps often just brings you back to an Booking.com page
Really? Huh.
I just looked at a dozen or two across Germany, France, Switzerland, Spain, Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium, and while most had an option to book via booking.com (linked directly on the google search results) none had it as their only option, and they all had websites with direct booking forms of which only two were even styled slightly like booking.com
But I didn't actually try to book a stay at any of them, just looked at the websites, so if they redirect after that I would have missed it.
