> (For anyone who's ever tried to modify a reservation, the difference is astonishing. If you're booked with the hotel, all kinds of adjustments are at least possible. If you're booked with Booking, Travelocity, Expedia, etc., it's somewhere between hard and hopeless.)
That's utterly backwards IME. On Booking.com, most modifications are the push of a button (that, crucially, is right there in the UI that I already know) and if I need to do something complex I can send a message and they'll sort it and get back to me. On a boutique hotel website, maybe I'll get a phone number that I have to look up the international dialing code for and then call in that country's business hours, if their website isn't just completely broken.
Here’s something else — the most critical part of a booking — the booking itself. Go talk to third party aggregator chat bot when you realise you don’t even have a booking that you booked.
4-5 days later if you’re lucky you’ll receive an apology email if you’re lucky, which mentions that they do not want you have that experience and they’ve send it for feedback to the relevant team.
I rarely book hotels via third party aggregators now. Either direct or I use my employee’s travel assistance parter portal where I have same protections as my work travel just that I’ll have to pay from my pockets.
If your hotel double books you, they're out of rooms and can't help. If Booking.com double books you, they can pull strings to give you a different room in any hotel on their site (and they do). I don't doubt you had that experience personally, but it doesn't match my experience at all, and I spend 1/3 of my life in hotels.
If a hotel double booked you and you showed up, the hotel would walk you to a nearby similar hotel all paid for by the hotel. The “walk” process is a standard industry practice.
Having to walk a guest when the hotel cannot meet the terms of the reservation is part of the contract between the big hotel brands and franchisors. If the hotel operators do not fulfill the walk policy, then you should contact the 800 number for Marriott/Hilton/IHG/Choice/Wyndham/etc and they will mail you a check for your expenses and bill the hotel owner.
This thread started about “boutique hotels” and now we’re talking about franchisees of major national chains. They’re not the same. Plenty of tiny unfranchised operations can you leave you hanging with little to no recourse.
I worked a few years as a night manager in a hotel in Norway - we always had to figure out a solution when overbooked - at "our" expense (customer pays/pre-paid agreed upon price, we cover room and transport at alternative accommodation - usually more expensive).
As a bonus re: booking.com - they integrated with our booking system and always overbooked, unless our system lied about available rooms (would happily sell rooms when none were available - especially annoying at night, when a booked room typically means an occupied room).
Or maybe booking.com is actually a better experience for most people than the legacy hotel sites. It's more streamlined, it's cheaper, you don't have to sign up etc.
If you think I'm an astroturfer look at my comment history, I've never mentioned hotels before.
When was the last time you booked direct with a hotel where they were overbooked and they refused to walk you to another hotel when you showed up? Which hotel is it? We can call them up to ask them to clarify their policy.
Edit: Here's more information since you're not familiar with the walk policy.
Those are all about big corporate chains, which have many of the same advantages as something like booking.com. We were talking about boutique hotels. If you really want I can tell you the place in Aachen where it last happened to me and you can call them up, but I guarantee they don't have "policies", and probably not anyone who speaks English.
I showed up at a (cheap) hotel booked on Booking.com earlier this year. They had no record of my booking. They couldn't help me.
I spent the next hour on the phone or on hold with a booking.com rep. They claimed the hotel had made a mistake and should be the one to fix it. They attempted to contact the appropriate person at the hotel but were unable to.
About four hours later somebody appropriate from the hotel responded to the booking.com rep and "found" the "lost" booking.
I brought up the policy you mentioned, and the booking.com rep told me that they hotel gets a chance to fix it first. They seemed quite surprised the hotel ghosted them for four hours, and told me that eventually at some point at night they would book me some other room.
So I'd say the booking.com policy you mentioned isn't quite as valuable as you might think at first.
If you’re booked 3rd party you’re much more likely to be the one bumped I. The first place. You’re also likely to get the least desireable rooms on the least desireable floors.
That does not match my experience. IME the bumping is first and foremost dependent on the time of arrival. While the hotel has rooms, they will give them out to those who booked and show up. Should the hotel run out due to overbooking, how the next guest booked a room is not going to matter. My 2c.
Big sophisticated hotels have blocks of rooms at different price points. So, even if there are rooms currently empty but have been reserved for customers who have paid higher price, they won't give them to you.
In recent years, I have not had any booking problems whatsoever. Only problem I had more than 10 years ago was about arriving very late and finding that my room reservation had been released and they were full. Luckily it was a big chain hotel which had another property nearby and was able to get me a room there for the night and then resume my original room for the rest of the week long stay. This was very busy conference week and all 3+ star hotels were full in the area.
> even if there are rooms currently empty but have been reserved for customers who have paid higher price, they won't give them to you.
In my experience (not very big hotel) - the emphasis was on full occupancy - rooms would only be held (with other guest with booking at the counter) in rare circumstances (eg we knew an incoming flight was delayed and we were certain the other guest would arrive. Even then we might bump the other guest if it meant we had more time to scramble to find an alternative room for the guest that hadn't shown up yet).
I'll tell you a story about Booking.com. I booked an ostensibly available hotel in Ouray, CO in fairly peak season. I got there and they of course, had already sold the booking beforehand and because the systems didn't link up correctly Booking's availability was not updated. It was the hotel's fault, but it didn't matter. Not a single other hotel in Ouray had availability, and, if you happen to know the area, anything that resembles a hotel outside of Ouray is going to be a significantly long drive.
Booking.com was zero help at all when I called them. None. They couldn't find or book me another hotel, and basically just told me that there was nothing they could do besides refund my money.
There are many, many stories like this.
Don't get me wrong, I actually like Booking. I think it's a great way for smaller properties to get visibility without having to build and maintain that web presence themselves. But when it goes wrong, don't expect them to go to bat for you. They are incentivized to keep making money, and threatening to delist hotels for fucking over customers when the hotel clearly messed up is clearly not a game they have decided to play.
I always book directly with the hotel if I can, because, if you do that, the shit that I mentioned just doesn't happen. Sure, if it's double the price, I'll roll the dice with Booking. But it basically never is. If it's something like 5-10% of the nightly price extra, I'll pay that premium to not have to deal with any BS. Usually it's the exact same price anyway, if it's an available option (there are some hotels that literally only survive via Booking these days).
> Not a single other hotel in Ouray had availability, and, if you happen to know the area, anything that resembles a hotel outside of Ouray is going to be a significantly long drive.
> Booking.com was zero help at all when I called them. None. They couldn't find or book me another hotel, and basically just told me that there was nothing they could do besides refund my money.
I get that you were in a very difficult position, but if there weren’t any hotel rooms, what were you expecting Booking.com to do? And what did the hotel do to help you?
> I always book directly with the hotel if I can, because, if you do that, the shit that I mentioned just doesn't happen.
Of course it does. Booking.com didn't invent double bookings.
My point is that they aren’t on the side of the booker. They are on the side that makes them the most money. Incentives are not aligned to provide the best possible experience for consumers. I would have expected them to at least say “this is not ok, we are looking into this relationship with this hotel. We own responsibility for this hotel that we ostensibly vetted to be adequately integrated with our systems to not fuck you, and they did. After all, we advertised them as a booking on our site”.
But they didn’t do any of that. They just said, sorry, can’t help you. Which is fine, but be aware of that and don’t sing their praises from the rooftops and advocate for them by saying “why would you not use them over booking first party?”
Yes, but you are blaming them for being unable to resolve what appears to be an unresolvable problem that a hotel you booked directly wouldn’t be able to help with either. Incentives don’t matter there if nobody is in a position to do anything.
I think Booking.com is by far more reliant upon repeat customers than hotels. If a hotel screws up a booking, sure the customer isn’t going to come back but they probably weren’t even if they had a good experience – people travel to lots of different places. If Booking.com screws up a booking, they very probably lost a repeat customer – Booking.com gets used again and again even when people travel to many different places. Booking.com’s incentives are more closely aligned with the traveller than the hotel’s are.
A reasonable approach would seem to be to confirm the booking with the property within, say, 24 or 48 hours so if it’s overbooked you’ve at least got a chance of getting something else.
Perhaps you misinterpreted my above comment. I don’t blame booking for my poor experience with that hotel, merely their response to the situation.
If what you say is true, I would think that there would be evidence of some sort of punitive action from booking.com for poor behavior like this. As far as I know, such evidence does not exist.
Strangely, at least in Australia, you often pay more for booking directly. On multiple occasions I've checked a hotel's website and found aggregators with cheaper rates, then literally walked in the front door and asked what's the best they can do. It's worse and I end up getting my wife to book on her mobile phone from the parking lot and let her complete the check-in.
Don't get me wrong, generally not a fan of middlemen. But the experience when booking a hotel directly comes down to the owners/management, and it's going to vary wildly compared to one of these big aggregators.
I've heard booking.com forbids them to charge first-party customers less than the booking.com price, and the hotel is beholden to the site for income so they play along. The only people booking directly are basically idiots, so for those people they charge as much as they can.
In the UK there are large chains such as Travelodge who have pulled out from booking.com entirely and made people go to their site.
Booking.com requires the cheapest price, unless you are talking about the price from the hotel’s rewards program, which they will push very hard. It’s a contract loophole that works out for everyone except the non-savvy (or privacy-conscious) consumer.
That's simply not true. I just did search to see if anything has changed. I searched for hotels in the Seattle area for a 5/18 reservation. The 3rd item in a hotel's result [1] is the direct hotel's price. It matches the same reservation on the hotel's website [2]. Another hotel's result [3] has the lowest price as direct booking.
Similar dynamic with credit cards, where retailers are forbidden from offering a cash discount. Though some skirt this using rewards programs— in Canada for example, Canadian Tire gives you more Canadian Tire "money" if you pay with debit or cash.
In fairness, if credit card processors hadn't been permitted to require that and customers had had to pay the fee, credit cards would never have achieved liftoff.
Which is maybe as much of an argument as any, if it had put pressure on the processors to minimize or eliminate the fee and find alternative revenue streams to sustain themselves and build out the network. Instead we got a world where the fee has been static forever and the gains from automation have gone to cashback and rewards programs for customers, ultimately making it more expensive to pay with cash.
For reference: to be part of a hotels “rewards program” just requires you to create a free account.
What privacy concerns are you alleviating by not signing up for the hotels loyalty program? They are going to ask for ID when you get there and many require a credit card hold.
You can read the terms of service and privacy agreement for that "free account" to find out.
In general, the Hotel would not be offering a rewards program if it did not benefit them more than it cost. At the very least they are going to use your "free account" to try to get you to use that Hotel (chain) more.
They will be getting that information from you anyway when you check in.
Who do you think is more likely to sell your information to third parties - a hotel brand that has every incentive to keep your information to themselves or an aggregator?
> cost. At the very least they are going to use your "free account" to try to get you to use that Hotel (chain) more.
And a third party aggregator won’t try to get you to use their site more?
> except the non-savvy (or privacy-conscious) consumer.
Every single hotel I have been to already requires your ID and records your information at check in. In fact, it is required by pretty much all city laws in the US.
I also would not want to stay in a hotel that does not require it.
The rewards programs use your information to market to you, and sometimes third parties. Terms and conditions vary. As always, consult a lawyer before clicking accept on any EULA.
Of course they do. Grocery stores, airlines, car rentals, hotel brands, retail stores, everyone has a rewards program for a discount and they all have my info.
So far I do not receive any junk mail other than credit card offers, which I take advantage of for the bonus.
While I didn't downvote you, I'm one of those "idiots" who tends to book directly on hotel web sites because I'm a member of several free-to-join hotel loyalty programs. The aggregators generally do not beat prices available for members (which, again, I can be for free). It's not uncommon for me to find specials, room types, or even availability, period, available on the direct sites that the aggregators don't have. And I have never once been told "sorry, we can't find your reservation" if I book on the direct website, whereas I absolutely have run into that issue -- albeit generally with independent hotels and B&Bs -- when booking through aggregators.
But, sure, I'm obviously an idiot! I'm just over here drooling stupidly while I get better and/or cheaper hotel rooms.
Thanks for your response. I apologise, the term "idiots" was definitely over-the-top - while there are people who are paying more than they should, I didn't know about the loyalty programs (which makes me the idiot). Maybe it's a US-centric thing. In any case I understand that your experience with booking direct has been better than using third party.
The annoying thing is that should so obviously be the case! Booking direct should always be cheaper and better, right? But I've found that even if booking.com is cheaper the hotel refuses to match the price when booking directly. And they never told me about any loyalty scheme :/
I didn't downvote you, but I did notice that you are making repeated assertions about price disparity between direct and third party; multiple people are posting actual links and experiments showing you wrong; to which you more vehemently ("idiots") repeat the assertions (without evidence).
I apologised in another comment and admit it is not universally true, as many people have pointed out. However I have repeatedly tried to get hotels to price match; they don't, and they never mentioned a loyalty scheme. That is my personal experience. Of course it may differ based on the type of hotel (I don't use very expensive chain hotels), the country, etc.
I mostly deal with Hilton brand hotels for both work and our newish “hybrid digital nomad” lifestyle where we hop across cities in the US for 7 months a year.
We stayed in Hilton brand hotels for around 160 days over the last year.
You don’t get loyalty points and days don’t count toward status when booking through a third party. With Hilton, those loyalties points can account for 20%-35% toward future stays. Meaning if I spend $100, I will get points worth $20-$35 toward future stays. Based on rooms I’ve already booked this year with just points, we are staying free for 25 days in 5 cities this year. Of course point accumulation is a lot slower for most people. But there are a lot of people who stay in hotels using other folks money when traveling for business.
Most hotels chains also have a “lowest price guarantee” where they will match a price found on a third party site.
This isn’t even mentioning all of the hassle you can avoid dealing with hotels directly if things go wrong or if you just don’t like the service.
Last year, I booked a 7 day half work half personal stay in San Francisco at the Hilton Financial district. It was a run down dump. I went to the front desk, told them I would be cancelling the rest of my stay and booked another hotel - the Hilton Parc 55 - for the rest of the week.
The first hotel charged me for one night. That would have been much more of a hassle going through a third party site. First you would have to hope that Hilton gave the money back to booking.com and then go through the hassle of getting your money back from them.
On that same note, I booked a regular room at Parc 55, messaged the hotel on the app before I got there and asked did they have any free Diamond upgrades available. They upgraded me to the fitness room - with a gym inside the room - for free. You don’t get those benefits when booking through a third party.
It seems to make sense if you're going to use the same brand for a long time, yeah. I tend to stay wherever is cheapest so I haven't exploited loyalty schemes yet, but reading the comments I might be missing out.
As the guy who started the thread, I'm just glad to have provided an (accidental) portal into a whole new subdomain of HN community expertise.
We've ended up with the perfect mix of helpful insights, provocative theories, well-documented personal experiences (sample of one) -- and brief snark that gets reined in before it gets ugly.
Later on this year, I'll offer some thoughts about hotel bookings that can be nerd-sniped the other way -- into a discussion of Brave search
Well a hotel has never double booked me. A hotel in India however of Taj group (business class) took me to a much better class which was not from their group/chain in a Mercedes and put me up there for the same duration and added full meal plan from their side because my room had some problems and they were fully booked.
And booking.com? Heaven’s sake! Where do you even want me to start! First of all I can’t contact them right then. Nope I can’t! And if I do they fucking stonewall me and more than once just waved the T&C in my face. Once they fucking refused to refund because they said “I should take it with the hotel”
I mean the experience has been so shitty with TPAs that I don’t even want to look for deals now. I just call the hotel and book. They confirm and they double confirm and if anything goes wrong there’s literally a desk with more than one people 24x7. It’s just so much worth it.
If you're using hotels with Mercedes then you're booking an entire different class to the hotels I book and that may explain our difference in experiences :)
Again that's the opposite of my experience. If I've booked on Booking.com my booking is right there, on their website and in my inbox. If I book directly with the hotel, do I have a booking? Uh, maybe. Roll of the dice when I show up.
Sticking with a single big corporate chain has most of the same advantages as using a big booking site. But I never found a single chain that had hotels everywhere I wanted to go; indeed a lot of the places I end up wanting to to don't have any name brand hotels at all.
This is super interesting. I know it happens, but I'm decently traveled and I've never had it happen to me (booking directly with the hotel and having that booking not be available). I've probably stayed in at least 500 individual direct bookings with hotels in my lifetime, to at least give some numbers to the anecdata.
Re: issues w/ travel plans - I’ve gotten stranded or left SOL before. My general course of action is to just buy a new ticket/room/whatever and file a claim on my credit card. My wife cracked the bumper of a rental. Chase paid. Flight got canceled. Polish air refused to give me a refund until 6+ months later after I had filed a complaint with DOT. I booked a new (more expensive) flight and Amex covered the cost.
I did get absolutely screwed once though. Turns out you can’t book a hotel in Paris after midnight because the system rolls the date over. Ended up sleeping on a couch in the lobby that night.
I can say overall I've had OK experiences with aggregators, but my style of tourism lately has been motortourism with partially determined plans so I often book rooms a day or two ahead.
I agree though with the sentiment of a post up in the hierarchy that it's a problem that middlemen dominate the listings for hotels, restaurants and such.
I think you're talking about common modifications that the booking website understands how to make via the hotel's API. The GP, meanwhile, is talking about completely arbitrary stuff that is not part of any booking services's data schema for "modifiable properties of a booking"—and also, where the hotel likely doesn't actually have an API, because it's just some family-run thing, and the booking website is maybe just sending the hotel a fax to book for you.
In the boutique + arbitrary case, what you want is to talk to a real person, explain your issue, and get some kind of free-text note added to your booking in a way that staff will actually follow the instructions in it. You also want this to potentially increase the cost of your stay (rather than your request being denied on the basis that such a modification would increase the cost of your stay.)
If you book through a booking website, and then you speak to the booking agent to make such a modification, they will have no ability to add the note to your booking in the hotel's computer in such a way that the staff will take it seriously; nor even, necessarily, the ability to confirm that that modification is something that the hotel can do for you. (They can call the hotel... but they're just as likely to be brushed off as you are.)
If you book through a booking website, and then you speak to the hotel, they will tell you that they can't help you, because they want to charge you more, but they don't have the ability to charge you anything, since they're not billing you; they're billing the booking agency. And the booking agency itself has no way for a hotel to add an SKU for this kind of customization. (If it did, it'd be abused by unscrupulous hotels.) They'll then tell you that they can fix your problem if they cancel your agency booking and then re-book it through the hotel itself... but in so doing, you might not be able to keep your reservation.
If you book through the hotel, you can just speak with the hotel, and enter into whatever private direct customer-to-business deals you like with them to negotiate whatever kind of special service you want from them.
> If you book through a booking website, and then you speak to the booking agent to make such a modification, they will have no ability to add the note to your booking in the hotel's computer in such a way that the staff will take it seriously; nor even, necessarily, the ability to confirm that that modification is something that the hotel can do for you. (They can call the hotel... but they're just as likely to be brushed off as you are.)
Being able to write a message and have them get back to me (even if all they're doing behind the scenes is calling the hotel) is a much better UX than having to make a phone call during business hours, particularly when there's a language barrier.
> If you book through a booking website, and then you speak to the hotel, they will tell you that they can't help you, because they want to charge you more, but they don't have the ability to charge you anything, since they're not billing you; they're billing the booking agency. And the booking agency itself has no way for a hotel to add an SKU for this kind of customization. (If it did, it'd be abused by unscrupulous hotels.) They'll then tell you that they can fix your problem if they cancel your agency booking and then re-book it through the hotel itself... but in so doing, you might not be able to keep your reservation.
> If you book through the hotel, you can just speak with the hotel, and enter into whatever private direct customer-to-business deals you like with them to negotiate whatever kind of special service you want from them.
Meh, that seems like a bullshit excuse to me. If they're selling me some special add-on service, surely they can bill me for it independently of my booking. If I'm already going to the trouble of calling them (ugh), having to give my credit card details separately is not making that a whole lot worse.
The problem is that Booking.com/Expedia/etc can't be trusted to book a real reservation. You never know if they're overbooking a hotel (and indeed I've been bitten by this multiple times).
By booking with the actual hotel's web site, you at least know you have a room. If the price of that certainty is a little bit of extra UX friction (or making a phone call, which I'll soon be able to delegate to an AI anyway), that sounds just fine.
Overbooking is never the fault of third party sites, they literally make an API call in real time and ask if they have inventory available. For smaller chains and boutique hotels the backend is probably a system that is calling into the HMS in the same way Expedia would.
What you are experiencing is either the hotel manager verbally committing to rooms and not logging them into the computer to try and skim money, or they had something happen that impacted availability (no hot water, housekeeping couldn't turn over rooms, etc)
overbooking / "I've been bitten by this multiple times": Did you arrive and the hotel didn't have any spare rooms? What happened next? I have never once heard of such a thing. And you said multiple times. What kinds of hotels are these???
I use hotwire maybe a few times a year and it has happened twice to me that the hotel they claimed was booked did not have the reservation. Most 3rd party booking sites don't have real time access to inventory, so if you book close to the same time that someone books direct, you can easily end up overbooked.
I think in the first case, they gave me a refund and I rebooked another through hotwire last minute. In the other case, the area was very booked up and I had to pay double to get a comparable room. So I had to send hotwire the invoice and they refunded the rate plus enough to cover the more expensive option. Both times was a huge inconvenience but that is sort of the price you pay for cheap 3rd party bookings.
They’re often not even cheaper these days (and are usually pay in advance with no or limited cancellations, vs booking direct usually being pay on site and cancel able to to a day or two out.
Yes, I have found that in many areas, you can match or beat the 3rd party price by going direct. Especially if you have any additional discounts like AAA. But quite a few highly competitive areas like las Vegas, you can save 25-50% by going with hotwire or Priceline.
This does happen, but rarely. Family boutique hotels should not overbook. It happens more frequently at business hotels, because those tend to offer no-fee cancellations, overbook and as a result never know how many people will actually show up for the night. So folks arriving very late can be hit with "sorry, we have no rooms available". Business hotels try hard not to do this often, but it does happen.
On the receiving side, this is not pleasant, but not the end of the world. On a business trip I can get a human travel agent on the phone who can find an available room and if it means a $100 taxi bill each way to get to a nearby town, so be it.
Again that's the opposite of my experience. When I reserve on Booking.com my reservation is always there (and I can see a confirmation of it whenever I want). When I reserve directly, who knows.
Booking always tells me that are only a few rooms left in the city I am looking for and only one left at that price on the property I am looking on. Many times, the price on booking is higher than if I book directly from that hotel.
Booking.com allowed me book a room in a hotel that was closed due to renovation - which I didn't know. I learned that a week prior my trip because I messaged the property (as I had a special request) and received automatically generated reply.
Since then I book directly. Most recently I booked a hotel which had 2+1 night free. Booking.com was offering full price for 3 nights stay.
Higher compared to what? There are plenty of smaller hostels/hotels which don't even bother to have their own website (only some FB page, and Booking.com listing)
Booking.com has a higher chance for errors compared to hotels' direct bookings since its information is secondhand and unreliable. For the hotels with direct booking avenues, why use booking.com?
Because booking.com answers the question "where can I stay given place, date, and budget"? While direct access can only help you when you already know where are you going. The latter is fine if you travel to the same place many times, the former is more universal. As for reliability, I dunno, I used to travel a lot, and in my experience troubles mostly come with a particular destination, not with the method of booking. I.e. if a hotel is unreliable (poor business culture, or overbooking, or whatever), it's unrealiable.
What if the Hotel doesn't want to have a Booking.com listing in the first place but is forced to have one because search engines rank it so much higher?
You might have typoed booking.con but it is spot on.
"On a boutique hotel website, maybe I'll get a phone number that I have to look up the international dialing code for and then call in that country's business hours, if their website isn't just completely broken."
If call them on the phone that implies one can speak the language. If hotel has a website that suggests it has an email address. Not sure I would want to stay at a hotel with a broken website and no email address.
I've never had problems booking through an intermediary but the parent is correct to the extent there are some benefits to dealing directly with the hotel.
It's really sad that so-called "tech" companies and internet marketing companies have bought out the independent travel guides, took the data and made it unreasonably difficult to find the contact info for hotels online.
But we can always find the contact info in Google Maps. Frommers and Zagat both acquired and pilfered by Google. Very sad.
Here is a website that will provide the website address and the email address for each hotel.
Nobody replies on the emails nowadays. You are lucky if the mobile number mentioned matches with Telegram, Whatsapp or whatever else, or it's phone call only. I'm talking about small to medium businesses - shops, hotels, restaurants etc.
Small shops and small hotels in eastern Europe. I simply stopped trying to contact via email after several inquiries without any response. While messengers for some reason are very popular. If I already talking to someone in person and I need to send files to them then in 100% of cases they will ask to send it via some messenger. Latest cases - car insurance asked for photos, notary asked for my passport, legal consultant asked for my docs - all via messenger. No, wait, there was one case when I was asked to write an email (not a reply to email send to me, but I had to write first) by a hospital. Guess what - they didn't reply and I had to print and give them paper copies of the stuff I emailed previously.
Email is great, I use it at work all the time, internally in the company. But in the outside world it's just not working, unfortunately.
Yikes. It sounds like there is an expectation that every member of the public has these apps installed or can otherwise use them. It's difficult to fathom that any organisation could claim "Sorry, we do not have email."
Not to discount the speed and convenience of messenging apps, but if someone is playing fast and loose with the law and trying to avoid a "paper trail", then avoiding email and using "ephemeral" messenging might be a strategy.
It was once claimed, by Facebook, that "[1 in 7 people worldwide is on Facebook. More importantly,] 6 out of 7 people are not on Facebook." Perhaps more than 1 in 7 people have an email account. Just a guess.
Beyond that, boutique hotels are often substantially more expensive when you book directly. Which is weird, because you think it would be cheaper since they’re not paying the affiliate booking fees. But no, even if you call them directly or show up in person they generally refuse to match Expedia or booking.com. I am being overly general here, I’m sure there are exceptions, but this has been my experience repeatedly.
With restaurants I try to not use aggregators like doordash or Uber Eats and always make sure to call and order directly so they save on fees. But hotels seem like they would rather pay the fee rather than give a real customer the best available price and keep a larger portion of the profit.
There are many things I hate about Booking.com, but at least they do generally give the best price.
I never use Booking. Once got a terrible (and overpriced) location that was highly rated according to them, but above all - I more than once arrived only to realise my booking wasn't there.
On top of that, I hate their UX.
My first go-to is Hotel Tonight mobile, which shows how interfaces should be handled. It doesn't handle rebookings and room selections though, so I often book through a given hotel directly - usually better interfaces than booking - even if not standarised, and I had a better treatment at least once, because I booked directly.
Also, if I type in a hotel name, I want to go to the hotel website, not a middleman. Hotel's website is a proxy of hotel quality to some extent.
For what it's worth, my batting average for getting problems fixed on the phone with a real person is substantially better than trying to sort problems out on a website. To the point that phone calls are now my first resort, before even trying a business's website.
Sometimes the person on the phone suggests the website to me, but if I decline with a "well.. I'm not very good with websites" excuse [which is effectively true, given the above] they're almost always happy to handle the problem for me.
Do you mainly travel where there isn’t a language barrier? My experience is the exact opposite. Written messages are far more helpful when there is a language barrier.
If there were an alternative that didn't suck, I'd look at it. But 95% of first-party hotel websites suck massively. So what's the option? AirBNB is far worse than booking.com in the moral stakes. I guess picking one of the big hotel chains and going with them might work for some people, but no one chain has good enough coverage IME.
I typically use travel sites to search for hotels and read reviews, then just book directly with the hotel, which has never cost me more, and often less because some sites (i.e. booking) obfuscate the relationship between price and amenities/size so you don't get what you actually could get for the money if you just went to the hotel directly.
Life's too short to do direct hotel bookings. The sites are slow and terrible to navigate even when they're not straight-up broken. They never bother to tell you their cancellation policy, filling in your information is a drag and you don't get a proper calendar entry unless you make one manually.
Maybe I just know how to pick good hotels? Every single point you just mentioned has not applied to the way I typically do it, the cancellation policy is always the first thing I look for and make sure it’s clearly spelled out. I’ve never had any problems actually interacting with the sites either.
I'd be interested to know what your process is if you've got a way to reliably pick out boutique hotels whose websites don't suck without taking too long over it. E.g. I'm going to Munich in August - want to talk me through what you'd do?
Do you have a vested interest in Booking.com? Interesting that you vehemently defend a common negative experience that booking through third parties is garbage, but you only seem to be defending this particular website.
Nope, just a happy customer. I'm sure other booking websites are similar (I used to use Agoda a long time ago), but I don't want to speak outside my own experience.
That's utterly backwards IME. On Booking.com, most modifications are the push of a button (that, crucially, is right there in the UI that I already know) and if I need to do something complex I can send a message and they'll sort it and get back to me. On a boutique hotel website, maybe I'll get a phone number that I have to look up the international dialing code for and then call in that country's business hours, if their website isn't just completely broken.