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Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

It has become ridiculous with these booking sites. When you google a small hotel, often the first many results are hotels.com, bookings.com, tripadvisor.com etc. and the hotel itself is down to spot 3, 4, 5 or even lower.

There is a place for the booking sites, especially for exploring several hotels at a time. And they do offer some reviews and comparisons that can be useful. Sometimes, they also offer the cheapest price but usually it is just as cheap to call the hotel itself or book through its website. And it really feels good to pay the hotel that offers the services, instead of some tech company in the US.

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I used to work a part time job doing hotel reservations for a small hotel a few years ago. Back then about 35-40% of their bookings were made through booking.com, and although I didn't know the actual cut booking.com took, I know it wasn't small. The hotel was always keen on trying to convert their booking.com or other third party customers into direct customers.

We were always instructed, depending upon predicted or actual demand of course (we had someone dedicated to trying to predict demand by populating a spreadsheet with prices), to be willing to haggle with someone that is dealing directly with the hotel if we felt it necessary to sell. I would always recommend that you deal directly with the hotel, especially if you think demand is low. Also, showing up just before the hotel reception closes and swaps to the night shift porters is a great time (10-11pm) as hotel staff are particularly vulnerable to haggling. At that time of night we just want to sell for covering staff wages/fixed costs.

Downside of showing up at the last minute is you can easily be ignorant of local market conditions and show up at 10pm when every bed in the area is occupied due to some local event that you were ignorant of.

> I would always recommend that you deal directly with the hotel, especially if you think demand is low. Also, showing up just before the hotel reception closes and swaps to the night shift porters is a great time (10-11pm) as hotel staff are particularly vulnerable to haggling. At that time of night we just want to sell for covering staff wages/fixed costs.

This sounds great for someone interested in haggling, but if I don't want to bother with it(actually, if I'm specifically averse to it as I want to plan my vacation costs in advance), why should I go to the hotel directly instead of using booking.com?

Even on the phone and sometimes months in advance you can easily haggle a 10-35% discount if demand is low. Especially if you agree to pay in advance on a non-refundable basis. We had price lists updated daily looking ahead 1-2 years.

Honestly, that's great if you're in the US and trying to book within the country, but once you start thinking internationally, calling becomes a headache, especially if you're traveling to countries where not everyone speaks English very well.

And when I'm on a trip, the last thing I want to do is hope for the best at finding a hotel the day I arrive!

I definitely appreciate your sentiment and agree, that I don't want to be fighting for a room when I'm on vacation - but with regards to the language barrier, where there's a will, there's a sale.

In all my experience abroad, as long as there is some effort made to communicate, language has never been an issue when it came to prices and sales. Sometimes this means we pass a calculator back and forth with different prices until we agree, but as long as there's an effort and money to be made, people are fairly open to alternative means of communication, even in remote nowhere locations.

I'd argue that tripadvsor.com would be more useful to me than the direct hotel website as I'd see more neutral outlook of the hotel compared to the hotels website itself. I know, the reviews are not 100% neutral given neutral experiences usually don't end up in reviews - only really positive or negative do but it's still useful than not having any opinions which would be the case on hotels website.

Also, the travel websites give the important details, amenities, nearby attractions, restaurants, public transit in the same format across all the hotels so I don't have to fiddle with each and every travel's website in a different way based on what their UX designer decided to do. Also, wayyy more photos on travel websites.

Disclosure - I used to work at TripAdvisor.

Yeah, it seems like nobody has ever tried booking a hotel from a direct channel before.

Customers don't want to go through the hassle of "discovering" a half-baked website filled w/ pretty little quirks.

This worsens the user experience by a ton, I find.

Booking.com is an absolutely atrocious website. It's full of very pushy marketing that tries to convince you that every hotel is almost fully booked and the entire world is about to place a reservation. Not to mention the weird push-style notifications.

That said, the 24 hour cancellation policy is really useful since some of the listed hotels wouldn't otherwise offer it.

I had a very interesting experience with booking.com. I found a hotel room, it said something like "Only one left". So, I quickly booked and by the time I entered the payment details the room was taken. Ok, so I went back to search for alternative, and it showed the same room again. I tried to book it again, and it simply went through. I actually stayed at that hotel in the end. It looks like some really weird algorithms are at work.

It's possible they use a queue system similar to the one used for concerts. Once you select a room/ticket, it gets held for a few minutes while you check out (and taken off the public market). So you can have a situation where there's no room, but someone else fails to complete the reservation and it becomes available again.

There can be an interesting interaction between booking.com and the hotel's own booking - I mean, booking.com doesn't know how many such rooms the hotel has available, it only knows how many such rooms the hotel has reserved for booking.com that may be booked at any time without a feedback from the hotel.

The hotel wouldn't put all their rooms there because they also have other channels (that also need to promise the customer that they'll get the room, inform the hotel afterwards, and the room must be available), and they don't want to risk overbooking. On the other hand, if they get a booking and see that all their booking.com rooms are taken, they'll likely assign another room or two to booking.com if they have them available.

> Sometimes, they also offer the cheapest price but usually it is just as cheap to call the hotel itself

Apparently, hotels that use booking.com as a sales channel sign a contract that prevents them from charging less for the same rooms on other sales channels.

In Germany and France this practice has been banned. (In Germany by a judgement of the Bundeskartellamt and the Oberlandesgericht Düsseldorf)

> it is just as cheap to call the hotel itself

Only if it's in the same country.

> book through its website

For some hotels, booking via website is often half-baked web app that's full of bugs, doesn't accept certain inputs, etc. Simply because webdev isn't the hotel's main activity. Reviews on the hotel's website are usually non-existent or only positive.

I mean, I hate the booking sites as well, but they are often "less bad" solution than booking directly.

International calls (to fixed lines) are not expensive these days.

For people who have had their contract for a while, they still are. You can't get a new phone contract that gouges you on international calls, but you can keep your old one.

It really depends on the country from which you are calling and country to which the call connects.

I'm considerably more sketched out at the thought of entering my credit card information on a half-baked local hotel website than going through Priceline or Booking.com. Even some of the bigger hotel chains have a terrifying booking experience - it wasn't all that long ago that I last nooped out of a plain HTTP booking process...

"instead of some tech company in the US."

Booking.com is Dutch.

Why is that their fault, but not Google's? Blame the search engine for bad results, not the sites.

And it really feels good to pay the hotel that offers the services, instead of some tech company in the US."

Most of the times I booked through booking.com it was "cash on arrival", so these sites are nothing more than ads. I think the problem is travel agencies, that book bulk of rooms to rent them later (just a guess, can't read the article itself due to paywall).

> Most of the times I booked through booking.com it was "cash on arrival", so these sites are nothing more than ads.

I can confirm this. I believe the hotels only pay a monthly fee for listing and that's all.

Not true. We pay a percentage of the reservation cost to Booking.com each month. TripAdvisor on the other hand, charges a yearly fee for an enhanced listing, no fee for the standard listing. So those pay on arrival bookings -- we get an invoice from Booking.com each month for those. Nothing on booking.com to my knowledge is pre-pay -- Booking never actually charges the guest's card. But we still get the invoice.

Thanks for clearing that up.

> Most of the times I booked through booking.com it was "cash on arrival", so these sites are nothing more than ads.

Expensive ads. Cash on arrival does not mean that the hotel does not pay a sizable commission. Roughly in the range as the cut iTunes, Play, Steam take for transactions that, unlike hotel service, create zero cost beyond the initial investment. Occasionally, hotels might even offer you a cheaper room if you cancel your reservation, to get out of that obligation. Maybe some sites are much cheaper, but the big ones like booking.com take everything they can, and they can take a lot.

> but the big ones like booking.com take everything they can, and they can take a lot.

You mean, take as much as is offered? The hotels are free to let the rooms sit idle & refuse the bookings; they wouldn't pay these commissions if they didn't make business sense.

A $100/night room that's empty generates $0 and costs $10-20 (amortised staffing and maintenance costs, insurance, permits, etc.)

A $100/night room filled with a 30% commission generates $70 & nets ~$50.

I think that most hotel managers would not list their preferences as: direct booking & ~$80 > empty & $0 > booking site & ~$50.

Most of the times I book private apartments (I hate hotels), so I have to deal with their owners directly. None of them has complained yet that I've book through booking.com or offered an alternative way, so I assume the situation is not as dire as other commenters try to imply.

iTunes charges 30%. Booking.com charges us 15%. 15% is a bargain considering they are an amazing source of customers who would have never found us otherwise.

> these sites are nothing more than ads

You got it: they're traffic funnels that you pay per conversion.

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