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Comment by sankyo | Hacker News Reader

Merchant model is where the OTA (online travel agency) is the merchant of record. Your credit card is debited by the OTA when you book. Behind the scenes, OTA buys N room nights from the hotel chain for some discounted price, and sells the room nights via their site.

Agency is where OTA acts as an agent between customer and lodging supplier. The OTA takes a fee and/or percent cut of the booking. Usually the customer pays the hotel directly upon checkin, and the hotel in turn pays the OTA.

Booking.com uses the Agency model and they dominate Europe. Expedia is strong in North America and struggles to get a foothold in other regions.

Expedia now uses the agency model and merchant model. Europeans understandably do not prefer to pay for the hotel stay at the time of booking.

There are more nuances, but that is basically how it works.

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> Europeans understandably do not prefer to pay for the hotel stay at the time of booking.

I do not understand the obviousness of "understandably". Seems like a likely culture difference. Explain?

Not sure what the OP meant, as I'm an European who does all of his traveling through Booking.com and as such I've encountered both situations, I'd say in equal measure: i.e. I've either paid the booking up-front or I've paid it after the stay was over (at check-out). I slightly prefer to pay at check-out, but that is in no way a stopping point for me when shopping for accommodation.

What Booking.com is really excellent for is that it just works and that it takes away a lot of the stress when traveling. Just by filtering on 8+ -rated reviews and by your desired nightly pay and you're sure to get what you want, no hidden gotchas, no anything.

It "just works"... except when reviews and ratings and inventory ("just 1 room left!") are bogus, as I experienced last week.

Yeah, I've recently noticed the "just 1 room left!" thingie, I generally tend to ignore it, as I travel by myself or with my gf. The reviews have held up for me, though. Granted, I also look at the number of reviews and at way those reviews are written, if it seems like there's something fishy I just skip it. On top of that I use TripAdvisor, which is really holding up pretty well for me in terms of traveler reviews.

FYI: TripAdvisor is an expedia brand.

Expedia sold trip advisor few years back, now they own another Meta Trivago.

It was never sold. They are both part of the Expedia brands.

In December 2011, TripAdvisor was spun off from Expedia in a public offering. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TripAdvisor#cite_note-16]

The spun off is a financial maneuver, it doesn't mean the company is not under Expedia.

>'It "just works"... except when reviews and ratings and inventory ("just 1 room left!") are bogus, as I experienced last week.'

These are all the reasons to just avoid booking.com. The whole site is like a shady used car salesman - for example returning search results that say -"You just missed it", then why tell me about it? Or "5 people looking at this right now", seriously who cares? Do people really liked to feel pressured? Or how booking.com returns properties with the red "sold out!" in search queries for hotel rooms? Booking.com is one of the most miserable user experiences on the internet and the UI? What a total 1990s looking shit show that is. And of course the reviews seem dubious as you mentioned.

I've been burned by them more times than I care to admit and prepaying means you are stuck with it.

I found similarly bogus ratings issues with both Booking.com and TripAdvisor.

Had I taken a closer look at the patterns of reviews (as I've learned to do with Yelp), I would have realized the preponderance of fakes. Ratings are all over the place. Numeric scores are inconsistent with comments. Vast majority of 8+ reviews are one-time reviewers, and a bad review is immediately followed by multiple high reviews the same week.

In the Booking.com case, the primary photo is phony (a different property -- room is wrong configuration). Many reviews refer to nonexistent features. The few negative reviews paralleled my experience very well (this place was a D-I-V-E, by far the worst I've stayed in anywhere in North America).

If you suspect a fraudulent property, ratings or images on booking.com, please report that. Personally, I've never come across any, but I know we've had such cases. In all such cases I'm aware of, the fraud was dealt with quickly and effectively.

Disclosure: I work for Booking.com albeit neither in the hotels facing department nor customer service. Managed fraud ops and security ops and eng years ago. Do not speak for the company.

TripAdvisor used to show photos of the properties taken by what looked to be actual past visitors, in all the cases I was involved in those photos matched my ulterior experiences with said places. And, yeah, like almost all the reviews-based websites out-there you have to learn to filter through the fake reviews. I'm European and as such travel mostly to non-English speaking countries, and you can spot those fake-reviews pretty well if they come from the owner or his relatives/friends, as they tend to make the same grammatical mistakes. I admit, in North-America things might be different in this regard.

>Booking.com is one of the most miserable user experiences on the internet and the UI

Their search by map or whatever is called it's actually pretty handy. It keeps the filters you have already selected on (which is a big thing in this day and age) and you can "travel" through the general area you're interested in staying, showing the prices on map-pin mouse-over, if I remember correctly. I tried doing this on GMaps directly and the experience was clearly inferior (no clear way to filter for price and rating, a lot less available properties), or maybe Google has another travel-like interface of which I don't know anything about.

I admit, there are tons of dark-patterns, some of which you mentioned, but I got used to them and learned to ignore them, the same as I do with online ads.

In general, pre-pay seems to be increasing pretty much everywhere. It used to be mostly limited to some resorts and other pre-pay packages. Today, it's pretty common at a lot of hotels, both in the US and elsewhere, to get substantial discounts for pre-paying.

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