Booking.com agrees to EU demands to change travel offers

That depends (now) from a lot of factors and until not so long ago the contract with booking.com didn't allow to publicize lower prices than what was on the booking.com site.

But it depends also on the hotel (how it is organized, if it is a chain, etc.).

Think at the front desk employee as an unsupervised/lazy employee of a largish organization.

You book through booking.com, it means less work for him/her and no change in his/her pay (but less revenue for the hotel).

I have had more than once conversations on the telephone with the front desk of an hotel, where they just told me to "go book online".

If I have no time I simply choose another hotel, if I have some spare time I call again and talk to the director about the matter.

Now think at the front desk employee as someone that has an interest in the income of the hotel (directly or indirectly) , the amount of work is the same (as there is not any "web reservation center" or the like) whether your booking is made by means of booking.com or directly (at the telephone and possibly with a confirmation e-mail) and he/she has the possibility to increase - even if slightly - the income of the company.

For me so far its worked everytime I am emailing the reservations team at a hotel. (I am in their trade though and tend to use my business email when booking) I reckon phoning a hotel might be harder to get you a discount because most of the times the frontdesk staff won't put you through to the reservations rep because he might be unavailable or whatever so they'll just give you whatever price the system tells them which is what you'll get on their website if you go to book directly. Its important to be able to contact the person that can amend the booking prices and frontdesk staff usually can't do that.

Dirty rooms can be cleaned, cockroaches can be eradicated, but intentional overselling indicates an incurable dishonesty at the heart of management.

I would sometimes need to arrive to check-in really late, like 3 a.m. If the hotel was nearly full I'd actually get a call on my mobile phone from the desk manager around 10p or 11p asking if I was still going to be checking in. I'm sure it was only because the hotel would get dinged by corporate for having to pay me out if they gave away my room. Too bad they don't care enough to do that for everyone before selling out their room from under them.

An alternate strategy I use with other chains when I'm concerned there might be an oversold situation is to call the hotel around the normal check-in time (~3p) and get the front desk to check-in my room while I'm on the phone and insist on getting the actual room number. That way, it'll be some other poor schmuck who trying to check in at midnight that will get shafted.

Overbooking and caring about the customer is a completely different thing.

Overbooking is about running a business. We are almost on 2020 and currently its a stats game for any business out there. In order to min/max my own business I have to overbook, that's how i'll turn profit.

Caring and respecting the customer - anyone that is not doing that shouldn't be running a hotel imho. (Ryanair as an example should never ever run a hotel)

Also on hotels you do have ratings nowadays, service is not something you can compromise on. If you are having unhappy customers then that will show on your tripadvisor, booking.com, hotels.com and whatever have you. Then you'll have to drop your prices, meaning making less and devaluing your product. Customer service/happiness should be the number one priority for any hotel out there.

My kind of hotel allows me to make a profit by capitalizing on overbookings. I've kept the hotel on 4 stars whilst is an actual 5 star hotel with all the amenities a 5 stars hotel has. I kept it that way because the expectations of the customer are lower when they visit a 4 star hotel vs a 5 star hotel.

The pricing nowadays doesn't go by stars anyways it goes by rating. The higher your ratings and publicity the higher your price. There is less than a handful of 5 stars around me that can be more expensive than I am. The rest of them are cheaper due to their ratings/size etc.

When a customer arrives and learns that his room has been overbooked, he also learns that he'll be staying at a close-by hotel that usually is of 5 stars. The quality of the hotel that I'll put my customer because he remains my customer is either similar or higher than my hotel. If the customer check the prices also for that hotel, he'll find that they are the same as the room he booked. (I get them cheaper through the hotels I do business with and that's where profit comes from).

But I'll never have the customer feel that he is getting less than he paid for, or have his holidays ruined or altered.

8/10 times he'll stay at a slightly cheaper hotel than mine but of similar or higher quality/star rating. 2/10 i'll go in the bank and i'll be putting the customer on a more expensive hotel than mine.

Again its a stats game but I won't compromise on customer service and that's running a hotel.

Also personally let me tell you that I am not very keen towards returning customers in my area. My experience has shown me that returning customers expect the hotel prices and offers to remain the same and the hotel is currently on a developing area which has its prices going up yearly. I had returning customers asking why I was X more expensive this year than their last visit in 2016. For me its straight forward: inflation and the market prices around me will set the prices to where they need to be. For the customer is a bit more complicated and the customer will usually believe that my hotel is just becoming more expensive without a reason. Again this thing on the returning customer is totally personal and it affects my area as its highly touristic and not a business area and my hotel being of a certain boutique size. I am aware that most hotels out there have loyalty programs and they do make their money of returning customers.

Again as a hotelier I'll never ever compromise on quality and try to capitalize on someones holidays by ruining them or making them feel awful. If there is no room available at my price point around the area, the customer is going to stay at a more expensive room than mine and me going out of pocket on that.

For those unfamiliar, think of a Hotel’s PMS system like an ERP platform but for hotel operations and associating guest services with guest billing info. Buy the high-speed WiFi instead of using the slow free WiFi? That goes to the PMS and tells the hotel to bill you for it (if they don’t farm that out to a third-party who bills and remits on their behalf).

Anyhow.

I’ve come to learn, without naming any of my clients publicly that technology integration in hospitality (I specifically refer to household name hotel brands, not necessarily brands associated with ordering reservations like Expedia and Booking.com) ranges from exceptional but difficult to horrifying but trivial, and a common source of my personal frustrations as a product manager for our specific services (which require integration to these PMS platforms) is incomplete or inaccurate data produced by the property or hotel brand THEMSELVES

I feel your frustration.

Boils down to risk mgmt vs revenue - and all but the most conservative businesses will choose revenue.

In my case, I absolutely starved booking in favour of Airbnb, as Airbnb was much faster out of the gate. So, I have platform risk, but revenue is good.

Most of your code will be deployed as an experiment, so you are more likely to throw away that code instead of refactoring it.

Developers can push to production, and are expected to be responsible for the results of that push. It works quite well.

I use them sometimes, but from a company with such aggressive / dishonest marketing I would generally not expect any customer service worth the name. IIRC their terms and conditions exclude all responsibility whatsoever if the reservation does not work out, It's always the hotel's responsibility.

Luckily I have never had a case where I would have really had to contact their support.

Well, what you read into my writing is entirely your problem, but let's just say that you are far off the mark and it is precisely because I have couple of decades in IT behind me that I know that six months to stop doing something at this level is ridiculous.

> I have experience with travel industry, and I can tell with absolute certainty that there exist many projects (much younger than booking.com, by the way), where disabling something like that "in a day or two" is downright physically impossible.

I would hope that the level of competence at booking.com would be a little higher than that.

> Marketing and strategical issues aside, there wouldn't be a single person who could apply necessary changes in a day or two for any amount of money.

I'd be happy to give it a shot.

> It might sound crazy for an outsider, but that's just the way it is.

Or so you say. But the fact is that all software ever written did stuff because we tell it to and that disabling some bit of code is mostly matter of locating it. Writing new functionality can be very hard and might take a long time. But disabling something as simple as 'output ridiculous sentences that pressure our users into buying' should not be harder than to locate it and disabling it. If that has unintended side effects at the level that you are suggesting then booking.com has other problems.

Finally, I'm sure that if they wanted to make quick work of it they could disable that bit in the CSS for their website and make it pretty behind the scenes at their leisure. Anything that can be displayed can be hidden.

That is not true, in booking.com specific case, any competent frontend developer can do it in couple of days if they had to.