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I've completely sworn off third-party booking services. They never know what's going on and when anything goes wrong they just tell you they can't help you. Then the place tells you that they can't help you because you didn't book through them and they just point fingers at each other.

Better to book directly from whatever hotel / airline / whatever you want to use. Whatever savings you might get is not worth it and a lot of times hotels appreciate direct bookings and they're cheaper anyway.

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I've spent ~150 nights in hotels in the past year, and it's super rare that booking directly is cheaper. I almost always save like 30% on Hotels.com/HotelTonight/etc.

I recently wanted to extend a stay and the front desk quoted me $120/nt while Hotels.com was $107 (plus 10% back as a reward, so ~$96).

I wish that weren't the case because this is 100% true:

> never know what's going on and when anything goes wrong they just tell you they can't help you. Then the place tells you that they can't help you because you didn't book through them and they just point fingers at each other.

I've come to rely greatly on in-app ratings/reviews before booking.

Here, hotels have deals with booking.com etc that forbid them to post lower rates on their own websites. However, if you call to reserve, you get a discount code. I don’t know if that’s a more global practice or not.

This is exactly correct. You have to call them.

Oh, that's great to know. Thank you both, I'll definitely try this!! :)

I'd rather pay the premium than calling :-/

Ah, the extra tax for the socially introverted

Same here... I'm one of those archetypical millennials that hate phone calls.

Over the year I have learned to overcome my aversion to calls when making one is beneficial, but a call to someone totally unknown, and not in my native language, is one of the cases where... yeah, I'd pay the premium too.

Can’t imagine the latency of playing phone tag with X hotels trying to find the lowest price at a particular date/# of nights/# of people

You search on a booking website, then call the hotel you find.

But how do you know you got the lowest price ?

What if another hotel was willing to go lower ?

You can use email. Depending on what are you planning it doesn't need to get an answer immediately.

also at least in the case of hilton and marriott, they have friends and family codes that unlock those rates sometimes

This is the "most favored nation" pricing clause that major OTAs like Booking and Expedia try to put in their contracts with hotels. Usually the phrasing says something along the lines of how the clause doesn't apply if the hotel has a previous relationship with the guest - this is part of why hotel chains push so hard to get customers to join their loyalty programs. If the OTA is taking 20% off the top, the hotel can get you to sign up for their program and then sell you the room for 10% off, and everyone but the OTA wins. Another way hotels try to get around this is offering free breakfast, wifi, better rooms, etc. for directly booked customers, while showing the same price as the OTA.

~5 years ago the EU was starting to push back on the legality of the MFN clauses and I was under the impression that Booking.com had scaled back their usage of them in some ways, but I don't know the current state of things.

While I'm at it, my usual rant about Booking.com's review system - the scale is actually from 2.5-10, and the median score is 8.1. Don't be fooled by those "above average" 7 scores.

With Booking.com, filtering to 9+ is the way. Had good experiences with that

I found that to be the case a lot more during covid. Hilton and other chains had these amazing deals where if you found something cheaper they’d match plus knock 30% off or whatever. It was almost a certainty that was the case so I was getting good deals on rooms.

That guarantee still exists but I find the prices are now usually the same for those mega chains.

Not only that, hotels.com often has rooms when the hotel is “fully booked.” Twice last month in London, I wanted to extend my stay. The staff said the hotel was full. I went online and booked. Then asked them to keep me in the same room. I think it’s because they reserve a block for online sales.

> I think it’s because they reserve a block for online sales.

This is it, but generally only during high occupancy/peak periods.

The staff/management must have been incompetent, or there was a discrepancy in the inventory and they overbooked. There’s no reason a hotel owner would want a person in the hotel to buy on hotels.com and end up with 15% less money due to having to paying commission to Expedia.

I had issues with the accommodation after booking, but hotels.com always fixed it and so far to my benefit (getting better rooms or hotels than I paid for to compensate me).

> I've come to rely greatly on in-app ratings/reviews before booking.

Really? My last vacation we booked the first few nights and then decided where to go and booked the next night on booking.com and my take-away was that they must mostly keep the good reviews online and remove most of the bad ones.

I've found that booking direct will get me the same rate as something like hotels.com, at least for the hotels I'm booking. I do have a much higher confidence that I will get the room type I booked and any additional add-ons like parking if I book direct than with the 3rd party.

I'll also check back closer to arrival to see if there's a better rate. It's been about 50/50 this year.

Many chains will price match

https://thepointsguy.com/news/hotel-price-match/

This price discrepancy almost never happens due to advances in integration of the reservations systems. When a chain hotel changes its prices, it almost immediately is reflected on Expedia/booking and other websites.

Usually, the price discrepancy is because someone is comparing prices on different dates/times after the prices have changed, or the price is not actually advertised (auctioned rooms at random hotels like on Priceline), or some type of car rental/flight package pricing by the travel agent.

All the hotel chains offer a Best Price Guarantee discount or maybe even a free night if you report that you found a cheaper hotel room than the official website (at the same time/date of shopping):

https://www.marriott.com/look/claimForm.mi

https://www.hilton.com/en/p/price-match-guarantee/

https://www.hyatt.com/info/best-rate-guarantee

https://www.ihg.com/content/us/en/customer-care/best-price-g...

https://www.choicehotels.com/deals/best-rate

https://www.wyndhamhotels.com/hotel-deals/best-rate-guarante...

I agree. It never seems to go right. The third party either has the wrong room availability, wrong room type, wrong price, etc. And I actually side with the hotels because it’s exactly as if someone else bought the room for you and messed up, which the hotel can’t really deal with but they usually try. And for the most part, hotels seem like one of the last places you can still get actual customer service with.

I think most places that require you to pay $100-200/day for the privilege of using them still have customer service.

Most of the time those are very poor customer service

Sadly that's comparable to rent in some places these days, so not so special. But yes I've always been pretty happy with the level of service personally.

Yeah, the rent for my girlfriend and I is within that range, and the first two months we were in the apartment there were a total of six or seven days where our apartment had no heat and management would not answer our calls or emails until the city stepped in due to the number of complaints that we and our neighbors were filing. On the other hand, the hotel we stayed in for a bit during one of those stints had amazing customer service! They let us decide each day by 11 AM whether or not we wanted to extend our stay, and when we finally got confirmation that the heat in our apartment was working, they decided to let us stay until 1 PM with no extra charge just to save us some trouble.

Serious question: how much do you think a full time customer service agent should be paid? (Some background: I've worked at customer service in the past.)

Depends on the rest of the hotel/hospitality equation. I imagine they can be paid more than they are and still have the hotel be profitable, but I have no idea what a reasonable amount looks like.

Not only is it often cheaper to book directly through the hotel, they often upgrade you to a nicer suite at least here in Aus whenever I've done that.

My grandfather taught me a decade ago (more even) to use Wotif (now Expedia) and similar to find places, then call directly. For someone who definitely did not grow up with this sort of tech, he was quite excellent at working the boundaries of tech and people to get good results.

I’ve tried booking through hotels directly and it’s never been cheaper. It is so weird. I usually end up using hotels.com which is just one of many booking services owned by Expedia.

Have to call them -- they often have contracts that mean they can't offer cheaper rates online, but are happy to over the phone. Though it's possibly down to where you're staying I guess, but I've had good luck doing that in Australia, the UK and a couple places around Europe!

And worst-case, they'll match it usually, and I'd rather be booked directly to avoid the crap that the article is discussing

I'm seen this too, and it's bizarre that adding a middleman actually is cheaper.

While I've had that as well, I've also had occasions where the hotel staff replies "oh yeah, to get the cheaper rates you'll have to go through <agent-site-with-lower-list-price>" when calling them, or even trying to extend an existing reservation at the desk.

Norms do seem to vary between regions and countries.

> they're cheaper anyway.

Sometimes they are not cheaper, the price on their site is higher compared to what you see on booking.com.

Some hotels dont have a website and I dont like to book using the phone.

Some locations have no option to book outside of the third party service, unfortunately. I visited Peru recently and was only able to book directly with the stay on about 1/4 of the occasions.

I've had this exact experience with third-party brokers so many times. I now use third-party sites just for searching and price comparisons, but always book direct with hotel / airline. Usually they give miles / points / benefits you wouldn't get otherwise.

> Whatever savings you might get is not worth it and a lot of times hotels appreciate direct bookings and they're cheaper anyway.

Come again? You lose out on saving using hotel instead of third-party booking service, but at least the hotel is cheaper?

100% agree. You can also ask a hotel for free upgrades when you check in because you booked directly. Doesn’t always work but once in a while it does.

For flights yes, for hotels I suppose it varies on location.

In South East Asia hotels are cheaper on Agoda and even contacting the hosts directly wouldn't get you a better price most of the time. It's a waste of time to try so I stopped doing that.

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