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Comment by rebuilder | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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

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