I would like to know ow the world of hotel booking looks like these days.
Is everybody here using booking.com?
Or is anybody using alternatives as well?
If you use something else: What?
If you only use Booking.com: Why?
Is everybody here using booking.com?
Or is anybody using alternatives as well?
If you use something else: What?
If you only use Booking.com: Why?
Despite the proliferation of booking sites on the web, all of them are either part of Bookings Holdings (Booking.com’s parent company, 17bln revenue last year), or part of Expedia Group (11bln revenue last year), and I would expect the distributions of third party bookings at most hotels to roughly reflect that revenue split. There is one other competing group, Trip.com (5bln), but they mostly service China and don’t have as much penetration into Western markets as far as I know.
Yes, there is space for small niche sites with certain angles, but all of those sites will still be owned by one of the big two parents. There isn’t even much space for a niche player intending to eventually get bought out by one of the big groups like you see in some software fields, because hotels are pretty risk-averse in general and won’t just hand out access to their reservation channels to small players easily.
Room availability, staff service, everything else is identical. We have no incentive to encourage you to cut out the middleman and thus we don’t, but to my knowledge we also aren’t prohibited from doing that. Customers do sometimes ask about this stuff and I say “if you know exactly where you want to stay, might as well book direct to save a few dollars, but those sites offer a real service in helping you find a good place when you’re unfamiliar with the area”. Customers also sometimes say they can get a better rate on an OTA than what we are offering, and I always encourage them to book with whatever method gets them the best deal - “we honor all bookings and you will get the exact same room either way”. Usually that better price does not materialize, the guest realizes they were looking at a cheaper room or even a different hotel, though it does happen from time to time even with us (which I have never been able to understand; the OTA must simply be choosing to lose money on those bookings for some reason). We do not overbook, nor do we allow OTAs to overbook.
(I don’t know how representative this is of hotels in general; the owner is particularly upstanding and moral, kind of a “pillar of the community” guy, so this might be an unusually fair setup. But I’ve never heard a customer say we’re unusually fair, so I think this probably is pretty common.)
Essentially the role OTAs play in our case is they are a search engine and perhaps a more convenient booking process, nothing more. I believe this is a common way hotels use OTAs, though that’s just my impression.
The other common way hotels use OTAs is more tightly integrated, OTAs get to do variable pricing and probably other things I don’t know about since we don’t join any of those programs. I can’t speak to those arrangements but I imagine that’s what is going on when the OTA can offer you a better rate than the hotel direct, which definitely does happen with some hotels. That might also be what is going on when you ask questions about OTA rates and it feels like the staff member is under a gag order, but again, I do not know anything at all about that mode of OTA integration.
About room availability, I thought that if Booking or any other third-party says "this hotel has 5 rooms left", it didn't necessarily mean the hotel had actually only 5 rooms available for the dates, but maybe there were only 5 rooms left from the "batch" the hotel put in Booking (my assumption was that, to make the orchestration of reservations between different platforms easier, hotels divided the number of rooms between them, or something like that...)
Orchestrating reservations is a lot more streamlined than you’re imagining. All sources have access to the reservation management system and can poll it for availability, while the booking is in progress it simply blocks out the booking with a “pending” booking. When the booking is made, the source adds it to the hotel’s system themselves. I have had customer support with both OTAs on the phone and heard them say “I can see you have this many rooms available…”. So if we have 7 rooms left, Expedia knows we have 7 rooms, Booking.com knows we have 7, and we know we have 7.
The only exception is if we have rooms with potential maintenance issues (air conditioners, TVs, and hot water systems have Heisenbugs too!), we will sometimes reserve one room of that type in case we need to move a guest. In that case, we would have 8 rooms available but Expedia and Booking.com would see 7.
Booking.com doesn't know about any rooms that are not made available to them by the hotel, so everything is based on that. In my experience, most hotels just have all their rooms available at all times for booking.com - but maybe some of them experiment with availability to sell a bit more themselves.
The "A person just booked..." and "Only 2 rooms left" messages that booking.com uses to annoy customers are actually correct. I've worked on the other side, and seen from the backend that they don't lie.
> (my assumption was that, to make the orchestration of reservations between different platforms easier, hotels divided the number of rooms between them, or something like that...)
No, they use hotel software that integrates and synchronizes instantly with all platforms, their own web site and the front desk.
Yes, I think that's feasible. However, I sometimes stay at medium to small size hotels (doing my reservation through Booking or other 3rd parties) but when I get to the place, I can see them managing my stay using Excel files or similar "almost by hand" methods. So I was skeptical that those kind of places had actually a system that can automatically synchronize with all the third party platforms they use in real time.
I used to use various sites, but I realized that if I concentrated on Marriott/Bonvoy I could reach their highest status level (Ambassador). I've almost reached the dollar value and night count to retain my status through 2024, and it's only April!
I'm quite happy with them. I get a lot of free upgrades, lots of points for free nights, free breakfast, late checkout, etc. And if anything is the least bit out of order, they fix it for me.
I hate AirBnb. There are lot of bad actors now, and AirBnb customer support is useless. Even if I need a flat for a long period (like a month or more), I try to find an independent agency and use them. Searching on AirBnb can be a good starting point: if the listing shows an agency name you can usually find them on Google. AirBnb "protection" is useless anyway, so I don't understand why I should pay such a huge premium for it.
Booking.com is fine. I didn't get stressed out about the messages that the author writes about. But now I only use Booking.com when there is no Bonvoy hotel in the place I'm going. I have never had to escalate anything to Booking, but in general the places in booking are as described. There aren't as many bad actors as there are with AirBnb.
EDIT: I'm not employed. All my travel is personal travel paid out my own pocket.
But it doesn't apply in my specific case. I'm not employed. I pay for everything out of my own pocket.
I bet a better deal from Marriott directly as a member than by going through a third-party.
Speaking from the other side of the desk, guests can vary wildly in how much they cost to accommodate. A good guest (mostly one who cleans up after themselves) can cost as little as one-quarter of the average guest, that significantly improves the margin on the room and we can definitely afford to pass some of those savings on to you once we know you’re a good guest.
Speaking from a broader view, the kind of guest who stays often enough to meet loyalty targets is usually travelling for work. Their demand for accommodation is inelastic (job needs them in this place for this long) but very substitutable (pretty much any clean room will do). It makes sense to sacrifice some margin to capture that.
So there’s a few good reasons why hotels or hotel chains can offer real discounts in their loyalty programs.
The 100 nights/flights guy is also probably a much lower touch customer as they are just in&out for work, and "know how things work" generally so doesn't have unreasonable expectations for what they have paid.
You're expected to upgrade them to the best available room/seat but they complain to corporate when someone that does 101/year gets the upgrade instead. If their flight gets cancelled/delayed because they flew into a known hurricane, you better watch out for it and proactively re-book them or hand out food/hotel vouchers.
The $5 discount OTA person... give them the crap room/seat that nobody else wants and just ignore their whining.
Just based on my experience of being the latter and trolling flyertalk...
(used to be. then came covid. now i use my points to fly volunteers to ukraine.)
Another way to look at them is they are a gamified & transparent method of becoming "a regular" at a hotel/airline and generally get in return, commensurate better product/treatment/service, especially in cases of adverse events like short notice changes, delays, cancellations, etc.
Just like if you go to the same pub/restaurant in your hometown over & over, you'll get recognized as a regular.. and maybe on occasion get some free apps, access to a table when they might otherwise say they are full, and friendlier treatment. Except at a national/global scale across a brands properties/planes/airports/etc.
It is interesting to me that travel is one of the few remaining places where customer loyalty is in any way rewarded. And why shouldn't it be?
Or at least a tax-free retirement benefit (not bad if you have an employer).
But it is funny to read on the travel discussion boards how much road-warriors hate hotel/airline X Y or Z because their points program isn't great, but they're substantially cheaper.
Some country's tax policies consider employer-paid meals a (partly/fully) taxable benefit, but if the hotel provides it for free, that's cool.
Same thing with credit card points. That's a huge one for squeezing out tax-free income out of your business.
However, if you get into any quarrel with your employer that can be fatal. Now they have an good argument to fire you with any compensation because of your wrongdoing. This had recently happened to the head of a Finnish government agency, ironically enough the audit office.
EU regulation is pushing back on the MFN clauses, but I'm not sure what the current state of things is.
If the difference was small enough, many guests would still book through booking.com instead of the hotel out of ignorance, not caring enough, or because booking provides a better experience.
It'd cut their profits by limiting the commissions they can charge, but I don't see why they would go out of business.
There are lots of other websites for booking hotels. But after trying a few, I don't see any advantage over booking.com so that's what I use (and ignore the dark patterns if possible).
A note on alternatives - loads of former competitors have been bought by either BDC or EXP, i.e. hotels.com is just Expedia, kayak or priceline are BDC, etc.
Booking.com have a price guarantee, and a good one, so you will rarely get a better price from the hotel _unless you’re a member of their loyalty programme_ … so for the big hotel chains, sign up to those and book via their apps
I remember walking into a hotel at around 10 PM (I was road-tripping around Iceland and could've slept in the car too) and asking if they'd give me a discount (1 room more to sell), and the front desk person clicked around on a lot on his computer and when a colleague asked him, he said "I'll just give him the agency rate.".
The most likely reason you might get a better rate from a third-party booking site than from the hotel direct is if the hotel allows the site to do variable pricing to try to capture more willingness-to-pay; sometimes that variable pricing will work out in your favour.
They have a few mechanisms to try and drive up commission from the usual 12%, though. They have a preferred program which boosts search results but costs 3%> They would have loved to drop it to better tune search, but they were addicted to the incremental revenue.
At various times there were also dynamic ranking boost efforts, where a hotel could increase boost their ranking (with a preview) by increasing the commission percentage. IIRC that went as high as 18%.
Both of those applied to the default search results order ONLY. If you clicked "order by price" or similar then you simply got that.
(Worked for booking until end of 2017.)
Had a flight on all American Airlines metal that the OTA purchased through Iberian airlines on a mix of AA bookings and Finnair codeshares. The flight did not touch Finland or Spain.
With multiple carriers, sometimes things become your problem.
If you buy multiple independent tickets to get the cheapest fares possible, you can be really screwed.
So it really depends on your appetite for risk. I sometimes choose the lowest risk to get to my destination, and a high risk option on the way home where I am less time constrained and can be more flexible dealing with any issues. New Zealand is the antipodes to Europe and can take 24 hours to arrive (including stopovers), so any flight problems are significantly worse than for many other countries.
But I do see Google's OTA listing offering things like you say where you're not protected in the event of a missed connection delay and have some shady insurer that's supposed to 'protect' you outside of the airlines.
Though, Google Maps' UI is buggy and often the deals are out-of-date/sold out, but I still find it better overall