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Comment by zxcvbn4038 | Hacker News Reader

I think people really must not appreciate booking.com. My wife strayed from the formula, booked directly with major chain, used loyalty points to book a stay at a European hotel they operate. Got charged full price by the hotel, got charged for a number of meals she didn’t have, and we’ve been dealing with that since September 2022. When we have problems with reservations we made through booking.com, and post Covid a lot of hotels seem to overbook so we’ve rolled in and found we have no place to stay on several occasions, it’s just single phone call to booking.com resolve the issue. I don’t know what booking’s cut is but they earn every penny.

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I showed up at a hotel at around 19:00. Website stated that their reception was open till 21:00. Nobody was there, front door was locked. A single call to Booking.com and an hour later they had put me in another hotel, free of charge. Cost of the other hotel would be paid by the first hotel.

I now do most of my bookings through Booking.com. It is very rare that booking directly gives a lower price (I always try) and the upside of guaranteed logging in that area is a big bonus for me.

I’m very jealous of your experience.

On booking.com I booked a place with a lockbox and it didn’t have all the required keys on it.

Multiple phone calls gave me no help and I found a way to effectively break into the building and I just did that every day for the rest of my stay

I recommend actually booking a hotel instead of a rebranded Airbnb.

I've booked apartments, which are the most common type of travel/tourist accommodation in my country, through booking.com before Airbnb even existed.

I appreciate Booking:

- the info is correct. There may be a lot of small print but everything's there. You don't get surprise cash deposit requirement, etc.

- I dealt with their customer support a couple of times. Each time I got talking to a living human within minutes. Stark contrast with airbnb

- it's not owned by Ctrip that's buying everything travel related. If/when it is, I'm out but until then I think I'm a pretty loyal customer

Using Booking for years, recently deactivated Airbnb so now it's my only option.

What I don't like is that it looks like they are going as far as given jurisdiction allows. Depending on where I connect from I can see prices excluding taxes and possibly other dark patterns that I don't always notice. I wouldn't mind destressing the GUI a bit for sure

> "the info is correct"

Oddly enough, this not being the case is the reason I ended up not using Booking.com for my last hotel booking. I had to go to the hotel website to find accurate basic information (like the size of the bed, which was wrong on all of the Booking.com room options) and ended up just booking the hotel while I was there.

Interesting, never knew they have bed sizes... I would see if it is single/double/whatever and then consult photos/reviews. I guess my information requirements are different;)

Booking actually owns something like 5% of Ctrip.

We all know how ownership goes with Chinese companies...

Exact opposite experience. I will never, ever book third party again. If you book direct, a cc chargeback is always available to quickly resolve a dispute without debating Indian call center reps for an hour.

I'm about three months into my chargeback, I've had to supply additional documentation twice, and every time I do the hotel gets thirty days to review and respond.

Booking.com's advantage used to be that they had actually good customer service, spread all around the world, no huge call centers in India. They've recently outsourced most of it though, so I can't speak for what it's like at the moment.

This reads like a bizarro-world advertisement.

You book through booking.com, and upon arrival, regularly find your reservation bumped due to overbooking?

That’s not positive for booking.com!

This happens no matter whom you book with. The difference between booking directly and booking through booking.com is the difference between "sorry, sucks to be you, bye" and "there's this more expensive accommodation available for you and you don't have to pay anything extra".

This is just as anecdotal as your story and the original post: For the last 15 years I've spent about 100 nights in hotels per year all over the world and this has never happened to me. When I had a reservation it has always been honored.

I've booked directly with small hotels, using chain sites and various aggregators (trivago, hrs, booking, Expedia, hotels.com). The experience has been pretty much the same. My only reason to use aggregators is to collect rewards across different hotels.

It's happened to me once and to my parents once, and we don't even book that often. Maybe it depends on the country.

It probably depends on your time of arrival. With some rooms sold as fully refundable or as "one night fee for no show", the hotel does not know, even at 10PM, how many people will actually show up, so many go with first come first serve method. As a single data point, I had two cases of booked room not being available and both happened when I got to the hotel after midnight. My 2c.

I have spent far fewer nights but it has happened to me twice. Once in New York City and once in Portugal. Both times the hotels between the lines admitted that it was their fault and compensated me with better rooms in other hotels just a short walk away.

It is not booking that does the overbooking, it is the hotels. It doesn't matter that I made the reservation in advance, pre-paid, and spoke to someone at the hotel the day prior to arrival. They probably give away my room to avoid confrontation with someone else who was overbooked. By the time I roll into town, which is usually 1-2am because I like driving at night, the hotel is locked down tight and the clerk is pretty comfortable behind his intercom telling me to sleep in my car because they gave away my room (yeah! they actually said that). So I called booking and 45 minutes later I'm checking into a hotel (they had to call several places and talk to people to find one that actually had a room because the computers kept seeing availabilities even though the hotels were at capacity).

Not sure if it needs to be said, but try informing your hotel the day of, but close enough to when you're actually arriving that you're speaking to the same person, that you will be checking in late so they're less likely to give it to a walk in.

People _do_ book hotels and no-show enough that they're more than willing to assuming you're not gonna use it if you don't give them a heads up.

They'll overbook before the day

We did that, and to emphasize again we pre-paid, they could have left the room empty for the entire night and been compensated. Instead they gave it away, and this has happened several times now. I suspect what is going on is they give away any rooms during normal hours to avoid conflicts with other people who were overbooked, then let the night clerk who is safely locked away inside the office deal with the rest.

If you book an airline ticket and get bumped from your flight, it has to do with the airline not whoever sold you the ticket. Booking in this case is your intermediary who gets you a seat on another flight on the spot.

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