Booking.com halts payments to hosts over IT technical maintenance
nltimes.nl
nltimes.nl
Unless H/W is failing it seems to me that an existing system could just keep rolling along. If there is a capacity problem throw more H/W at it. I suppose if the S/W is poorly designed some intervention would be required. I once worked at a shop that had years of transactions clogging up a database when daily information was critical and perhaps monthly would be useful for reports.
As others have mentioned, incoming payments are processed but not outbound.
Likewise 'IBill' and a couple of other cases besides. Regardless of origin: if they really have IT issues that can cause this then you should find an alternative. Unfortunately the 3rd party booking sites are so few in number when it comes to volume that your options are very limited.
The far more likely explanation is that their payout system is a heap of junk (as are so many systems).
https://ir.bookingholdings.com/overview/financials/quarterly...
You could get very rich shorting them if you believe they’ve run out of money.
The problem is that their signal is completely ambiguous.
They're enacting maintenance during the busiest season.
So we're already at odds with what a serious company can be expected to do. Unless there's a serious reason.
https://ir.bookingholdings.com/financials/annual-reports/def...
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4611920-booking-holdings-ca...
I see positive net income and a positive net change in cash and cash equivalents.
“Net income for the quarter amounted to USD266 million, compared with a net loss of USD700 million the prior year quarter. Net income per diluted share was USD7 compared with a net loss of USD17.10 the same quarter a year earlier.”
“For Q1 2023 (quarter ended March 2023), Booking Holdings reported revenues up 40% YoY on a reported basis (47% on a constant currency basis) to USD3.8 billion, on the back of a 44% YoY increase in gross travel bookings which amounted to USD39.4 billion for the quarter, and a 38% YoY increase in room nights booked. Booking's performance outpaced rival Expedia (EXPE) whose gross bookings rose 20% YoY to USD29.4 billion the same quarter.”
So something is wrong with their system.
They’re best off reporting it and ignoring it. Unless, of course, they used OP’s payment details.
From airline tickets, to bank statements, to collection agencies, to McDonald's HR portal, to HomeDepot invoices. Plz make it stop...
As someone who interviewed for a role last year, they're mostly migrated to Java / Python for backend services, some Go getting introduced as well. And half of my interviewers were working remotely from Spain / France / UK / etc.
But then again, I have no idea about how colocated the teams at Apple and Google are.
Though yes, Apple/Meta as of late are trying to get people back in Office. Google I hear still lets you do full remote.
https://medium.com/booking-com-development/how-we-spent-two-...
Outbound, they're paying into bank accounts (more complex), in many different countries with different protocols for bank transfers, with significant reporting and auditing requirements, invoicing, etc. Also paying on different timescales for different things – whether bulk purchasing inventory, paying for on-demand bookings, etc. Payment terms will vary by many factors including who the payee is. Some payees like large chains may have their own accounting systems that need to be integrated with.
I'd have generally assumed that outbound would be much more complex!
A few thoughts as a non expert:
They might take thousands of bookings for a single hotel, so the volume of inbound payments is significantly more.
Public facing payments have to operate 24/7.
They have to deal with fraud and bad actors.
Transactions need to be real time rather than batch.
They need to support all kinds of international payments.
They have to take payments over web, mobile and call centres.
They have to support PCI and GDPR compliance on the customer side.
I’m sure neither side is easy at their scale, but B2C sounds much trickier to me even though there are opportunities to outsource on both sides.
It may be complex, but they only give hotels 5 days for reconciliation, and won't accept any changes after 5 days.
Booking.com just started now. They just started this year where guest pays to booking.com and they send it to the hotels. Until last year, they didn't collect payment from the guest.
The interesting thing is... what's with the hosts who get into financial difficulties after 10 days of delayed payments. I get it that three years of a pandemic, the consequences of the Ruzzian war, and inflation have been a drain on everyone's reserves - but not even ten days of runway? Holy shit.
> payments for guests checking out from June 28 would be delayed and all paid out in one go on July 24.
That said, it sounds like payments are normally delayed by 10 days from checkout.
Of course, apparently some payments "could be delayed until August", so all I can say with authority is that this is a mess.
Why are they robbing the little guys, what is going on with their cash flow? A switchover can happen overnight, with the right planning, there should be no need to delay payments by 3 months!
Also, from a quick search, Booking seems to be doing fine financially.
They had a pretty bad loss two quarters ago:
"Net income was $266 million, compared with a net loss of $700 million in the prior-year quarter"
https://s201.q4cdn.com/865305287/files/doc_financials/2023/q...
Please visit this group in FB which was created to register all the concerns from hosts and guests from all over the world. We can collectively work together to fix this situation. https://m.facebook.com/groups/1316864141779135/
Poor tech + poor timing. Take off the tinfoil hats.
Basically, they can just down outbound payments for 10 days and not really lose any business. For most places it's probably not going to be that much of a problem they need to wait 10 days for a payment. If you can do something and it makes your life easiler why not?
There, I'll turn of the grumpy old man now.
https://welcome.expediagroup.com/en/about-us/about-expedia-g...
On the other hand, there are other companies not owned by Expedia who use their backend like AmexTravel.
The majority of the guest don't know about it.
If you're a member they've been sending emails about how they're merging the rewards with Expedia's reward system.
Perhaps you're right that most guests don't pay enough attention to realize, but it's not a secret.
Last year, I was in San Francisco for a hybrid business/personal trip where I extended my stay on both ends, brought my wife and of course I paid the difference.
I booked the week at the Hilton San Francisco Financial District. We got there and it was a dump. It was late, we stayed one night, checked out the next night and moved to the Parc 55. That would be nearly impossible if I booked through a third party.
On top of that, you don’t get hotel status benefits or points booking through a third party. We were upgraded free to the “fitness room” with a gym inside the room as a Diamond member of Hilton and the points went toward free hotel stays.
And the good hotels still thank me for being a loyal member and link my number to the booking on checkin (oddly occasionally I get the points too)
Also, I understand outside of the US, credit card rewards aren’t as lucrative. I get 20x points per dollar from Hilton for staying and an additional 14x from Hilton for using my cobranded Amex Hilton Aspire card when paying Hilton directly.
And yes we have much less lucrative CC rewards here. Here, Amex are partnered with Marriott (ew. not many good ones in the UK) and you only earn 6x
If you pay Booking, it's quite possible that Booking are acting as a reseller and buying wholesale hotel rooms to then sell to you at a markup. In that case Booking are the merchant, and who is ultimately responsible for the service. If you pay the hotel, Booking may take a fee but it's essentially commission, the hotel is fully responsible for the service and are the merchant.
None of this should really matter to the customer, but it does when things go wrong. Liability is different and consumer rights can be different if you're buying internationally or paying online vs in person.
They don't do that and none of their competitors do that. Booking.com charges hotels 15% in commission on their sales and that's it.
If you reserve through Booking.com, they are 100% responsible towards you for the reservation, and the hotel is 100% responsible towards Booking.com
This is how Expedia worked for many years. Booking didn't start out doing this, but I think both are now large enough that they all do a bit of both.
Some googling suggests Booking may not be buying wholesale directly, but may be just listing inventory from other wholesalers.
There's a good episode of the Acquired podcast on Booking.com that goes into some depth on their business model if you want more info.
Both expedia and booking.com know better about the market condition than the hotels.
When they realize that rooms are selling fast in the area, they sell the room as prepaid rooms. If the nightly rate is $100, they sell it for $120-150 and they pay hotels $100 - 15-18% commission.
They also buy google ads in the area for the top results during that time. Most guests don't even realize they are clicking on their ads.
I've never seen Booking.com do that with any hotel no matter how high the demand, and I have never heard anybody in the industry having experienced that. What do you base your claim on?
That would make little sense, since the proposal of Booking.com is to always offer the cheapest rates.
However they do buy a ton of Google Ads for hotel bookings.
I'm very hands on at my hotel. Sometimes guest shows us how much they have paid. There were times when someone handed the guest receipt showing how much we got paid and they come back saying why they were charged more than the receipt. Older guest brings the printout of their booking.
Booking even had a unique website for my hotel. We had to involve the franchise to get it shut down.
> Booking even had a unique website for my hotel. We had to involve the franchise to get it shut down.
Unless you're talking about listing page that they have for each property, I have a hard time believing this. Only if the previous hotel owner made some kind of thing together with them.
Responsability varies greatly depending about what is the issue at hand.
with that being said, I'm pretty sure marketplace regulations (such as booking.com) forces the marketplace to be out of the money flow. so this should be on the PSP side, it's strange that booking.com is halting payments this way.
another point is that they're collecting 4% interest on money that's not theirs ... I wonder if they plan on paying out the interest.
Of course. And it's much easier to frivolously book and cancel rooms if you don't need to pay up-front.
Charging at booking time gets rid of a lot of guests who make "maybe" bookings, making it easier for real visitors to get their accommodation. That's the reason most hotels are moving to that model.
> We have temporarily paused sales to catch up on the production and delivery of existing orders. Rest assured – this has no effect on servicing.
... and then news broke that it's on the brink of bankruptcy.
just poor tech capabilities & timing. nothing deep here. (not a speculation.)
I interpret that as... we have laid off the entire sales team
Their back-end systems must be horrendous - I've maintained an integration for years that works off their PDFs and they keep making little tweaks, adding lines here and there, renaming columns, adding odd lines that refer to charges they "forgot" to collect months before.
I'm going to contact a few future bookings and say that booking.com have not been paying their bills, and to see if I can get them to rebook direct.
If this was affecting guest checkout, it'll be resolved within hours with execs being all over it.
But this affects outbound payments, same as if it was affecting refunds. There is no legal requirements here (with penalties) and hosts are hostage to the system. The alternatives are not much better (if not worse) due to the enshittification of the whole IT sector.
Welcome to Web 4.0. I guess we'll be missing Web 3.0.
Pretty much every big system at a big company is a "pile of junk", but they had all the time, money and resources to improve it. They didn't, the question is: Would Booking.com act the same way if they were a small player in a market with a dozen big players?
The busy summer season... as half of the earths surface is in winter.
I can only think of only 2: Booking Holdings and Expedia Group.
Are there more?
Booking Holdings and Expedia Group are two different, publicly listed companies.