At this point basically any third party booking should be considered a scam. Even if the booking company is "legit", you're still a second class citizen with the hotel or whatever you booked and subject to no help, arbitrary fees, no points, etc.
It's just as much scamming on the side of the hotels - they accept third party booking but misrepresent that they treat you the same.
Story: After being burned multiple times via booking.com and other third party sites, I tried to book directly with the hotel. I was planning a last minute trip with multiple stops and so i just booked a hotel and forgot about it thinking that once I arrive in Ireland i'll look up the details. There was this hotel in Ireland that accepted my booking, charged my damn card the day after the first night, but never actually sent me any confirmation or any emails. When I arrived I didn't remember whatever stupid quaint name the hotel was because I had booked about two weeks prior. I guess this was my bad because I was used to a hotel freaking emailing you something when you book.
When I arrived I was desperately trying to search for any indication that I made the booking and my credit card didn't even have a record. I gave up and ended up booking elsewhere.
Then all of a sudden after the first night I got charged. I was absolutely livid. I demanded an explanation. Turns out what happened was then when I first tried to book, their email form had an issue where my broswers autocomplete added the name of my email after the .com so it was email@gmail.comemail. The site rejected it and I realized the error. I hadn't entered my credit card info so I thought I was fine. I resubmitted it with the correct email and then entered my credit card info. Booking was accepted.....turns out their system somehow retained the first email and send out the confirmation to that email and they had no indication that the email bounced until the person looked up the issue AFTER they had charged me. Whats even crazier is that on the second day they emailed me first asking where I was before I could reach out to them! So they had the correct email in their records but their internal billing system captured the wrong email!
You can't win either way it seems! Fortunately I had a long email chain where they admitted their system never sent out a confirmation. my credit card company sided with me in this regard when I attempted a chargeback.
I'm not so sure the problems were on the hotel's end here.
Again they emailed me on the second night after I had given up and assumed that somehow the booking didn't go through.
If you can't see how this is an abnormal situation that others can fall into then I don't know what to tell you. Maybe I'm just used to a higher standard of websites accepting only correct input and properly clearing cache before they transmit data to the DB but what do I know?
Of course, this isn't perfect, to be sure - but they sometimes do implement it well, and when working, this can give a second line of defense beyond just what's available with the hotel's own website, which often a smaller subset of information than the OTAs have access to.
I'll travel with workmates or friends, and they're frantically trying to look something up, while I calmly retrieve my bulky binder, flip to the right page, and pull out the appropriate paperwork from the plastic sleeve. I highly recommend this mechanism for any complex trip.
In your case, knowing what the name of the hotel is can be very important before you even leave the airport. I've had Canadian border guards ask me very detailed questions about the nature of my trip, where I'm staying, phone numbers, etc. You could be detained in secondary if you didn't have that information handy.
Is there any advantage today to buying a physical SIM? Why not buy an ESIM from home just before your trip? One less thing to worry about abroad..
The papers that I carry with me, on the other hand, will be available regardless.
When traveling overseas for the very first time, I made sure to go to my local bank and ask them to 'enable' my account and detailed the countries I'd be going to and the duration. My bank offers no fees when using ATMs overseas but the bank charges fees for giving me foreign currency while at the the branch so I thought let me just enable my card and then get money from the ATM. I can save 5 bucks.
The same thing was done for my cell phone. My carrier (tmobile) had a different plan where you can use the phone overseas and so I thought ok let me switch over to that plan so that when I arrive I have cell service. (This was many years ago)
When I arrived (ironically in Ireland lol) my cell phone didn't work and my ATM card wouldn't work either. :/
I had to take the bus to my location and I had no money...
Thankfully Dublin airport had free WIFI and so using that + some skype credits I had, I was able to call my bank and make them enable my account and then I was able to call tmobile and have them put me on the right plan. Without that free WIFI and my quick thinking....i'd probably still be at Dublin Airport.
>Everyone makes fun of me for this, but this is why I carry a 1/2" binder with paperwork for every part of an overseas trip in individual plastic sleeves. When you land in a foreign country, you never know when/if your phone will start roaming, or you're waiting to buy a SIM, etc...
This is an excellent way to prepare and I've been doing this more since the incident but keep in mind you are paying for the cost cutting of others in paper, time and possibly frustration because you now have one more thing to taking up space that could have been allocated to something else. A more competitive market would remove these inefficiencies.
I see your point but my perspective is that this approach protects me in a potentially adversarial situation in a location where I am at a distinct disadvantage: I most likely don’t speak the language, aren’t familiar with cultural norms, and unfamiliar with the surroundings.
With paper, I can point to my reservation number or booking details unambiguously and prove my point. If they need to take the paper to someone else to verify, I’m not giving up my personal cell phone and only method of communication at the same time.
It’s like when you learn to drive: you are taught, you could be right in a traffic situation but at the end of the day, you adapt to the situation. Better to have bent to someone else who did something wrong but stay alive rather than dying “proving” your correctness.
1) I bought lift tickets for a mountain resort, and when I showed up I couldn't find the confirmation email to scan at the self-serve kiosk. I also wasn't able to find my online account portal to see my bookings, so I bought lift tickets on the spot on my phone. As soon as the transaction completed, I was redirected to the account page that I was looking for where I found my original booking. At the end of the weekend, I took up the issue at the ticket window, and got the issue resolved (mostly) to my satisfaction: they refunded me the discounted pre-order amount instead of the full-price I paid; normally they only issue an account credit, this was going above and beyond as they saw it. I believe the reason I didn't get an email the first time was that I used a gmail +tag (name+resort@gmail.com) which their system accepted but didn't know how to use.
Lessons:
i) Stop using +tags with my emails, the utility of these tags (maybe tracing what company my info was leaked from) is far outweighed by the possibility of incidents like this. I don't use them to organize my email, like others do, so this habit has only cost me time, money, and stress so far.
ii) Don't be afraid to ask for help, try to talk to a human next time something like this is happening.
2) Booked a hotel through super.com because they had the lowest price. I didn't read the fine print, so when I showed up to check in, I was informed that I owed a resort fee or something that more than made up the difference. I ended up paying slightly more booking through super.com than I would have going direct.
>ii) Don't be afraid to ask for help, try to talk to a human next time something like this is happening.
I'd just like to clarify that in my situation I only filed a chargeback after a lengthy email chain that went back and forth for a entire day where the hotel was adamant that they would not offer any recourse, no refund, no credit, nothing.
>2) Booked a hotel through super.com because they had the lowest price. I didn't read the fine print, so when I showed up to check in, I was informed that I owed a resort fee or something that more than made up the difference. I ended up paying slightly more booking through super.com than I would have going direct.
I think everyone gets burned by this at least once in their life. These "resort fees" are a complete scam that originally were meant if you were going to use enhanced services at the property such as the pool or gym. Now thanks to years of enshittification its just part of the bill. Make it the real price then!
I travelled a lot with them before people pointed out that you get subpar rooms, and worse treatment. Like, a lot. 150 nights or so. And I do confirm those rumours, many subpar rooms, sleep next to elevator, that wonky corner room that is smaller than the others, ...
I liked it because it was business travel to an area without a Hilton or Mariott, so I still got some points for my personal holidays.
But now years later, I still use expedia a lot. Somehow their prices are better than what Hilton can offer, even if I call them up for a price match (because I do prefer hilton points over Expedia points). Same for IHG. Yes I get the occasional room with the broken door on the closet, and sleep next to the elevator practically alwyas, but anytime I needed support from Expedia, they came through. And I use them for personal travel if I actually have to pay for it myself
Unlike hotels large airline booking systems are generally decent so I am okay with them, many are just white labelled Amadeus I think. But still, with expedia for flights I can (at least pre covid) get cancellations free of charge even if airline tariff doesn't have that, useful when applying for visa etc. But let's not talk about AirAsia, once booked with them direct and now get spammed for eternity, they don't unsub you no matter how hard you try. Had to set up a filter...
Last year I booked 7 days at the Hilton San Francisco Financial District for a hybrid work/pleasure trip. We arrived late and really didn’t like the hotel. We checked out the next day and went to the Hilton Parc 55. The first Hilton charged us for one night when we checked out.
That simple change would have been next to impossible through a third party where I prepaid the third party and they paid the hotel. It definitely wouldn’t have been seamless
Edited: I see that you changed length of booking, at first I misread. That's possible, especially if booking listing doesn't take a pre-payment. But generally if I am uncertain I find and book two options with easy cancellation and then cancel the other one if I like the first one (or not cancel and move the next day). Easy enough when you have one panel for all your bookings.
But I travel not in home country, in home country sure you know how stuff works you can just call your hotels or sweet talk reception staff and negotiate everything.
I guess the other part is that I would still use a chain hotel in my case hotels affiliated with Hilton and Hyatt. I’ve also never had to deal with a hotel that didn’t cater to Americans even outside the country - mostly Mexico.
I’m sure it would be more complicated once we start doing more overseas traveling.
Note I have breached this wall by doing what used to be common before 2000 before we all got a little too polite. Getting really angry and not going away. Eventually they will cave and do what they knew was fair all along. Definitely NOT worth it though.
Would you say more?
For things like hotels in popular destinations, it lets me sleep at night to put down a deposit up front, I feel like it incentivizes the hotel to hold my room. Knowing the room is better secured is more important to me than money.
Now with Booking, I’ve never had them ask for a deposit. They either have me pay at the hotel, or they run my card after the “free to cancel” period expires (which is always very generous, expiring from 5 days to 1 day before my stay). This doesn’t help me sleep at night, when making bookings a month or more out, I worry that I’ll be cancelled on or be offered a lesser room than the one I booked. Fortunately I’ve only had good experiences with Booking so far, but once I have my first bad experience, I will switch to booking direct or with another platform that lets me put down a deposit up front.
That doesn't mean I won't go to a hotel website if it's a chain I have points with or I won't avoid a booking company that looks sus.
Eventually you figure out whether you should be using a booking site or the hotel website.