Comment by nebula8804 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nebula8804 | Hacker News Reader

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Its not like hotels are some amazing entity to deal with. Many hotels are stuck in prehistoric times.

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.

So you literally forgot what hotel you booked... and entered the wrong email... and they emailed you anyway about the no-show, with someone probably manually fixing the address to contact you... and you're still blaming the hotel for being hard to deal with?

I'm not so sure the problems were on the hotel's end here.

When you are used to every single hotel emailing you a confirmation you assume there will be an email. That was my mistake for assuming an email had been sent after seeing a successful confirmation on their webpage and moving onto the next booking for my trip.

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?

I have an eerily similar story, and a more general one.

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.

I'm sorry you went through that. I guess this is why others probably went to the third party sites in the first place but I went to the local site to avoid the third party site and got burned. Was that the reason you booked directly or was there no other option?

>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!

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...

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.

> or you're waiting to buy a SIM

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..

I've been doing this long before eSIMs were widespread. I have traveled to locations where you can't buy an eSIM until you present physical identification in country, so that's sometimes a no-go. Plus you have no way of knowing that eSIM will function until you land... or cell coverage is too poor to use immediately, etc...

The papers that I carry with me, on the other hand, will be available regardless.

Yeah I have been burned so now I have learned my lesson. I have also been burned regarding credit cards and SIM not working overseas so I have lived and learned.

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 am glad to see this has improved your travel preparation- I have learned the hard way too!

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.

Setting aside the fact that as a consumer, not having a confirmation email is a giant red flag that would have avoided much of this... one thing that OTAs can do is interface with low-level supplier APIs to know whether/when the status of a booking has changed.

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.

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