Booking.com leaves hoteliers thousands of dollars out of pocket | Hacker News Reader

Booking.com leaves hoteliers thousands of dollars out of pocket

theguardian.com

19 pointsCaptainZapp9 comments

Does anyone have a clue why Booking is not paying since many months? Their revenues are growing, and claim to have technical issues with processing the payments. But to me it sounds strange that a critical technical issue with payments needs many months to fix. Any insights?

It's called theft, but now they do it to the hoteliers as well. That's why after booking.com has scammed me with their car rental service, I always opt to pay at the property, even if it's a bit more expensive.

It is a huge parasitic company for the industry. Beware they take %15 percent commission from each transaction. I live in Turkey and bought a room through them. There was a problem and I called their call center and it turned out they didn't have a turkish speaking call center staff at this time of the day. I solved the issue with speaking english but this was really unacceptable service for a huge profiting business. Shortly after, Turkish government banned them operating in Turkey. That was a good decision.

Booking.com was hacked months ago and people are getting scam messages sent to them by their hotels after booking looking for a verification fee via credit card.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37719483

This field is in a serious need of disruption. The one thing they might vring in - customer service - is always absolutely abysmal.

I once had a travel agency "negotiate for me" a case where I had booked the wrong date, immediately noticed it and contacted back. The agency failed, so I called the hotel directly and they agreed immediately.

These services are usable as search engines perhaps but that's it. Never book through them.

Quite often they are the only one with a room or at a reasonable rate.

It is not uncommon to call a hotel, say you want them to match booking.com rate and have them decline.

Or worse, I've had someone try and not honor their own free cancelation policy stated on my booking confirmation email when I tried to cancel 2 weeks before I was supposed to show up. They went as far as to duck my calls and had to call them from a different number and be very persistent.

After that experience I decided that I will only go through platforms for smaller places, which is unfortunate. I'd much rather support them directly.

Isn't Booking.com just a 'disruption' of a traditional travel agency? Whenever I hear someone use that term, usually means something is about to get more expensive and less useful

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