Booking.com makes a fortune – so why is it leaving its bills to hotels unpaid?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Having some kind of centralized travel booking service that "took care of everything" would likely have caused me to find another job. For one company I did a monthly 6h travel + a few days of hotel + 6h travel thing for a decade. Not being in total control over that would simply not have been feasible.
I have no idea how people doing a large amount of travel for stereotypical low-margin large companies manage to get by.
Having worked at both kinds of companies, I vastly preferred having a travel agent that took care of everything.
For example: one time I had a later flight with a layover. The initial flight was delayed on the tarmac before takeoff, and immediately upon landing, a person called me telling me there were no more flights that evening to my final destination, but they'd already booked me a hotel near the airport and the first flight out in the morning to my final destination, and asked me if I'd like any modifications. Perhaps someone else who wants more control would like to handle that stuff themselves, but for me, it was a massive luxury to have an experienced professional automatically smooth over any problem I encountered during my travel. I certainly didn't miss keeping all my crumpled receipts and submitting expense reports either.
I've heard similar stories to this from people working at high-margin software businesses before too.
It could be something along the lines of "depends which team you're in", as to who's being screwed over or not.
Definitely was. Bad HR people can exist anywhere. :/
I once worked for a company that had a similar travel process. When I was asked to travel, I insisted that my VP have his assistant schedule and pay for everything. When I arrived at the hotel on one trip, the hotel asked me for a credit card to pay for the booking. I stepped out of line and called my VP to have him fax his card info to the hotel.
I understand this wouldn't work for everyone but I think it's ok to question the policy and see how much flexibility there is. In my case, I was able to avoid taking on personal liability for my employer's expenses by pushing back and working with my VP to find a solution that I was comfortable with.
As in, huge mandatory fines on top of reimbursing employees for 100% of their costs (including interest and other charges incurred related to late reimbursement) type of violation.
If you're not willing to name and shame here, please report it to the state's Dept of Labor if this was within the past 5 years so current employees can be protected.
Depending on the state you can file many years later after you've left the job. So feel free to get a new job and file a claim with a spreadsheet of what they missed.
However, to my knowledge, there is no federal law that an employer is required to reimburse you for any of your travel-related expenses. (Which is, in itself, ridiculous.)
You could always take them to court (even small claims court) or just outright get debt collectors involved.
Probably better once you've quit though. ;)
Good incentive structures are hard.
Putting your trust in people is a great incentive structure.
It seems like there is a misunderstanding of who is on the taking and receiving end of risks
The story here is about how booking.com is screwing over hotels and hostels, not guests. Someone should create a different thread for that, because apparently people have a very strong need to tell their tangentially related stories.
1 - https://www.computable.nl/artikel/nieuws/development/6777910... (
If this machine translation is correct and the statement true, then this is borderline hilarious. I know that some companies keep their languages dearly, but that's taking it to the next level.
That statement is absurd. You can't dismiss an employee in the Netherlands for such a stupid reason. I used to work in their HQ as a developer, and complaining about Perl was always water cooler talk.
All the newer stuff is in Go or Python (thank God), but there's an acrophyal story about someone asking Octave Klaba, the founder of OVH about any regrets he had, and he allegedly responded "maybe using Perl was a bad idea".
A Booking.com market manager in south-east Asia admitted at a recent industry event that payment delays were caused by the installation of a new payment system. Staff salaries were also affected, she said, explaining it as a risk they had to take.
From an earlier article:
In the company’s August results, CFO David Goulden said there were "lower than expected" IT expenses in the second quarter of this year, in part due to phasing IT spend into the third quarter, but did not outline what this IT expense included.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/03/bookingcom-...
Is this all just a fancy way of saying, "They 'restructured' IT and payment problems resulted?"
On the other hand I consider Airbnb to be a scam enabling company that does everything to screw the customer and appease the hosts. Their reviews are worthless as they remove mentions of problems regularly and you will never know what you're getting until you arrive at the location. Forget about getting your money back if the host screws you as well - they will string you along from one support call to another and then pretend none of this happened.
It's no surprise shady hosts prefer Airbnb to booking as it's easier to keep your trap offerings online for longer.
I finally wised up. Hotels basically hate guests who book with a service like Booking.com and they will not lift a finger to help you if anything goes wrong.
Now I use Booking.com, Kayak, etc to find hotels in the general area I need, then use google or DDG to find the website of the hotel (a process much easier said than done because the booking sites SEO the hell out of search engine results), then book directly with the hotel or its parent chain.
Edit: been typing markdown all day, oops.
It started with airlines, but eventually included everything from hotels to rental cars.
The space is more or less dominated by a few big players. Sabre. Amadeus. Travelport.
GDS is the backbone of all of these booking platforms as far as I'm aware.
But Hyatt is almost always cheaper directly. Hyatt is my fav chain, they maintain a proper standard of service for their price. I’m a believer.
The hotel did not give a rats ass about how happy I was, if I wanted to come back, and were not accountable. They basically gaslit me. The person pretended I was crazy or stealing, and I would surely have proof otherwise.
In most systems, you get some kind of ticket notification. I really felt I would be better with any portal system. I know booking can be shitty too, but dealing with hotels individually just seems worse to me.
By the way, they finally only charged me for one day. Chargeback rejected. Assume all of your chargebacks will be rejected if you don't have evidence. They WILL side against you, in favor of a large hotel at least (I don't think they were a chain either).
In Dominican Republic I was told to just use an online booking site as it was much cheaper than doing it in person. Their own site was also more expensive than expedia.
When I last did this, for a vacation, the cost at an aggregator was less if there was no cancellation allowed, and more if the option to cancel was added (but to a couple days before I believe), and needed to be paid at time of booking. When I called, I got a rate slightly less than the online+cancellation, I was able to cancel up to 24 hours in advance, and I only needed to pay on arrival, meaning I didn't tie up a few thousand for a few months.
There's also always the option to state the rate you found online and see if they are willing to match it. It's not like there usually some magic involved, if they're willing to offer it to an aggregator, why wouldn't they at least consider offering it to you direct?
The magic is actually being given the direct authorization to give you a matching rate or if not then having to get management to authorize that rate for you. That depends entirely on the hotel. Some employees might also recognize a deal seeker as someone who's also more likely to be picky and complain more and so would rather deny your price negotiations and avoid working with you if they have the choice depending on how filled they already are.
As I said elsewhere, the hotel's support can be even worse, and amount to them basically robbing you.
It wasn't advice, it was an anecdote about my experiences from doing what I describe. People can use that as advice, while knowing it's based on what I've experienced and not a wide survey of how the industry works.
>> as they offer the same or better rates usually
> I will say in most cases, it seems around the same.
The same what? Price? Wasn't that what I was describing? Or are you referring to some other aspect of it that I'm not connecting?
To further ground my statement, I'm generally dealing with larger name hotel chains or tourism spots that deal with repeat visitors, not random small or independent hotels. Maybe that matters.
To my eyes, most this thread seems like a missed opportunity for people to examine why sometimes dealing directly seems to work well and why sometimes it doesn't, and which types or brands are better than others in this respect. I think that would have been a much more interesting conversation. (I know you did contribute somewhat along these lines as well, I'm more criticizing the thread in general, not your specific replies).
> A Booking.com market manager in south-east Asia admitted at a recent industry event that payment delays were caused by the installation of a new payment system. Staff salaries were also affected, she said, explaining it as a risk they had to take.
What do you mean a new payment system? How do you not create a fallback for this situation when you're dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions?
I mean I am willing to give Booking.com the benefit of the doubt here in case that is actually the root cause, but it doesn't compute for me. You don't just throw thousands of people (who drive business for you in the first place) under the bus by not properly preparing for a software rollout.
You still have the old system or whatever it is that you were using, how hard would it have been to detect an issue if they did a A/B or a gradual rollout at first.
As a Booking.com user myself - I am pissed that this is a thing.
Then put on your best surprised expression and wait to see if you manage to unwind the errors before a competitor exploits them.
It is fascinating how much faith people have in computers, even after at least a decade of watching them fall over. Sure it crashes a lot but it couldn't get the answer wrong.
https://skift.com/2022/02/11/booking-com-to-eliminate-2700-c...
Seems like that's going as well as everyone except their executive team predicted. ;)
Booking had a real person pick up the phone, know stuff, and fix it. Not a native English speaker but still far more helpful than the software alternative.
How long ago?
We need to fix the broken & corrupt legal systems so that companies have not just equivalent penalties like individuals would (the equivalent of jail would be that all profits go to the state for the duration of the "jail" term), but be given even less leniency/benefit of the doubt since massive companies have way more resources to investigate & comply with laws than individuals do.
We had a guy in Australia trying to use our trademark, in the US they would call my bluff and I would have to spend tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to sue. In Australia we sent a polite letter, outlined our case that was pretty clear, reminded him he would pay our legal if we escalated and made it clear we would, and the result was immediate.
In short, companies shouldn’t be incentivized to play game theory on whether or not you will sue me if I trample your rights.
Thus, in instances where they are objectively wrong, they lose big. In instances you are objectively wrong, you lose big. In instances where it is not black and white, where there is merit to both sides of the argument, you settle. All this is achieved with little intervention by the courts.
Note also that the "loser" factors in offers to settle. So if I offer you $10,000 to settle and you refuse and the court awards only $5,000 to you, you are the one that has to pay my legal bill, even though I am the one that "lost".
If one party wins, they do not have to pay the legal fees of the looser.
Settlement offers have no bearing on this.
If one party wins, their (reasonable) legal fees usually are paid by the loosing party. Except if the judge orders both sides to pay their own.
If you offer £10k settlement, and I refuse, and I win £5k, you’d have to give me £5k, plus pay my and your legal fees. What I don’t get to say is you offered £10k so I want that instead.
For punishing corporations (for whatever legal reason) I would rather see a percentage of c-suite compensation for a time period (including end of year bonuses) confiscated, maybe along with a fine based on profit (so stock values are hit as well, so that both can't be used to avoid penalties and also to signal to the market it's a bad idea).
The problem with fining a company is that often you hurt a lot of the lower ranked employees that had no power and often no knowledge of the problems, and usually weren't involved in any way, sometimes to the point where they lose their jobs if the company is hurting to a much larger degree than the people running the company do, which is why punishing corporations is sometimes hard.
We need to incentivize and punish the people that actually decide the problematic policies and actions and not those that just happen to be in proximity and/or are linked financially, to the degree that we can (obviously it's hard and no perfect solution exists).
Fine the investors. Everyone who owned a share when the violation occurred takes a lick.
If you go after c-levels, what will happen is they'll devise some sort of time deferred compensation avoids the penalties you want to impose. The board needs a CEO after all, and CEOs are reluctant to run a company if they know they'll just have their paycheck confiscated.
A fine to the investor is literally taking money out of their pocket. Before they receive the dividend check. Even if it nets the same to them in the long run, it will feel different. It will be true punishment rather than reduced reward at a later date.
Corporations are made of people, and can by large multinationals, or small mom and pop operations with a few tens of people (or less). Should someone that has a company that runs a few ice cream shops in town go to jail because of actions of people under them? Because it's not like it's always going to be something that was condones or expected from management, and while I'm okay with monetary damages that don't aim to dismantle the company entirely even if management didn't really know what's going on (that's maybe a good way to make them care and pay attention), I'm not okay with sending them to jail because of mismanagement.
Not only is that unfair, it would have a huge chilling factor on entrepreneurs. And not just the startup kind, the people that want to open a restaurant or run a small business.
And to fully put this in context, this is under an article about booking.com paying slowly. You think jail time is appropriate for that? What if they're having cashflow problems? If they aren't and it's intentional, how do you distinguish this from that?
The problem is that laws are basically just 'suggestions' if you're rich/your company is rich, and life altering consequences if you/your company is not.
There should actually be jail time for corporate leaders that break the law, and the potential of being forcefully removed from office or the company itself forced to shut down if poor behaviour continues.
It's a case of "if I owe a hotel $200, that's my problem, if Booking.com owes a hotel $200,000 that's the hotel's problem"
If you owe some government 500 billion, you are probably also a government.
I'm not convinced
US has a very individual centric attitude where everyone is an temporarily inconvenienced millionare and Europe has a much more collective attitude. I will take the European attitude over the US one any day of the week (and I'm from neither, I'm Antipodean).
Every billionare is a policy failure.
That's how it works everywhere, including in the US.
What you DON'T get to do is set the rules for OUR countries. Several of these companies have been under the misapprehension that's how things work, and they are being (slowly) cured of that delusion (far too late, but better late than never...)
FWIW, I think the EU's recent legal behavior is only about 1/3 foreign-company envy. There's a lot of misguided do-gooderism and a large dash of control-freakery, too, not to mention intelligence and LEO wishlists.
determine which members of the executive team decided it was OK to literally steal from people and put them in jail.
Guests and hosts both win if you cut the booking.com middleman.
You processed my credit card, so now you're gonna deal with my refund too.
I stayed at a hotel that had bed bugs, the hotel was uninterested in refunding us or giving us a new room (I had only been in the room shortly before discovering them). I went back to Booking.com and they said I had to be refunded via the hotel and they would only act as arbiters. After showing proof the hotel wouldn't refund me, they continued to not refund.
To really add insult to injury I wrote a review of the hotel explaining the situation and it was removed!
They instantly flagged and deleted my review claiming I only stayed one night (I did – in a sleeping bag no less) instead of four. This claim from them actually helped in the chargeback.
"It's urgent"
"Can I talk to you?"
"Can you please come downstairs? Just 2 minutes." (it's 2am)
"There is a big problem" (with me not being willing to pay a network tech to deal with my IT problems instead of badgering my guests)
No thanks. I had booked a month and left after a week.
Bill Gates says: "I didn't get rich by writing checks".
Made a reservation a few months ago, searched for hotel rooms that would allow bringing a dog, and got a confirmation via booking.com that said everything was ok. But when I arrived at the hotel, I was informed that they don't allow dogs at all. And since the reservation was made through booking.com, there was nothing they could do about it. So I ended up paying for a hotel room that no one slept in and have been given the silent treatment from booking.com since then despite several contact attempts.
A "middleman", or search engine, or discovery system, or price comparison site, is worth a lot to me and to most travellers.
Edit: it's worth a lot when you... don't speak the language in the country the hotel is in... when you want the consumer protections of the country you or the middleman is based in... these sorts of concerns are much more of an issue in some parts of the world, and this might be reflected in the fact that Booking.com grew up in Europe.
Perhaps perspectives are based on whether you're booking domestically or not. Domestically you get the same protections, same language, not much benefit. In the US most of the market is domestic.
I've had the best success when traveling abroad booking directly. Anyone in the hospitality industry is going to have someone on staff with enough English to assist you, and most of the nicest places are smaller hotels that often don't work well with big booking companies.
> If I buy from Booking UK I get UK consumer protections
I worked in a travel startup (not Booking), there's a lot of fine print to all those "protections" that will leave you high and dry in most cases.
Only use 3rd party apps for search, never book directly through them especially, in my experience, for International travel.
You're right that we're lucky as English speakers, there's often someone to help, but that's not true of most other languages. Small places can provide some of the best experiences I agree, but finding them and getting in contact can be difficult.
[1] At least last time I looked into it. Haven't had a change to travel since a few years.
This happens all the time with every single type of service provider, why would some shitty service like Booking.com get to mandate no one can offer any other discounts?
What, just because there's some sort of aggregator service out there that you've partnered with you are not allowed to offer coupons, discounts, or your own booking services yourself? I would find that VERY difficult to believe.
Plus, based on what we're hearing everywhere, potentially losing your contract w/Booking.com seems like a blessing.
You also get points if it is a chain hotel that can be used for future stays. The points can be worth from 7% to 20% of the cost based on what combination of base points, credit cards, and status you have.
You'd call a number, "I can take your order for XYZ whenever you're ready!"
"Is this XYZ restaurant?"
No yes or no answer, just "What's your order for XYZ restaurant?"
However, in reality, people want more than a place to lay immobile for roughly eight hours. These are not commodities. Check-in time. Check-out time. Type of bed. Bathroom? Bathroom with tub? Bathroom with waterjet tub? Pets? Dogs? View. Floor. Proximity to whatever. Bedbugs. Television, microwave, refrigerator, coffee pot, hair dryer. Free wifi? Breakfast? "Continental" breakfast?
If "hotel room" were some kind of spec, it might take years to hammer it out. And then hotels may or may not be honest about their rooms, or even understand the spec. Then there's the periodic keeping the listings up to date. "We had to take the TV out last week, it was on the fritz." "This room was upgraded." When was the last bedbug check? Finally, who is the system of record for any given room? And then the discount policies, wowza.
Looks fungible, really isn't. These aren't pork bellies.
There’s a lot of variability, but it’s also pretty impossible to know at a non-commodity level unless I’ve stayed there before or do a ton of research.
I’m not going to trust anything online for the latest bedbug check. Id like to know, but let me know how they factors into your decision making process.
Even if you’re not happy with the response from the hotel - and I’ve never had a problem with a chain hotel making things right, I can call corporate customer service.
You're right there's certainly no formal spec here and everyone is going to have the things they care about that others may not, but for any given person there are going to be many places that satisfy their needs, basically interchangeably.
Maybe I am wrong and this is a common tactic?
True, but not uncommon! Captive market.
The very reason I don’t use third party portals is because it’s always a hassle when you need to make any changes.
Last year I booked a week at the Hilton San Francisco Financial District for a hybrid work/personal trip.
We arrived late that night and we were not impressed. We went downstairs the next morning, shortened our stay to that one night. Paid it and moved over to another hotel - the Hilton Parc 55. This would have been much more of a headache if not impossible going through a third party portal.
I’ve also increased my stay by a day before arriving and the published price had changed. I called the hotel and asked them to extend my stay by one day at the original price - no problem.
I was a customer of the hotel, not the third party portal.
In my specific case, I am Diamond with Hilton and Globalist with Hyatt. I would get no status benefits or points for going through the portal.
That incident in S.F. I mentioned? When I changed hotels I got an upgrade for free to the “fitness room” with a gym inside the room.
JFTR, my last stay in Prague I paid 80 EUR for a perfectly fine Hotel room, the cheapest room in the Prague Hilton I can find (being flexible for whole Oct+Nov) is 130EUR, usually more like 140+, close to double.
So I suppose if I had to just take a different room in a different hotel every fifth time (and that never happened to me) I'd still be about equal with the price.
Price: The hotel website often is no cheaper than booking.com (I guess thanks to very one-sided contracts), and sometimes only gives you a better price if you join a "club" and give them permission to spam you, sell your data, etc.
Payments: booking.com is shady, but less shady and far less broken than a random hotel website where some credit cards might not be working, your CC data turns up in some data dump "found" somewhere, or payment is held by the CC company because you are the first person in months to directly pay to that hotel's website.
Language: booking.com offers an interface and descriptions at least in English. Many hotel websites are only in the local language plus maybe some awkward machine translation that leaves lots of important points to guesswork, especially in the payment flow.
Convenience: booking.com at least offers some kind of searchable database of hotels so I can easily compare them. The hotels themselves make this rather impossible.
I do make a point to try to book via a hotels website after having found it on booking.com. However, in more than half of the cases, for the aforementioned reasons, I end up going through booking.com after all. So while lazy users might be a large part of the reason for the existence of booking middlemen, the hotels do have to bear their fair share of blame here.
While it makes sense to take a card to guarantee against a no-show, it’s always felt a little slimy to me that they make it feel like they, rather than a random property someplace far-flung, are the ones who would collect the fee if I didn’t make good on the reservation—and only if I actually didn’t show up.
It looks like they still pre-emptively give out your full credit card details directly to every property in plaintext, but that they might now make a notional effort to record when the property accesses the CVC?
https://partner.booking.com/en-us/help/policies-payments/gue...
"Never take a screenshot of your guest’s credit card details, and never write them down."
That's a bit like instructions for an eBike.
"This bike is limited to 20 MPH. Do not go to the third option on the settings menu and remove this limitation with a long press of the plus button".
I've regularly scored things like 70% off regular price when booking the day before.
They continue to advertise their regular full price on their official site and other mainstream sites that business travelers use.
But they advertise at a massive discount on certain discount sites that attract budget travelers.
They want to fill the rooms, often in response to last-minute cancellations, and they hope they get lucky with somebody at full price first, but they advertise budget prices on budget sites because a deeply discounted rate is better than no money at all.
booking.com frequently appears at the top of searches for "hotels near..." and other third-party travel sites, like tripadvisor, link to it.
They've done a good job of getting their site in front of eyeballs. Like others, I've tried them, and like others, found them to be awful and now actively avoid them.
It can be worse. I once called the hotel and didnt realize I was calling Hotels.com (which used a tricky website to make it seem like I was calling the hotel.)
Worse, the [Hotels.com] agent pretended to be a the hotel reservation desk. I gave him several discount codes (my consulting company code, my AAA code) and each time he said it wasnt reducing the price. That got me suspicious...because my consulting company Accenture always had discounts.
So I asked the person outright, "do you work for the hotel, which company do you work for, etc" and learned he was a Hotels.com employee.
Based on this, i'd note that Hotels.com might not be the same price but might actually even be more expensive that booking direct with the hotel.
I always thought that booking direct got the best rates also, but that seems to be incorrect, at least in this case.
They make it easy to see available options in a city and compare prices. And making the reservation through them is often easier than getting in contact with the hotel.
Assuming it works, that is.
Never again.
For my last booking the difference was almost 20% (340€ at Hotels.com, 420€ direct booking). I don't know if they enforce some most favourable pricing rules or what, but one of the booking sites is always the cheaper option.
I would prefer to book directly so that the accommodation gets all the money, but I'm obviously not going to pay that much more just out of generosity.
I do a lot of motorcycle travelling without a plan. I often do not know where I’ll be at the end of the day, just a general direction.
Late afternoon when I have a better idea where I’ll end up before it goes dark I’ll look at booking.com, find some hotels/motels that match my criteria and head to them without booking.
Countless times I’ve turned up and said “I found you on booking.com and it says you have vacancies, I want a room” only to be given a price higher than booking.com. Some reluctantly negotiate down to match it, some look confused how booking com can offer the price they are while I book through booking.com at the hotel desk as the hotel won’t match the price booking.com are charging.
I appreciate people who want to travel with their animals, but saying "we allow dogs" then not having rooms designed to ameliorate the issues with such a policy - hard surface floors everywhere and thorough cleanings - is unfortunately very common.
The biggest lesson I learned there: never book through a 3rd party for travel.
For airlines the price is already dictated to not be lower than the airline offers, you're far better just working through your favorite airline directly. It makes it much easier change plans, and anyone who travels a lot will agree not all airlines are equal. I've learned to have a favorite airline and not worry as much about lowest prices.
Hotels can be cheaper through a third party, but imho, not worth the hassle of having your trip depend on an untrustworthy middle man.
At most, use 3rd party tools as search engines, and then just book directly.
He who takes your money has the responsibility. The travel agent cried foul but what are they going to do.
Couldn't cancel automatically. Support only seemed to be able to do the same I could. I assume the booking was some kind of fraud or credit card test -- anyway, the result is my account is suspended and support won't respond to me.
Or: obviously booking.com should have gotten back to you, but I'm also not entirely sure the hotel also didn't just fob you off with a bullshit story for their own mistake.
Trusting a 3rd party booking system to have accurate up-to-date information is a fool's errand.
Contrast to Airbnb, which was so bad I deleted my account in.
Contrast to Agoda, which after charging my debit card required government ID scans within 2 hours-- or immediate cancellation & no refund. Stay next morning in foreign country, what if I was on the damn plane already? Never had an account with them and probably never will.
It also sounds like the hotel screwed up if they listed themselves as pet-friendly but actually aren't.
The one time I have had to request a chargeback I was basically told to contact the financial institution[1] in case the merchant tried anything funny.
[1] In this case Nets A/S who acted as a middle man between my bank and VISA. But I assume my bank would have said the same thing if they had the agreement directly with the CC company.
They don’t care about screwing up because they dominate the market so much. They’re enjoying the benefits of the existence of little alternative to them.
You could call them rent-seeking middlemen, but not a monopoly.
Really? Huh.
I just looked at a dozen or two across Germany, France, Switzerland, Spain, Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium, and while most had an option to book via booking.com (linked directly on the google search results) none had it as their only option, and they all had websites with direct booking forms of which only two were even styled slightly like booking.com
But I didn't actually try to book a stay at any of them, just looked at the websites, so if they redirect after that I would have missed it.
- Isn’t that market distortion?