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Comment by carlosjobim | Hacker News Reader

1. They don't have any such penalty

2. They have competitors that are larger than them, Booking.com

Booking.com is in every way better than AirBnB for guests and for honest hosts. This means that with time, AirBnB is going to get more and more scams, becoming the market for lemons.

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Booking.com does sometimes seem not to do a proper integration and just rely on emails or phone calls to confirm the bookings. I've used them multiple times around 10 years ago and the hotel would show me a printout of an email from them with my booking details afair.

A friend of mine recently had to sleep in the car because booking never confirmed her reservation with the hotel and wouldn't accept her booking.com confirmation printout.

That depends entirely on the hotel. They can use one of the many booking systems that integrate with booking.com through XML or they can choose not to. If they choose not to, then they will have to manually sync availability and receive their bookings by e-mail. A nightmare, but their own fault for not running their business properly.

> A friend of mine recently had to sleep in the car because booking never confirmed her reservation with the hotel and wouldn't accept her booking.com confirmation printout.

I'm 100% sure this was the hotels fault.

That makes sense. Is there a way to figure out which places have a full integration?

If the hotel has any booking system on their own website, there is a good chance that it integrates with booking.com and others. If they ask guests to book by phone or email, then they probably do not have any integration.

I don't have first-hand experience, but I own a couple of short-term rentals, and the word on the street in the hosts community is that booking.com (BDC) is full of scammers and not worth the effort to integrate with.

This makes me wonder where you get your word from? Booking is well established since a very long time, if a host is problematic you'll see it in the reviews. If they're scams they get removed from booking. For clients there is no way for them to scam a host.

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