Booking.com cancels $4K hotel reservation, offers same rooms again for $17K
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
All bookings in popular places or on popular dates are NON REFUNDABLE. As in "click and you will never see any of this money again" non-refundable. Very non-refundable. If I have to cancel, I lose all my money.
At the same time, hotels can cancel for little or no cost. They do not lose money.
I don't know what the right solution is, but I have a feeling this should be regulated at least a little bit (EU, take notice): I'd say totally non-refundable bookings should not exist. You should always be able to get at least some of your money back before the date the service starts. And if the other side cancels, they should pay a penalty, at least the same as the penalty I have to incur, possibly more to prevent schemes like the one described above.
Show me 3 hotels that have non refundable dates.
Show me 3 hotels that ONLY have non refundable rooms.
I'll be sure to let the places I booked in popular places (Nice, Paris, London and just recently Times Square) that had refundable rooms they should be not offering those rooms. After I refund my booking for Times Square, that is.
The Atlantic recently wrote on how hotel policies have changed, with many no longer allowing free cancellations.
Why Hotel-Room Cancellations Disappeared
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/11/hotel-room-ca...
TL;DR: Hotel aggregators (e.g. Booking.com, Expedia) adopted a "cancel-rebook" strategy, where the aggregators would monitor hotel prices & rebook if the price dropped.
Also, I tried booking directly with the hotel networks several times recently, in most cases non-refundable was all they offered, or the option of refundable was so much more expensive that it bordered on ridiculous.
Don’t you think hotels aren’t already regulated? Just try opening a new one in a popular place and let us know how open the market is.
Repeat after me: regulations (no matter how good or well intended) favor the incumbents and hinder startups. Fewer startups means less competition. Less competition means fewer, crappier and more expensive products and services.
Trying to use more regulation to fix a market f’ed up by regulation will only deepen this spiral of doom.
Will this public case result in flood of people away from booking.com? Probably not.
This is just a simple abuse of power, most easily identified by the question: "What are you going to do about it?"
It seems the play is to tell the world. Congrats to this lady for getting her money/booking back.
There are plenty of full service travel agencies that offer to book guaranteed price reservations in pretty much any locale in most countries. There are some that even offer extra guarantees like a last minute cancellation by the hotel being refunded at double the cost, to ensure you can get a room elsewhere.
Because you live in an attention economy and the probability of using another service is pretty low. We can also develop our own travel agent with LLMs but that's an outlier of the market, and financially negligible. The problem is about power in the economy.
If a dozen different HN users expressed a dozen different preferred ranges… would there now have to be viable competitors at each possible step?
This is an ironic statement, insofar as it's myopic.
The implication was clearly a monopoly by market availability (convenience), which is not a legal precept, but a sociological one. Comparing rates across all possible locales and vendors is impractical. This is part of what makes Amazon so successful. Sheer momentum.
Incompetence at that level feels like malice.
Fortunately, you have more power than you think. Just don't do business with these companies. Picking a hotel and calling them directly always works for me.
One could also open the DevTools, Ctrl-F for part of the address, and copy it from the HTML source...
Google and many other services direct you to the hotel itself, which means you need to create an account at the hotel's and enter your cc data... so yeah, tough luck if the hotel's 1990 era website gets hacked. Meanwhile, for Bookingdotcom, I enter my data once, don't have to worry about newsletter spam for the hotels, or my credit card data being exfiltrated. And same for airfare or train rides that can't be booked on Deutsche Bahn.
Then, the consumer criticizes those of us that enjoy backpacking as not being "adults". This one really got me.
The concept that advertised prices that are genuine mistakes are generally not enforceable is a well established concept in many jurisdictions.
With that being said, I do believe that honoring ones advertised prices, even when they are mistakes, unless it would be egregious or impossible to do so, is generally a better way to do business.
But will this story prevent me from using a convenient and less expensive platform for booking cheap, bottom barrel hotels, for those of use who aren't "adults"? Probably not.
I've only leveraged it once, where a (Westin) resort hotel told me my room was not available when I arrived to check in. After I called Amex, The hotel ended up giving me a penthouse suite for the same price.
"The Assured Reservation Program allows Cardmembers to contact a participating property or rental agency to make an Assured Reservation and guarantee the reservation by giving their American Express Card. The Assured Reservation Program is available to the following industries: hotel, trailer park/campground, vehicle, aircraft, bicycle, boat, equipment, motor home, and motorcycle rentals."
https://www.americanexpress.com/content/dam/amex/us/merchant...
> When Mann booked the accommodations, Formula One organizers hadn't locked in the exact race dates. So she covered her bases — reserving the same four-bedroom unit for two possible weekends in May 2026, both with free cancellation.
> Once the official dates were announced, she cancelled the extra booking, in line with Booking.com rules.
I wonder if this changes our perception of things. If you book two dates and then cancel, are you not also part of the problem?
Perhaps if you didn't go for the free cancellation, then it should be a fair two way lock in, if you commit, we'll commit etc. Still not as bad as when Jason Manford finished a show, turned up at the Village Hotel in Bournemouth, and because he checked in late, they'd given his room to someone else.
If the website said "you can cancel for free", why would I consider myself part of the problem?
If the website said "you can book, but we could cancel your booking for any reason, including because we can rent it to someone else for more money", I wouldn't consider the website as part of the problem either.
As it stands, only one of those two things was prominently mentioned on the website.
It doesn't follow the spirit of the rules though; it's something I've always viewed as the business saying "Listen, we get it, life happens. If you can't make it, don't panic, we've got your back". To book both weekends with the intent of cancelling carries a strong odour of bad faith, and IMO makes you part of the problem.
Notably, the free cancellation policy only really works in a high-trust society, which at least one prominent nation seems to be backsliding on - meaning policies like this may be on their way out.
The problem is it's lying. It's abusing a grace to get something for nothing. Holding a room for you that you will never use is denying it to someone else who was not lying and actually does intend to complete the transaction.
So yeah, doing this doesn't explain the hotel committing their own cancellation fraud but it is exactly the cause of the hotels reaction to just not offer cancellations.
If someone wants to reserve all the options for themselves but not actually use them, that should cost something. They are getting something, and it's not free to produce, so it should cost something. Then ot wouldn't be an abuse or a minor fraud, just an honest transaction. There should be a "rent the dress" option. And what do you know, thete usually is. It's called the higher rate for the option to cancel.
But there is really no way to distinguish this kind of abuse from honest people who had plans change outside their control who you don't want to burn except by collecting and sharing data on everyone to maintain profiles and track history and behavior, and no one wants that right?
I think websites/hotels have the same intention with free cancellation. It drives up rentals.
It goes both ways though. A restaurant or hotel will not one-sidedly cancel on you. A deal is a deal. When the ink is dry and money transferred all parties keep their word.
For those not living in the true north (Canada), 90% of the time, this is dog-whsitle phrasing preferred by the Canadian right wing to complain about Indian immigrants. Canada does have issues with immigration fraud, but this phrasing of complaint pretty exclusively is used by people who don't like Indians.
> All of these supposed "dog whistle" call-outs do not feel constructive to me. I would never have though the parent comment was deriding Indians (and still don't).
The point of a literal dog-whistle is that the intended audience (dogs) can hear and understand the whistle perfectly, while other people do not hear anything at all.
Figuratively, a dog-whistle phrase leaves room for debate (like this), and provides cover for people to say unsavory things while still being able to deny the meaning. Well-meaning folks can say things like "I would never have though the parent comment was deriding Indians" because that is the whole point of the dog-whistle in modern rhetoric.
The analogy holds well here as well. You can wade into any right wing space in Canada and you will hear the phrase "low trust society' and "high trust society". It is ALWAYS used in the context of immigrants (low trust) and white Canadians (high trust). It is almost always used in reference to Indian immigrants specifically.
The whole point of a dog whistle is that you can take them at face value and see nothing explicitly wrong with the statement. Is it possible that this commenter simply blundered into this phrasing without understanding that it is used specifically against Indian immigrant cultures by the extreme right? Yes. Do I believe that they happened on the exact same particular phrasing and argument that anti-Indian/anti-immigrant groups use was made by pure coincidence? No.
If OP did blunder into their statement, they can easily reply and correct their true intent. If I accidentally used a racially loaded statement that signals allegiance with certain groups, I would absolutely want someone to point it out so I can clarify.
You can believe whatever you want.
If you think that high levels of Indian immigration are causing a conflict between dominant Canadian culture that relies on "high-trust" transactions because the immigrants come from a "low-trust" group that take advantage of it, then say that (or whatever it is that you actually believe). Phrasing it like OP has, leaves room for multiple interpretations. It is possible that they think this is a transition from high to low trust that Canada is making entirely independently of immigration policy. Because they chose to use ambiguous phrasing preferred by a specific polity, we are forced to interpret for ourselves.
In short: say what you mean clearly in plain language. "[this] cancellation policy only really works in a high-trust society, which at least one prominent nation seems to be backsliding on" is not clear or using plain language.
I'm not sure I have assumed ill intent. I didn't say anyone was categorically wrong or racist. I simply pointed out that they are using phrasing mostly used by people who dislike Indian immigration.
If that is not what they intended, I have left plenty of room for them to say they are not part of that group, and the phrasing was coincidental, or that they did not understand that the phrase is a reference to the superiority of one culture over another.
The story occured in Canada, but not about Canada. The story doesn't mention Indian immigrants, gp didn't mention them either, or even allude to them[1]. Assuming you are against bigotry, it's ironic that you're the one to introduce the anti-Indian meme to this thread with your recontextualization, where most people were thinking of economic power imbalances and contracts.
Just because a phrase is coöpted by bigots doesn't mean it becomes anathema. Context is important, IMO, you misapplied the context and took the threed off topic. If on the other hand you're trying to propagate anti-immigrant concepts in an unrelated thread and/or make people hate language-policing, congratulations.
1. IMO, The allusion is to the US, where the political wing aligned with nativism is leading the charge to undermine societal trust.
Other people would be perfectly correct to point out that the language I am using is associated strongly with certain political groups, and that it has strong implications of racial bigotry. I could then come back and clarify that I am talking about the relative merits of protectionist economic policy in the era of globalized, state supported economic segments, and not Nazi economic policy.
I pointed it out because, while the story is not about Canada the country, it is about a Canadian doing business in Canada with a Canadian business. The comment uses language and specific phrasing preferred by anti-indian immigration groups in Canada.
Is it possible that the original comment was completely unrelated... but the specific words and phrasing on a comment about a thing in Canada happening to a Canadian lead me to believe that they mean the same thing as the other people that use that exact phrasing about things happening in Canada to Canadians.
If someone says "we woke to a chaotic airport" and you go on about how "woke" is dog-whistle, I'd consider that to be an off-topic diversion, at best.
I was using a more globally recognizable example to illustrate it since you have already implied that you do not understand the Canadian context. It wasn't reductio ad absurdum, but just an example of the concept moved to a different domain.
> If someone says "we woke to a chaotic airport" and you go on about how "woke" is dog-whistle, I'd consider that to be an off-topic diversion, at best.
That's not what I'm doing literally or figuratively. I'm not picking on one specific word.
I am pointing out that specific phrases and ideas used to express a specific sentiment on a specific topic can have hidden meaning assigned to them by interested groups.
In this case the phrase is "... [booking.com's] free cancellation policy only really works in a high-trust society, which at least one prominent nation seems to be backsliding"
The ambiguous/suspect terms here are "high-trust society" and "prominent nation seems to be backsliding". I am not suggesting that we cannot use those terms without being suspected of anti-indian sentiment, I am suggesting that using that phrasing to convey a message on that specific topic is a pattern predominately invoked by those with anti-indian/immigrant sentiment.
Accusing anyone that uses the word "woke" of being necessarily political is reductio ad absurdum of its own sort, and I fully agree that using a single word once is an absurd way to determine political meaning. Fortunately that isn't what I said. At all.
I am leaving open that the OP truly does want to talk about changing social mores leading to businesses having to change their policies, and that this is not a comment on immigrant communities. But I am pointing out that they have used the same language and specific terminology that is used in anti-indian immigrant political discussions.
If their intent is not to target immigrants, fine, that can be clarified. If it is their intent, I would prefer that they plainly state that they think that immigrants are the cause of hypothetical future changes to policy at high-end luxury hotels.
Just wanted to make you aware that you are using the terms and framing preferred by anti-indian immigration people in Canada that push a theory very similar to "great replacement" theory in the US. Essentially the claim is that Canadian culture is fundamentally changing from "high-trust" to "low-trust" because we have too many immigrants from "low-trust" societies. Oddly enough, the societies they think are low trust with too much immigration are pretty much always non-white.
I was thrown off by the ambiguity and this being a story about Canada.
Equally, if the fine print the guest agrees to says the platform/hotel can cancel unilaterally, why should it be considered a problem?
> As it stands, only one of those two things was prominently mentioned on the website
Why does prominence matter?
If we're that far apart in ideology, there's no productive way to continue the conversation.
Because when things go to court you need a meeting of the minds for a contract to be held up. It's accepted that people don't read contracts so the terms can't be far outside what people expect unless you've highlighted unexpected clauses, or shown that the person did actually consider the contract. It's one of the reasons, for example, you can't buy a house without having a lawyer representing you (in plenty of countries).
The company offers cancellable reservations for a fee. She paid the fee. What are you talking about
Every time I have ever seen a cancellable reservation at booking.com I have also noticed that it costs more than the same reservation without cancellation priveleges.
She almost certainly paid for the flexibility.
booking & hotel are just abusing their power ... there is no another perspective here
But KLM (Dutch flag carrier) found a way around that: if a flight is overloaded by weight they will keep all the passengers on board but leave their luggage behind. There is no direct penalty for late luggage, so many customers will get nothing except perhaps a little free shopping if they feel like filing forms to reimburse for having to buy clothes at their destination. But that's cheaper than the penalty for not taking the passenger on time, so KLM "optimized" it.
It does not.
This is a common consumer tactic for reservations of all sorts. (It is a thorn in the side of restaurants, and why you get emails asking you to Confirm them and other appointments)
2 bookings isn't heinous; some people do things like book at multiple restaurants, then cancel all but one right before. (e.g. when their friend group comes to a consensus) It's fine in this case IMO.
It is a point of consternation for consumers more generally, when you can't get a booking because many of the ones are ghosts.
Given all the asymmetric squeezing being done by corporate algorithms everywhere in the ruthless march towards economic efficiency, it's hard to feel bad for the algos when a human finds a pricing arbitrage that the hotel conglomerates failed to notice.
In other words, the hotel conglomerates are the ones who started the algorithmic event pricing and "cancellable reservations carry a price premium" games. It's on them if they mispriced their own dynamic-event cancellation premium.
Gee, the system tries to game you, so you may not try to game the system? Fact is this is about earning as much money as possible and nothing else.
I'm 100% for gaming the system, but i can't blame the system from trying to protect itself from it as well. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
It shouldn’t be a problem ever.
It’s a mutual agreement.
The free cancellation is provided to one side in exchange for booking. If the booking wasn’t cancelled it would be charged.
The booking agency could limit it to one booking per person but it could miss out in group bookings.
If there was a way to lock in the rates that might be an option.
This is possibly an overly simplistic ai optimization agent gone wild.
Detailed pricing models for airfare and hotels around events have existed for a very long time.
This isn't quite what happened.
He turned up before the show to check in, and found that the hotel had been overbooked and that his room had been sold to someone else as a result, so he was forced to share a room with members of his team.
Source: https://news.bournemouthone.com/81555/
(Now that's not to say that this isn't a shitty practice and that it shouldn't happen: the hotel were absolutely in the wrong, it's just that they were wrong in a different way to what you suggested - but your bigger point is well made.)
How so, exactly? Maybe if you cancel at the last minute, but if she cancels when the race dates are announced, presumably, that’s enough in advance for someone else to book the cancelled room in her place?
Only problem was when I arrived there was already someone in it and they weren’t leaving.
At first Booking.com told me it was my problem and they would refund me and I could book somewhere else. But to get the refund I needed to prove that I couldn’t get in (how? They weren’t clear) and then book somewhere else and then send them all the details and they would “consider my request”.
I wasn’t doing that. No chance. And apart from anything else there were no hotel rooms available because there was a big conference going on. The nearest available rooms were about 30 miles away.
In the end - after an hour or so on the phone with an escalating series of people one of them (I think to get rid of me) stupidly said “if we could find ANY hotel room in town we would book it for you like a shot - but there are none”.
“Ah ha!” I said. “There is a hotel room - but it’s a suite in the Hyatt Regency - and it’s £2100 for the night. I bet you won’t book that!”
Amazingly, they did. The suite was larger than my flat.
And a complete waste because I only needed it for that night and was checking out at 6am. Though it did include a bar and restaurant credit worth nearly as much as the original “room” I’d booked.
They are a completely chaotic company. And after that I never used them again.
I will not use them again, just like I do not use Travelodge any more since they repeatedly double-booked my rooms. I feel like, eventually, I'm going to run out of brokers to use. Perhaps I just need to book direct with a handful of hotels.
I'm pretty sure that if you tell them that you're initiating a chargeback, it'll magically resolve itself.
I had this on Airbnb.
Once the official dates were announced, she cancelled the extra booking, in line with Booking.com rules."
And then Booking.com cancelled her booking, in line with Booking.com rules. Shit goes both ways.
But I know nobody would consider the two equivalent, so I must be mistaken. Right?
If the booking isn't fixed untill you showed up on the exact date at the hotel front desk then wouldn't that make making prior bookings moot
Booking or the hotel reserve the right to cancel for clear pricing errors with the example cited from their own terms being a $1 room. They do not claim a right of cancellation for arbitrary reasons.
It isn't at all clear that this is the same class of error. $4,500 that she paid is the normal price for the room, not a pricing error. Their "error", if it can be considered a pricing error, is that they accepted a booking without factoring in that the dates were possibly an event weekend where they could deviate from their normal pricing.
I don't accept the excuse of "it turns out that we can make more money than the standard rate we charged you" as an error, and I don't think any reasonable judge or arbitrator would see it that way either.
"[...] A5. Our values
1. You will:
[...]
- not use the Platform to cause a nuisance or make fake bookings
[...]
If you breach these Terms (including our values and our Content standards and guidelines) or fail to comply with applicable laws or regulations, we have the right to:
- stop you making any bookings,
- cancel any bookings you’ve already made
[...]"
She made two bookings, one of which she intended to cancel from the get go, in other words, it was a fake booking.
I'll bite though: I don't see what the definition of a "fake booking" is in there, but I would argue that knowing that you need one of two weekends, and fully intending to use the booking when that determination is made, does not make it a fake booking. A cancelled booking is not the same as a "fake booking", cancellation is a service that they offer (presumably for cases just like this, where exact ravel dates are still being determined) and she paid for. You can't offer, and upcharge, for a cancellation service and then claim that cancellation is not within your terms of service.
Additionally, the remedy for making "fake bookings", as described in the document you are citing, is that they will cancel your booking. They did not cancel, they attempted to 4x the price. So that section doesn't apply doubly. 1. She did not make a fake booking 2. They did not invoke that section in their reasoning, and they did not use the remedies described by that section.
Edit: Finally, you have chosen a section of the terms and conditions for a different country (GB) on a different continent that is neither the home of the hotel or the person making the booking, or the travellers accompanying the person making the booking. It is not just completely irrelevant from a textual perspective, but also completely irrelevant because it has no legal relevance for any of the parties involved.
2 bookings isn't a nuisance booking.
She had an intention of cancelling that was exactly 50%. In other words, she fully intended to use the booking, until she found out that it wasn't fit for her purposes, at which point she exercised the cancellation option that they charge more for.
If I pay extra for a refundable hotel booking option knowing that there is an equal chance of me using it or cancelling it, I don't think it is fake, it is simply uncertain. When I exercise an option for service that has been sold to me, I certainly don't consider that to be a nuisance. She was playing by their terms and conditions.
Given that they don't define what a "fake" or "nuisance" booking is in their terms and conditions, it is perfectly fine to argue that a booking made with an uncertain, but genuine, intent to use the service is neither "fake" or a "nusaince", especially given that cancellability is prominently advertised as a feature of the booking. What possible other purpose would offering cancellability serve if not handling uncertainty in travel plans.
Eugh, I feel dirty defending them.
Priceline, Agoda, Rentalcars.com, Kayak, OpenTable, Rocketmiles, FareHarbor, HotelsCombined, Cheapflights, momondo
Each time a hotel has had an issue Expedia and hotels.com has fixed the issue for me by refunding the difference or giving me a credit for another booking
Cancelling through hotels.com has always been easy. Even for bookings that have been non refundable, they can call the hotel and make exceptions.
I would never not use it. Dealing with sites directly is a nightmare.
For example, one can generally check out early. We had followed a hotel reservation from locals in Nagoya, and found ourselves in a stodgy "classic" hotel. We were able to pivot to possibly the nicest corner suite in the entire city, at a steep last minute discount.
I did get trapped once, not realizing that my Hiroshima hotel became nonrefundable several days before check-in. With a phone call they moved my reservation to a few days later as a courtesy. The web page then let me cancel.
A well functioning marketplace will have step-changes in 'fair value' when there are step-changes in the underlying fundamentals (i.e. 'uncertainty' becomes 'certainty').
Don't blame the woman. Booking.com has a free cancelation policy. In the financial markets, options cost money. There is an intrinsic underlying value. In this case, the woman was given a free option and she took it. She did the smart thing.
Don't blame the hotel. Booking.com also offers a similar policy to the room providers - if the rate is clearly in error, they can cancel. The hotel likely operated in the same manner as the woman (i.e. they said "hey there's no penalty for requesting a refund... lets try it and see if we get away with it" or more sinister "hey Booking.com uses an automated system for these requests and any price discrepancy >50% is auto-approved by the system!"). While this feels adversarial, the hotel also did 'the smart thing' (... something about the "fiduciary duty to maximize value for the shareholders" ...)
The issue: Booking.com approved the hotel's cancellation request for a room with a rate that was (likely) correct at the time it was booked. (Given the well established dynamics around market pricing around events)
The policies of Booking.com led to this mess - ultimately Booking.com did the right thing by upholding the reservation and covering the difference.
Every time there's a big event somewhere a bunch of people who booked before the event was publicized get bit by this.
By burned, I mean not getting the room I paid for. At this point, I'll use it to search then just go to the hotel site directly to book.
About an hour before I checked in I got a message from Booking.com saying my reservation had been canceled. I called them and they said the hotel had canceled the reservation. They attempted to find another hotel upon request but there wasn’t one that would fit our group within 45 minutes of the convention center (the original was a block away).
Without many options, I showed up to the hotel to attempt to check in anyway. They told me Booking.com had canceled it several weeks prior. I denied any knowledge of the reservation being canceled and we got our room with little issue.
I’m not sure what was going on, but I’ve never used them since.
Unfortunately, there are some smaller BnBs that only take booking.com
Although, this article reminds me of people on slickdeals complaining that they got caught trying to buy a type-o.
I had exactly the same case. I had a non cancellable room booked for an event and a week or two before the event it was cancelled and booking tried to claim they were not an agent, they were not part of the contract, that they cared very deeply. Customer support in English cost 1€ per minute and they kept putting me on hold. Eventually I just went to Facebook and asked GPT to start incrementally generating more and more offensive posts direct at their social media account. It's much cheaper than their customer support line and it actually reaches someone who can do something.
With booking.com they’re big enough that making a fuss in the media gets you a $17k room for $4k. I’m taking that deal every single time haha.
> Once the official dates were announced, she cancelled the extra booking, in line with Booking.com rules.
Let's be real here. Booking.com is not the only side stretching the terms of service to the limit to extract maximum value. This speculative booking and cancellation also drives costs up for other consumers who book reservations with honest intent by pulling a bunch of units off the market. It's hard to blame Booking.com for wanting to stick it to her.
Free cancellation is an upcharge (often a significant one), which she paid for, and made use of.
It would have been easily possible for booking.com and the hotel to offer rooms at two price points and make the conditions clear ahead of time:
- High price (guaranteed room)
- Low price (based on availability, if F1 is that week you'll get the choice between paying an upcharge, cancellation, or moving the booking to another date)
Sounds like booking.com made a mistake in applying the wrong policy, and is trying to cover up for it instead of admitting their liability.
Without that risk you’re not functioning as a broker and shouldn’t be rewarded as one.
The underlying problem, that hotels are capable of canceling bookings so they can ask for extortionate rates when events nearby take place, still remains.
I'm not sure whose fault this is, really. The person buying the reservation knew this deal was too good to be true, the hotel should've fixed their prices if they want to charge 12k extra for a weekend, and booking should probably kick hotels that do this off their website.
Booking.com is an absolute hell site for various reasons, but I'm sure the same conflict would've happened had the room been booked through the hotel's website.
Booking has stood by me before whereas the little seaside hotel barely has a working phone much less a computer with a person that can operate it.
I have no doubt Booking is fully liable here but for the vast majority of interactions they reduce friction.
When I read your first sentence I thought "that is the exact opposite of my experience". Then when I read your second sentence I realize we're probably not using 3rd parties the same way.
I primarily book 4 star and up properties, that is just how I prefer to travel. For those kinds of places you'll often get a worse net experience when booking through a 3rd party (I've tried in the past). Upon check-in, it is made clear that your "discounted rate" doesn't qualify you for certain perks (loyalty points, check-in bonus like a free drink, etc.). I'm also not too worried about a name-brand property screwing me over.
But for a little "seaside hotel" kind of place, I can see where having a large 3rd party booking agent on your side could be valuable.
I once mentioned that while checking in at a family owned hotel, and they said they appreciate that the booking service allowed them to compete with larger chains on that front.
Perhaps if there was some "shopify of accomodation" it would be easier to have a seamless experience. In the meanwhile, the existence of a stable reference point gives the false sense of a trusted travel assistant.
I take advantage of their platform moreso than they me. I book refundable no-pre pay hotels every time, sometimes having multiple bookings for the same week. It's like a free option on future pricing.
Socialism also isn't the only system that isn't capitalism either. Capitalism is a relatively recent invention, perhaps 300 years old.
Socialist theory typically handles luxuries of limited quantity in a few ways.
One, if there's demand, try to increase the quantity. Could we have more racing fill the gap? Maybe not, as an F1 fan I understand this might not be possible.
Two, could we apportion it via lottery? There's lots of styles of lottery, from random chance to chances derived from some characteristic (e.g. maybe you can get some lottery tickets based on productivity).
Three, queues -- maybe you can't be one of the hundred thousands who go this year, but everyone who did go has to wait their turn before going again.
Four, don't offer it. Some luxuries maybe don't exist in a society built on the concept of wellbeing for all. I think there would still be racing, but maybe there wouldn't be superyachts or many private jets. This is definitely not the preferred outcome -- luxuries make life wonderful, but if they are really really hard to share, maybe we should put more time in to things that are easier to share.
Five, markets and trade. Markets can exist under socialism, though many socialists consider them unpalatable. Capitalism is a specific type of market economy. There are non capitalist ways to run markets.
Six, corruption. The powerful and their guests get to attend. I'd argue this is what we have today under capitalism today as well. We just derive power from money, not government positions.
And rentalcars.com is a flat-out scam. I had to dispute CC charges with them when I showed up on scene, there were no cars, and rentalcars wouldn't refund it. Always book with the rental company directly.
The hotels sell rooms full-price on their site, and only release cheaper prices to budget aggregators. Often times the cheapest hotel deals are only available as part of a flight+hotel package where the cheaper price never gets revealed at all, because they never reveal which actual proportion of your package goes to the airline and to the hotel (hint: it's usually the hotel that gives the discount, even if the package is advertising a "$0 flight").
You're right about it being easier to change/cancel, for sure. But it's not also cheaper -- it's the opposite. You're generally paying more for that.
This is why when you travel for business and plans change and someone else is paying, book direct. Whereas when you're traveling for fun but on a budget with fixed dates you know won't change, use a budget aggregator.