Expedia: Bad for the Traveler, Bad for the Hotel

Not using hotels.com is harder than you think. There are front entities pretending to be the hotel and are actually booking thru hotels.com.

Background...

We booked a hotel in Key West FL. Fair deal. Show up, no reservation. Turns out they gave us the wrong hotel info. It was super late and we couldn't resolve the mess with hotels' customer service over the phone so we just crashed where we arrived. Took months to get the charges for the other booking reversed.

People at hotel where we arrived said it happens all the time.

For our next trip, resolved to not use hotels.com ever again, I found hotel via the web. Called the number. Turns out both the website and phone number were SEO optimized front companies that book thru hotels.com. Which we did not discover until we arrived and there was a problem with the booking. We paid $40 extra per night for the privilege of being lied to.

Rant...

Personally, as a consumer, I'm very grumpy that I'm constantly being lied to. I work hard for my money. I try to be diligent about how I spend it. And I'm sick of being robbed by legal means. It seems to be getting worse (ISPs, banks, phone companies, mortgages, etc). I'm now more reluctant to spend money. Because now my transaction costs are getting too high. Too much friction.

If my wary consumer experience is widespread, it has to be dampening the economy.

Free market! Woot!

    > For the most availability, best prices and service,
    > always book directly with a hotel. 

(Full disclosure: I work for Booking.com an online hotel booking website and Expedia's competitor)

I think it's a gross misrepresentation to say that the customer is always best off booking directly with the hotel. You get something you wouldn't get when booking directly through the hotel.

When you use an OTA you have collective bargaining power; If the hotel screws you around in any way it's now the OTA's problem. They'll call up the hotel on your behalf (in their native language, which you may or may not speak) and either sort it out with them or make sure you have somewhere else to stay because you're now their customer.

Of course the service you get differs a lot by OTA. But from the customer's perspective there's usually a net gain by booking through one.

> For the most availability, best prices and service, always book directly with a hotel.

It has never been the case with me. Expedia, or any other travel site, always had better deals. In fact, I once called the hotel in question to ask why there is a big price discrepancy between their site listing and makemytrip. I was concerned makemytrip is selling me rooms that doesn't exist and the hotel won't honor my reservation. The hotel staff told me the hotel sells rooms to makemytrip well in advance, and whatever the price that is listed on makemytrip will be honored(doesn't really matter; you pay directly to makemytrip).

Also, I am a bit paranoid. I would hate it if some hotel overbooked and told me "lol sorry" when I arrive. I know travel sites aren't really on my side, but at least I will have someone to appeal to.

I didn't have any bad experience with Expedia but then, I had very limited interactions with them(I didn't even modify or cancel my bookings).

I would advice against agoda and booking.com as they forward your credit card info to the hotel as security. In what world does forwarding a customer's credit card info to a random hotel makes sense? Imagine the surprise when you are at the hotel counter and the staff shows you a printout of your credit card info(nothing obscured; everything in plain text).

> If you would like to know more about our hotel just visit our website at www.lunabluehotel.com.

I tried, and the link is down. Most of the hotels don't even have websites, let alone online reservations. There is a reason customers go to expedia in the first place.

EDIT: Random travel tip. If you are in a foreign or an unknown location, a hotel which provides airport transfer generally ends up cheaper than a hotel which doesn't + cab fares. You would be surprised how wrong your assumptions about transport might be. "You have a flight to catch at 8, it's 5, you are in the lobby and there isn't a cab in sight and looks unlikely there will be one for another 2 hours" isn't a pleasant situation to be in.

I worked in the online booking industry for a couple of years, coincidentally I also live in Playa del Carmen now.

What most likely happened was this: Expedia and other big players buy wholesale room inventory from large hotel chains. Expedia might come up and say that they want to buy 30% of the rooms of a hotel for a certain period at a steeply discounted price.

This might be something that the hotel itself can't fill, so the happily sell to Expedia et al. To Expedia, selling these rooms might be something like 80% profit, against 25% for a small hotel such as the Luna Blue.

Expedia then promotes the hell out of the hotel through their website: they make it appear on top of search results, they "pimp" they profile of the hotel, and such. They are not allowed to undercut the price, because other retailers might ask for the same price.

Then, the office managers of Expedia Cancún are most likely on some sort of incentive to sell most of these wholesale rooms (travel is dominated by such economic incentives). The hack is is pretty clear: "closing" smaller hotels causes users to book another hotel, and it will most likely be one of these pimped out hotel profiles that provide much more profit than other hotels.

I'm guessing this is a regional issue, just some dim witted office managers at Cancún that are trying to game the system in order to get a big incentive.

I am a typical travel customer. I often go to conferences and book hotels in unfamiliar cities. I am very sympathetic to this story. And yet -- at the end --

>either use the internet to do the research or go to a reputable travel agent.

Let's look at these alternatives. Use the internet to do the research? Expedia makes it very easy, that's the point. Are its competitors better? Maybe. How am I supposed to be able to tell? Is Hipmunk also evil? Orbitz? Some other random website I find which compares hotels? If I use these websites to do my research and then book directly, I'm avoid some of the problems -- but probably not all?

Go to a reputable travel agent? No, sorry. That's a pain in the ass.

I'm disappointed in this article. It makes a very convincing case that we should avoid huge internet travel monopolies, but yet doesn't compellingly suggest what I should do instead.

I know people in the hospitality business, and all third party travel websites (and travel agents) are bad for the traveler and hotel, for a few simple reasons.

1) Middlemen always need their cut. In this case, you pay the website, and then the website pays the hotel less.

2) By bypassing the middleman (call the hotel directly, and speak to that specific location's on site employees), you SHOULD be able to get a better deal. Simply compare prices, and if you find it cheaper on a website, ask the hotel to give you 5% off. Any competent manager will do this because it costs much more than 5% to get your reservation from a travel agent. Obviously, they will have to verify that third party price, but in the case of Expedia, they can just search it.

3) Additionally, it's good to book directly with the hotel for the following reasons too (or at least call them directly after booking online to confirm):

-In the fine print of travel websites' T&C, it will say you are guaranteed A room, not THE room you want. This means if only smoking rooms are available, the third party site will still sell it to you as a non smoking room. Also, there are many incompatibilities in the GDS/Central reservation system software, so there is a chance there can be an error in your reservation.

-Third party reservations don't go to the hotel with the guest's contact information. This means if the hotel wants to contact you about some issue, they cannot reach you, and the websites won't give out the guest's information. This was a big problem during Sandy a few months ago.

All in all, third party websites are a relic of the times when hotels did not have the technical expertise to implement internet reservation systems. Nowadays, you can just look up the hotel's reviews on TripAdvisor, call the hotel directly, and make sure you get the room you want by speaking with someone directly at the property, with actual knowledge of the place. The ONLY benefit these third party websites can provide, seems to be with the bundling of hotels/flights/rental cars, but I still wouldn't use them. Going straight to the vendor has been the more pleasant experience for me.

Edit: I should have noted that my knowledge comes from US and British hotels, mostly franchises like IHG/Hilton/Choice/Wyndham.

    First of all they have a well-deserved reputation for bad customer service. 
    Google the words “Expedia bad customer service” and see what comes up.

Yes.

Anecdotal I know, but I've used Expedia twice, and will never use them again.

It took a year and an offer to take the case to court before they issued a refund, and the second time they just screwed all the bookings up with no apology or comment upon complaint.

When the cost to enforce a contract is higher than the value of the contract, then there is no justice. Small businesses are left with what is effectively vigilante justice, writing blog posts and appealing to the public directly.

Frankly I'm biased against large organizations in general, and so I'm tempted to take this post at face value, and get angry with Expedia. And perhaps that's the right thing to do (although, as someone else pointed out, some e-mail quotes, screenshots, or other corroborating evidence would make for a more convincing story). But I can't help but think that we're all missing the big picture: that the high price of justice creates an enormous advantage for large companies. That justice is priced out of most people's ability.

I used to hear about how 'litigious' American society has become. And yet, is that really true? Personal injury is no doubt quite popular. What what about simple fraud and breech of contract? What about conspiracy to commit fraud?

Unless the justice system is priced for people to actually use it, then it's useless. So the question arises: what cheaper options does the OP have for pursuing this case?

I see Expedia as no different from traditional middle-men (travel agents). If I search a flight+hotel deal on Expedia, I can always get the exact same price by booking directly with the airline and hotel, and without the potential hassles described in the article.

Perhaps it's naive, but I feel safer booking direct, because then if I have any problems, I'm dealing with a first-party and it's harder to be given the three-way runaround.

I see few posts where people are in doubt. This behavior is unfortunatly their business model. Mark "non participating" hotels as full and listen against their will and trick users to more expensive/hotels they get more commissions from. Not long ago they even lost in court around this in Norway http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&...

Here's my reason for avoiding Expedia.

A few years ago I booked a trip to the UK to visit some friends. The morning I was supposed to leave, I get an email from one of my friends saying that I should check if my flight is still on, because there is "something going on with a volcano in Iceland". Turns out it's the start of that major eruption and all air traffic in Northern Europe is grounded with no foreseeable reopening.

I first called the airline, Virgin Atlantic. They were very friendly, apologetic, and as helpful as possible. They said they could reschedule me, but given all the unknowns they weren't making any new bookings for at least 2 weeks. Now this was a two week vacation I was taking, with lots of other things scheduled, so I couldn't really just up and shift the whole thing two weeks on a whim. They would have gladly given a refund, but since I booked through Expedia, I had to talk to them. That's when things started going downhill.

First of all, even on what I'm sure was a crazy customer service day, the people at Virgin answered the phone in minutes and were quite friendly. The Expedia call took almost an hour to be answered. Every agent I spoke too was borderline rude and confrontational, and had the worst broken English of any oversees call center I've dealt with. From the start they only wanted to argue, that because it was the day of the flight, I could neither cancel or reschedule. Finally, after about 90 minutes of arguing and being transferred, I got to a high enough manager who actually seemed to listen to what I said and not just be reading a script, and got my refund authorized. And I thought it was over.

Months go by and the credit never appears back to my card. I call Expedia a couple times, each time they say it is being processed by the CC company, but it can take up to 90 days. I check with the CC, they have no record of the credit. Finally after 90 days, I get a hold of Expedia and they say it is fine if I just have the CC company cancel the transaction on their end (as a dispute), as there must have been a "glitch" somewhere. And that flipped the trouble switch.

Apparently there is an automated system in Expedia, if you dispute their charge with you CC company, they automatically flip it to a collections agency. A few months after I did, I got a very threatening letter and phone call saying I owed the charge plus penalties and interest. If I did not pay, they would flag my credit rating and possibly take further legal action. I contacted Expedia again to ask WTF is going on, and their response was that they are not allowed to communicate with the collections agency once the matter has been given to them. They were confident that if i just explained why I didn't owe the money, the collections guys would drop it. But they couldn't provide me with any documentation to give them.

After another month of letters and phone calls with the collections agents, and quite a bit of stress on my end, I stopped hearing from them so I guess it was resolved.

Keep in mind, all told this is about 8 months down the road from when I was originally supposed to travel. In fact I rebooked the entire trip for about a month after the original, and had already gone and come back. But definitely not with Expedia.

Thanks to all the folks offering support here and sharing their own stories of frustration with Expedia. We also wanted to note we are aware that our site is down. Our host server is having real troubles today and tell us things won't be fixed for 24 hours. If you need to contact us before then please email us at info@lunabluehotel.com or via our Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/lunabluehotel. Again thanks for the voices of support. Tony & Cheri Owners, Luna Blue Hotel

Why should anyone be surprised? Do you really think abuse of power is absent because a business is on the Internet? How many times have publishers had their Buy buttons removed from their books at Amazon? How many stories are there of small devs getting ripped off by Apple and Microsoft? What about late payments to devs from the Google Play Store? I will never use Expedia now. Better that I should be inconvenienced than be jerked around by smug companies out to crush small businesses.

EDIT: Typo fixed.

Travel hack: as the article points out, Expedia take 25% cut of the booking rate, which is usually the same a the hotel's direct rate.

Because the hotel will make more profit from you, you have a higher chance of getting a room upgrade at the property, better amenities or even just better service if you book direct rather than via Expedia.

A classic "small business is mad" blog post. It even contains the a quote about how much money they spent on their business, "We put all of our money, time and heart into making it work," as though that's a criterion Expedia uses when deciding how to respond to customer service inquiries.

I'm also surprised that the links broke and Expedia's "IT department" said they'll "never" be fixed. That doesn't really make any sense. I can't help but think that the images are hosted by the hotel itself and that they broke the images. I don't know. The story sounds plausible but unlikely to me and has all the classic "crazy person" literary features. (Some sources to back this up would be good: emails, screenshots, etc.)

I work for an OTA and this is likely not Expedia per se, but the local office trying to up the value of their sales. Small hotels are always going to have more problems than a big chain, as they don't have any real time data connection to provide availability and room information. Either they send in their information and hope someone enters it correctly, or they are provided with access to a portal they can manage their own data in. If the local property manager is only interested in getting credit for high value sales and the small property owner doesn't have access to the portal, then likely the manager can screw them over so that people wind up at the more valuable properties. OTA's prefer data connections because that way the data is more up to date. It also means any errors are the fault of the chain (unless the hotel system itself has bugs).

By making Expedia aware of how their local managers are operating they might actually get this fixed. No OTA wants this kind of bad publicity. Just the US alone my employer (and its parent company) have nearly 300,000 hotels available. Keeping the data current is a massive pain at that scale since at the other end are individual people.

Also note that for most OTA's there are only a couple providers of hotel photos and one dominant one, and we all hate them as they suck terribly. Unless you are a speciality provider like Oyster or Hotel Tonight and can take the few photos you need, or are Tripadvisor and can get customers to take them, you are at the mercy of the photo provider.

So a quality bitching can get you better service (as a hotel provider) from an OTA. Even better is make a deal with someone who provides small hotels with data management (which does cost money) so that your room availability is all electronic.

The hotel business is all about filling rooms. The average hotel hopes for 70% rooms filled tonight. OTA's do provide a lot of hotel bookings so you can't do without them. But if the local OTA hotel property manager sucks there are 4 major players you can deal with (plus all the speciality ones). Yes you have to give them a commission (20%+ usually) but if you work with them correctly they can fill your rooms.

Outrageous if true, though I'm inclined to blame Expedia's incompetence rather than intentional misdirection...

A bit of a shame because I've found Expedia to be pretty decent for booking flights (though that's mostly by way of comparison with other sites; most flight booking sites are jaw-droppingly horrible...).

It would be great if this blog post were picked up by a legit news organization, researched and fact checked, cross referenced with other stories (like the French one) and published more widely as an expose.

This is bad for consumers and bad for hotels. I like small local hotels. I want them to succeed. I want an easier way to connect with them. They are hard to find on hotels.com, etc. and I always assumed it was because the owners didn't maintain the listing, but it seems it's because expedia doesn't care.

Been using Expedia for 14 years, though not exclusively. Contrary to the post, they often post discounts unavailable elsewhere, particularly for combos. For example recently, the regular rate at Wynn Las Vegas was around $200 a night in December but with an Expedia flight it worked out to $140 a night. This is the discount they usually give their mid level Red Card members, if I recall correctly (upper get RFB).

I've also used Expedia to book a stay in Cancun a few years ago; they had a number of mom and pop hotels listed with rich details, but Ultimately I got a great combo rate at the Ritz Carlton (like $240 - it was about a week before the season really began); this rate was not available on the Ritz website.

I have had some bad experiences with Expedia when requesting refunds or changes, though this has improved over the past 2 years with more software features and slightly better call center agents (ymmv).

Ultimately I'll book direct with the hotel or airline if I have a specific reason to (schedule, FF points, upgrades, etc), but for easy price comparison and research I tend to rely on Kayak and Expedia almost exclusively.

This posting has not changed my mind that they offer a good service - they seem to have issues with their Latin American offices.

This is a known problem and I see no reason not to believe every word Tony & Cheri writes.

Check out this (poorly tranlated) article from Norway:

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&...

This is fucking disgusting, and these scumbags (together with tripadvisor) have polluted Google's search results.

No matter what hotel you're googling for, your search results will be chock-full of these bastards.

> Secondly they do not offer discounted rates as many claim.

In Denmark at least, I have found that they typically do offer discounted rates that the hotel's own website doesn't offer, especially for smaller hotels during periods of lower demand. If you're booking off-season at the last minute, I've found discounts on hotels.com of 40-60% relative to what the online-booking system of the hotel's own website was showing. One example where I've stayed a few times (http://www.hotel-maritime.dk/) was offering €50/night via hotels.com in late January 2012, at a time when their own website was listing €80/night. It's frequent enough that I advise my friends visiting Copenhagen to always check a hotel's rate on hotels.com before booking through the hotel's website, in case there's a substantial difference.

>>> "a long, detailed list describing our rooms"

Hint: a red flag right there. You're selling what's perceived as standardized commodity. If a long and detailed list made the job of corporate copy-and-paster hard, imagine potential customer confusion.

I don't use Expedia as I've found their service to be horrible, and their technology in the early days had all kinds of issues with losing session and the like, so I abandoned them 10+ years ago.

I do use Orbitz. I'm not sure if they are guilty of the same sins, but I've generally found their service to be adequate. I book directly with airlines when it makes sense and doesn't take too much effort - but most hotel booking sites are horrible and prices are usually higher.

It would be great if an open platform like AirBNB emerged for hotels - perhaps AirBNB itself.

> It wasn’t cheap, as Expedia takes 25 % of every booking made through their sites–a fact that hotels are forbidden by Expedia to disclose to guests.

This is forbidden to be disclosed because business contract details are covered under an NDA they signed with Expedia. 25% is their negotiated commission but it will vary by partner and hence they don't want that being disclosed to be used as leverage in negotiations with other hotels.

> For the most availability, best prices and service, always book directly with a hotel.

This may be the case with the Luna Blue, but is definitely not what we at Room 77 see in the marketplace. We're connecting with the GDS and pretty much every major OTA in the US (Expedia, Orbitz, Booking.com, Priceline, etc.) and what we're seeing is increasing price fragmentation in the marketplace. This is why we fundamentally believe that metasearch is a better model for the consumer since prices and availability do vary.

> Secondly they do not offer discounted rates as many claim.

As someone else mentioned, even if a rate is not discounted against the rate the hotel has directly, it may be a promotion against the regular rate and you have to factor in the loyalty programs that exist on many OTA sites (Hotels.com book 10 get 1 free, Agoda 4% rewards, etc.). The most probable reason that an OTA has a lower rate is that the room availability has changed. For example, a hotel has two types of rooms (A & B) may have presold a percentage to Expedia and if the hotel has sold their own allocation of room type A and only has room type B left, the lowest price the hotel has for ANY room is the price of room type B. Expedia may then show a lower price for a hotel because they still have room type A available to sell to travelers since they own that percentage of inventory that was presold to them.

The core value proposition of booking through an online agency wasn't really addressed by Tony and Cheri which is that people by and large don't want to shop a single hotel's price and availability. When I want to go to Playa del Carmen, I want to see ALL options I have in an area and compare hotels and rates and the easiest way to do that is through an OTA or a metasearch engine.

Booking directly through a hotel has it's own advantages which include: 1) payment is usually not required until you arrive at the hotel, 2) you earn the hotel's loyalty points if they have a program, and 3) the hotel will prioritize your booking for upgrades, etc. since they didn't have to pay a large commission.

From my perspective working at a metasearch company, we want to provide maximum choice and availability of options/inventory so we show both direct hotel inventory and OTA inventory and let consumers decide which one they want to choose.

Dear small business hotel

Yes, Expedia sucks, but here's what you should do

YOU make your website and booking system available on the web. Make people able to google your hotel and get there. (Edit: this seems to be already in place)

If I search your hotel on Expedia and it shows no dates available, I begin to suspect Expedia, or your integration of systems with them.

And if they really say your hotel is going out of business, get a lawyer. Edit: get a lawyer NOW

I stopped booking with Expedia when there was a problem with an incorrect flight time. Delta said they couldn't do anything and I'd have to resolve with Expedia. Expedia said they couldn't do anything, and I'd have to resolve with Delta. I had a clearly nonsensical flight plan (I was scheduled to be at the destination for 1 hour), and no way to resolve it. I gave up on both businesses.

It sounds like they aren't very savvy business people, but when I'm looking to stay somewhere that does not matter. A 16 room boutique hotel is never going to get a ton of attention from a large travel agency, there's no profit in it. They'd be better off marketing directly to their target demographic and trying for word of mouth / repeat business.

I have had great luck with Hotwire (an Expedia subsidiary) and have discovered many neat hotels with it. I live in Florida and frequently book hotel room on the various beaches for easy short vacations, the only motivator is location and price (if nothing is available, I don't go). I have booked directly at some of the places I found, but if it weren't for their being on Hotwire I never would have found them.

Also, the cost savings with Hotwire is frequently massive (50% off is not uncommon)--I haven't been able to book directly for cheaper (the trick is Hotwire doesn't tell you the exact hotel before you book, so if you want to ensure the same property you need to direct book and pay more).

To be honest, i'll still book where it's cheapest. Usually i use a lot of those sites, including tripadvisor, etc. to check for accomodations and in the end i'll book where it's cheapest. I'll check on google maps for hotels, check online pricing, but in the end.. when the hotel itself is more expensive (plus expedia and co offer me a good meta search not only one hotel!).. why should i pay more for "less"?!

Never had problems with expedia&co myself but i rarely need to cancel/change reservations.

It's not my fault that the whole hotel business doesn't seem to be capable enough to do this on their own.

Friendly PSA from someone who has dealt with lying businessmen and customer service reps: record all your conversations. Be careful to notify them that you are recording the conversation if you live in a two-party consent state.

In fact, letting them know you are recording them is a great way to get them to take you seriously. I've gotten a phone call from a VP of a company, wishing to "settle our differences" to my satisfaction once word got to him that I had recorded a conversation with a beligerent rep.

I wonder if we can repay them and play the same game they are playing. Maybe if many of us reblog/post and link to that amazing detailed blog post with the anchor text being "advertise with expedia" - maybe when new hotels who will want to advertise with Expedia (and google about it) will be able to read about that horrible experience.

Since this was posted on 5 December and has a fair amount of attention now, I'm surprised that Expedia hasn't officially responded yet. Maybe because so much of the attention has come in the past couple of days. I sent them a Tweet asking what was going on, and I notice someone posted this on their Facebook Page.

Well, that's exactly why we created http://live.Roomixer.com A Guest Exchange marketplace where Guest Rejections can be bought and sold. If hotels would cooperate with other hotels there would be less work for Expedia!

You don't want to book airline tickets with Expedia. If they are cheaper, they are only slightly cheaper, and you'll have to deal with Expedia when things go wrong. The airline gives a minor discount due to pushing over customer service to Expedia.

Expedia is (allegedly) lying about one of their “partner” hotels in a way that drives customers away from the hotel. Isn’t this the kind of thing that a lawyer would call “tortious interference with business relationships”?

If Expedia is misrepresenting the status of the smaller hotels and cutting them out then I think that is a type of fraud or collusion with the bigger hotels. It is at the least, a policy that is antagonistic to competition.

Given the owner's complaint, I find it odd that when I clicked the Room & Amenities link at the bottom of lunabluehotel.com, the link was dead, or at least, timing out repeatedly.

Well that explains some of the weirdness I've seen for hotels that Expedia said were booked out where it didn't seem likely (dead season).

I've never booked with Expedia because they have never offered a better price than I can get from the travel agent in my neighbourhood.

What are good alternatives to expedia that provide good customer service and are also friendly to small businesses?

I will NEVER book from Expedia, the end!!!

Since their rep double booked the room I had already booked online (which I told him) and I released expedia points weren't worth shit, I've been using hotels.com. Free night every 10. That's pretty sweet. (Note, I have no affiliation w/ hotels.com or whatever, it's just what works for me).

Wish I hadn't wasted all those nights getting expedia points worth what $10 bux maybe after 20+ nights?

Fuck that.

I disagree with this post. Never had any issues with expedia. Always use them for air/hotel bookings and they are awesome. They do a really good job filtering out the junk "non-chain" hotels and making clear to the buyer that what they are getting it high quality.