That travel deal you found online may be a one-way ticket to misery

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/travel/vacation-hotels-flights-online-booking-fees-29262506

by sanj • 3 years ago

28 57 3 years ago

At this point basically any third party booking should be considered a scam. Even if the booking company is "legit", you're still a second class citizen with the hotel or whatever you booked and subject to no help, arbitrary fees, no points, etc.

It's just as much scamming on the side of the hotels - they accept third party booking but misrepresent that they treat you the same.

throwaway2902• 3 years ago

With booking.com I have customer support I can talk to, would not even touch some hotel's own half broken booking system (much less give them my payment info... nope)

Unlike hotels large airline booking systems are generally decent so I am okay with them, many are just white labelled Amadeus I think. But still, with expedia for flights I can (at least pre covid) get cancellations free of charge even if airline tariff doesn't have that, useful when applying for visa etc. But let's not talk about AirAsia, once booked with them direct and now get spammed for eternity, they don't unsub you no matter how hard you try. Had to set up a filter...

scarface_745• 3 years ago

Real world scenario:

Last year I booked 7 days at the Hilton San Francisco Financial District for a hybrid work/pleasure trip. We arrived late and really didn’t like the hotel. We checked out the next day and went to the Hilton Parc 55. The first Hilton charged us for one night when we checked out.

That simple change would have been next to impossible through a third party where I prepaid the third party and they paid the hotel. It definitely wouldn’t have been seamless

dacryn• 3 years ago

I feel always conflicted about expedia.

I travelled a lot with them before people pointed out that you get subpar rooms, and worse treatment. Like, a lot. 150 nights or so. And I do confirm those rumours, many subpar rooms, sleep next to elevator, that wonky corner room that is smaller than the others, ...

I liked it because it was business travel to an area without a Hilton or Mariott, so I still got some points for my personal holidays.

But now years later, I still use expedia a lot. Somehow their prices are better than what Hilton can offer, even if I call them up for a price match (because I do prefer hilton points over Expedia points). Same for IHG. Yes I get the occasional room with the broken door on the closet, and sleep next to the elevator practically alwyas, but anytime I needed support from Expedia, they came through. And I use them for personal travel if I actually have to pay for it myself

nwellinghoff• 3 years ago

Seriously correct. You call the hotel to change something and they act like its not their hotel anymore. You call expidia or whatever and they tell you to talk to the hotel. Translation, never pay up front for anything that requires service at a future date.

Note I have breached this wall by doing what used to be common before 2000 before we all got a little too polite. Getting really angry and not going away. Eventually they will cave and do what they knew was fair all along. Definitely NOT worth it though.

xwdv2• 3 years ago

Pro tip: making a point of slamming a fist hard on the counter gets them to cooperate 90% of the time when they’re being difficult.

CoffeeOnWrite2• 3 years ago

Translation, never pay up front for anything that requires service at a future date.

Would you say more?

For things like hotels in popular destinations, it lets me sleep at night to put down a deposit up front, I feel like it incentivizes the hotel to hold my room. Knowing the room is better secured is more important to me than money.

Now with Booking, I’ve never had them ask for a deposit. They either have me pay at the hotel, or they run my card after the “free to cancel” period expires (which is always very generous, expiring from 5 days to 1 day before my stay). This doesn’t help me sleep at night, when making bookings a month or more out, I worry that I’ll be cancelled on or be offered a lesser room than the one I booked. Fortunately I’ve only had good experiences with Booking so far, but once I have my first bad experience, I will switch to booking direct or with another platform that lets me put down a deposit up front.

wayfinder• 3 years ago

Still saves a lot of money a lot of time and I've never had a problem with a booking company and I've booked a lot of things via booking companies.

That doesn't mean I won't go to a hotel website if it's a chain I have points with or I won't avoid a booking company that looks sus.

Eventually you figure out whether you should be using a booking site or the hotel website.

nebula88048• 3 years ago

Its not like hotels are some amazing entity to deal with. Many hotels are stuck in prehistoric times.

Story: After being burned multiple times via booking.com and other third party sites, I tried to book directly with the hotel. I was planning a last minute trip with multiple stops and so i just booked a hotel and forgot about it thinking that once I arrive in Ireland i'll look up the details. There was this hotel in Ireland that accepted my booking, charged my damn card the day after the first night, but never actually sent me any confirmation or any emails. When I arrived I didn't remember whatever stupid quaint name the hotel was because I had booked about two weeks prior. I guess this was my bad because I was used to a hotel freaking emailing you something when you book.

When I arrived I was desperately trying to search for any indication that I made the booking and my credit card didn't even have a record. I gave up and ended up booking elsewhere.

Then all of a sudden after the first night I got charged. I was absolutely livid. I demanded an explanation. Turns out what happened was then when I first tried to book, their email form had an issue where my broswers autocomplete added the name of my email after the .com so it was email@gmail.comemail. The site rejected it and I realized the error. I hadn't entered my credit card info so I thought I was fine. I resubmitted it with the correct email and then entered my credit card info. Booking was accepted.....turns out their system somehow retained the first email and send out the confirmation to that email and they had no indication that the email bounced until the person looked up the issue AFTER they had charged me. Whats even crazier is that on the second day they emailed me first asking where I was before I could reach out to them! So they had the correct email in their records but their internal billing system captured the wrong email!

You can't win either way it seems! Fortunately I had a long email chain where they admitted their system never sent out a confirmation. my credit card company sided with me in this regard when I attempted a chargeback.

vikingerik• 3 years ago

So you literally forgot what hotel you booked... and entered the wrong email... and they emailed you anyway about the no-show, with someone probably manually fixing the address to contact you... and you're still blaming the hotel for being hard to deal with?

I'm not so sure the problems were on the hotel's end here.

btown• 3 years ago

Setting aside the fact that as a consumer, not having a confirmation email is a giant red flag that would have avoided much of this... one thing that OTAs can do is interface with low-level supplier APIs to know whether/when the status of a booking has changed.

Of course, this isn't perfect, to be sure - but they sometimes do implement it well, and when working, this can give a second line of defense beyond just what's available with the hotel's own website, which often a smaller subset of information than the OTAs have access to.

ipython3• 3 years ago

Everyone makes fun of me for this, but this is why I carry a 1/2" binder with paperwork for every part of an overseas trip in individual plastic sleeves. When you land in a foreign country, you never know when/if your phone will start roaming, or you're waiting to buy a SIM, etc...

I'll travel with workmates or friends, and they're frantically trying to look something up, while I calmly retrieve my bulky binder, flip to the right page, and pull out the appropriate paperwork from the plastic sleeve. I highly recommend this mechanism for any complex trip.

In your case, knowing what the name of the hotel is can be very important before you even leave the airport. I've had Canadian border guards ask me very detailed questions about the nature of my trip, where I'm staying, phone numbers, etc. You could be detained in secondary if you didn't have that information handy.

terr-dav3• 3 years ago

I have an eerily similar story, and a more general one.

1) I bought lift tickets for a mountain resort, and when I showed up I couldn't find the confirmation email to scan at the self-serve kiosk. I also wasn't able to find my online account portal to see my bookings, so I bought lift tickets on the spot on my phone. As soon as the transaction completed, I was redirected to the account page that I was looking for where I found my original booking. At the end of the weekend, I took up the issue at the ticket window, and got the issue resolved (mostly) to my satisfaction: they refunded me the discounted pre-order amount instead of the full-price I paid; normally they only issue an account credit, this was going above and beyond as they saw it. I believe the reason I didn't get an email the first time was that I used a gmail +tag (name+resort@gmail.com) which their system accepted but didn't know how to use.

Lessons:

i) Stop using +tags with my emails, the utility of these tags (maybe tracing what company my info was leaked from) is far outweighed by the possibility of incidents like this. I don't use them to organize my email, like others do, so this habit has only cost me time, money, and stress so far.

ii) Don't be afraid to ask for help, try to talk to a human next time something like this is happening.

2) Booked a hotel through super.com because they had the lowest price. I didn't read the fine print, so when I showed up to check in, I was informed that I owed a resort fee or something that more than made up the difference. I ended up paying slightly more booking through super.com than I would have going direct.

chrismcb2• 3 years ago

This party booking is the opposite of a scam. Calling it such is libelous.

nebula88048• 3 years ago

Travel just sucks regardless. It feels like solving this problem is harder than putting people on Mars.

There are too many bad actors in the system, nothing is really standardized so customers can't compare or new businesses can't compete 1 to 1.

Its all scams at literally every level starting with "travel influencers" > booking sites > transportation to/from airports > the airports themselves > airlines > hotels and finally > the actual activities to do when you arrive. All layers are optimized to scrape as much as they can from your wallet.

As a CS person, this unoptimized situation really grinds my gears.

ttymck• 3 years ago

optimized to scrape as much as they can from your wallet.

What should they be optimized for?

nebula88048• 3 years ago

Competing against each other but because of the lack of 1 to 1 mapping of offerings it is really hard for consumers to differentiate so there isn't real competition.

scarface_745• 3 years ago

My wife and I literally travel 7 months of the year flying around to different cities and staying in hotels.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966

It’s not that difficult. I have a primary and secondary airline (Delta and American) and a primary and secondary hotel brand (Hilton and Hyatt). I know the corresponding apps and loyalty programs inside and out.

I know what to expect when I travel. When we get to a city or before we go, we search for “top things to do in $City”.

Admittedly, this would be a bit harder once we start flying overseas and we will have to do more research. We are starting our second year and the only international travel we have planned right now are mostly within US time zones.

francisofascii2• 3 years ago

Paying huge sums for superior brands (Delta, Hilton) is one way to solve travel. It is hard if you are on a budget.

terr-dav3• 3 years ago

Each separate party is a business trying to optimize for their own bottom-line. You said it yourself, "optimized to scrape as much as they can from your wallet." The system as it exists is a relatively organic outgrowth of the competitive marketplace. Every intervention to make it more consumer-friendly (efficient by another measure) will be gamed & circumvented by the businesses.

I don't see a way to optimize it without replacing the system that measures success/survival by personal enrichment above-all.

nebula88048• 3 years ago

Everything you said is true but it is also true for every other industry. Do you not think companies selling computer RAM for example not have the same motivations? How is that industry much less frustration to deal with than what we are discussing here?

In my opinion the free market should be able to solve this issue but I think therein lies the problem. There is no 1-to-1 mapping of competitor A offering to competitor B offering and that ambiguity is where the extra is skimmed off.

The free market has beaten the RAM industry. They cannot hide behind any ambiguity. RAM stick A has many direct comparisons to RAM stick B. Yes there are still some ambiguity like brand or quality reputation but overall it is very competitive. The market sucks for companies but is great for consumers. Hence we see bankruptcies once in a while when a major error is made (ie. When Windows 8 launched many companies overproduced in anticipation of new PC sales but when OS sales flopped they went bust)

If we can solve the issue with lack of clarity of what is being offered then we can build a mapping of competitor A offering to competitor B offering but this is why I say its easier to send people to Mars.

How are you going to get that info from each competitor? Lets say you managed to get it through regulation or some other mechanism. Then you have to normalize it across competitors. You can somehow try to break it down to literal things such as room size, does it have item A,B,C and then rate it at a very granular level. But then how to do you evaluate more subjective things like the area the hotel is in?

francisofascii2• 3 years ago

Yeah, travel has a ton variables and risk to make it overwhelming. Trying match to match personal preferences with all the various factors (time of year, flight timing, locations, transportation options, lodging proximity and quality, food options, etc.) takes time and research. You can typically mitigate the difficulty and risk by throwing money at the problem, but most people don't have that luxury, pun intended. It is fun though, when you find budget stay with a great location, or get lucky with great weather or low crowds.

thedigitalone• 3 years ago

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/ej1Su

mighmi• 3 years ago

Hostelworld has absolutely cornered the hostel market, with most venues signing away pricing. This allows hostelworld to equalize prices in a given location, raising them above board although occupancy is down (many empty places during the busy season) while the guests are focused in a few places (as lower rated places can't lower their prices). So for hostels, 3rd party booking is all that is left. Often, contacting them directly, they won't even know what their price is (while a few years ago they would give a discount to hostelworld, hostelbookers etc.)

nocoiner2• 3 years ago

99% of the time, you’ll get the same or better deal by booking online with the hotel directly. (Airfares, I’m less sure - the proliferation of hyper segmented economy and fees make me dubious about what the actual all-in cost of any given flight is.) And the other 1% of the time, calling the hotel will get you the same (or better) outcome or you’ll find out straight from the horse’s mouth they don’t actually have any availability for the room you want, and you’ll save yourself a lot of grief upon arrival.

landgenoot2• 3 years ago

calling the hotel will get you the same (or better) outcome

Not my experience. In Europe, in low-end hotels / B&B's they will get annoyed.

Wouldn't it be possible to build a decentralized booking.com/expedia alternative based on activity pub?

j1elo2• 3 years ago

My experience in Europe is that some low-end places (especially apartments) gave me a phone number or even a card with contact details, and told me to call them directly next time so I could save the Booking fee. Makes sense: remove the middleman!

j1elo2• 3 years ago

I learned from calling that hotels have a set of rooms that are reserved exclusively for Booking. So they might tell you no availability at this time, but Booking showing that they have "only 2 rooms left in this place".

ghaff• 3 years ago

I think I just ran into that. A hiking tour operator recently told me they couldn't book a night before room at a hotel but that there were still a couple rooms on Booking.com if I went directly.

flictonic• 3 years ago

99% of the time, you’ll get the same or better deal by booking online with the hotel directly.

This is often repeated but I almost never find it to be true in reality. Particularly for non chain hotels, best case scenario is their prices are the same as booking.com but if I go through booking I'll get points and future discounts. This tier is never cheaper booking directly. Chain hotels where I have a non base tier status will sometimes be cheaper but even then usually not.

coredog64• 3 years ago

For reasons, chains have to give the aggregators their best publicly available price. However, there is a loophole that loyalty users can be offered a lower price.

The chain still makes more money as they can avoid paying the aggregator a commission.

haswell2• 3 years ago

This tier is never cheaper booking directly

Even if so, the issue I’ve encountered with booking services is a complete lack of options when things go wrong.

I had a situation where the hotel was actively trying to help me, but they had few options because the booking agent (Hotels.com) made it almost impossible to get support. The hotel person patiently stayed on the line with them for almost an hour going through escalation after escalation (I was deeply grateful).

Would have been a 5 minute fix if I’d booked with the hotel, and not every place would be willing to go to these lengths.

I hear you on the points thing. But I’ve started weighing the cost of those points against the likelihood of needing to make changes once I arrive somewhere. If it’s a reputable place that I stay regularly, I’m less worried.

nocoiner2• 3 years ago

Fair enough. Most of my experience tends to be with chains. But my impression is that the non-chain hotels I book don’t typically appear on aggregators so I’m usually booking with them directly in any event.

slashdev• 3 years ago

I’ve stayed in hotels where I wanted to pay them directly for the room so they keep more of the profit, but they had to give the lowest price on Expedia and could not match it. They told me to just book on Expedia.

hef19898• 3 years ago

We had a nice chat a couple of days with a lady from a chain of appartments and resorts in the Auszrian alps. And while she said, that next time we can easily book directly with them, she was also quite happy with booking.com. First, booking as a search engine brings them customers. Second, booking helps in getting short term stays reducing the risk and impact of last minute cancellations.

One thing so, sometimes booking.com is aponsoring fares. Obviously, the hotel cannot match that.

Regarding air travel, the last couple of flights I checked, the was no difference between skyscanner and the airlines directly. With the exception of skyscanner showing you the bare-bone fares where you bring your own seat belt...

nebula88048• 3 years ago

With the exception of skyscanner showing you the bare-bone fares where you bring your own seat belt...

I loled but ryanair was considering a "standing only" tier: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/feb/28/ryanair-sta...

Frankly maybe I'd prefer that to cramped seats.

chrismcb2• 3 years ago

Probably not. There aren't deals you need had with air fares. But there are deals to be had with hotels. Hotels have decent margins and they are motivated to sell out every night. Yes, you may get a discount when you call them directly. But generally the discount comes from the person selling you the package, not from the hotel itself.

nness• 3 years ago

The interesting thing for me is that a lot of people assume Skyscanner does what Google Flights actually does... Maybe a decade or so ago it was only an aggregator or maybe it was always a booking agent that just felt more transparent at the time, so no one noticed.

As an aside, Google Flights is a fantastic — but at least in my recent experience — prices for multi-city bookings are off by 10-20% then the price quoted by the airline. Enough to make me think the taxes are just omitted or calculated differently...

Supermancho• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/tpqui

vrc• 3 years ago

The issue is agent v. merchant. Historically Expedia uses the merchant model (hood inventory, company as seller), and Booking used to prefer the agent model (no inventory, venue as seller). The former allows some advantage to what the company can offer but with added inventory risk, and means that the hotel doesn’t see you as “their” customer. With the agency model you do have recourse with the venue and will likely be a “normal” room to them. Unfortunately Booking is increasingly shifting towards the merchant model to find more profits.

tonymet• 3 years ago

This reminds my of the scams I encountered two weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37447652

I recommend booking in person you will save a lot.

In an extreme example: we booked part of a trip to Greece ahead of time and part on the spot. The in-person bookings were > 75% cheaper than the pre-booked stays, and the quality was the same or better

It’s not zero risk. sometimes a hotel will be booked and you move on. But if you appreciate a little spontaneity it’s very much worthwhile

xnx• 3 years ago

Hotel pricing tools are useless if they don't include arbitrary "resort fees" hotels can spring on you when you're standing in the lobby at midnight after a full day of travel.

That travel deal you found online may be a one-way ticket to misery

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