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HotelTonight (sadly recently purchased by AirBnB) has a very robust review system and a very responsive customer support system. If you ever have a bad experien
by Jd 7y ago
HotelTonight (sadly recently purchased by AirBnB) has a very robust review system and a very responsive customer support system. If you ever have a bad experience in a hotel room while booking through their app you can always contact them and they will contact hotel management and the problem will almost always very quickly be resolved.
Booking.com has way more properties but does not always properly vet them. Its easy to find that you've booked a property but the property owner is miles away and does not speak your language (i.e. English). That said, their customer service often resolves things.
In my limited impression Airbnb has gotten better at customer service but has basically pivoted out of their core business model (i.e. providing short term stays) and at the same time provided huge incentives for people to mislead people with respect to the listing. They are consistently the hardest to verify (i.e. that what you are reading or seeing is real) and I would really only use them for very boutique properties that can't be found on other platforms.
In some ways it just depends on how much up front time you have to do your own vetting and how much risk you are willing to tolerate for a potentially experience. AirBnb is high in both categories with results that very rarely are worth it to me.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago>HotelTonight (sadly recently purchased by AirBnB) has a very robust review system and a very responsive customer support system. How is this different from Hilton/Marriott/IHG/Choice/Wyndham's current options for customer support?
- modelica 7y agoHotelTonight always had awful customer support. They sold me a hotel room during February fashion week in NYC. Some sort of mistake happened with either HT or the hotel, and the room was not available upon my 11pm arrival. Rather than fix the mistake, HotelTonight gave me back my $400/night or whatever it was, and left me in a city, in the winter cold, where hotel rooms were almost entirely sold out. Essentially no inventory available on-line, and nearly all of that was not actually bookable. After a few hours searching (I had to actually call hotels to verify that the listed rooms still existed), I ended up spending ~ $1400/night for one of the only rooms left in the entire city. Fuck HotelTonight. A total piece of shit company.
- goldenkey 7y agoDamn, that is brutal... Shoulda stayed at Hotel Penn that price ....
- AJ007 7y agoHad a similar situation and ended up having to book someone a $2000 a night hotel room. It’s no joke being out of a room in a place where hotels are 100% sold out, or non existent. This is one of the reasons I refuse to use Airbnb in most normal situations. It’s a wild card.
- thw0rted 7y agoThe good news is that now there's a simple solution: if this happens in the future, you book a $200 Uber helicopter, $100-200 room at the airport, then another helicopter back in the morning, and you save ~$700. Easy! :D
- imroot 7y agoI had an issue with HotelTonight last year after the hotel I was staying at ended up charging my "incidentals" credit card for the entire room+tax for the night (vs what I paid HotelTonight for). Between HotelTonight and the actual property (a Kimpton Hotel), it was resolved in under 90 minutes. Look -- I've had issues with Hilton, Marriott, and HotelTonight -- that just comes with the territory when you spend 200+ nights a year in hotel rooms. How they deal with the issue is what brings you back (and honestly, it's why I'm lifetime diamond at Hilton, even though I did a LOT of work for marriot.com a few years ago).