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The hotel I booked online became a homeless shelter and no one told me

220 points by lxm 4y ago

breck 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tomcam 4y ago
  I’ll allow it
  - tomcam 4y ago
    I sincerely love that this was downvoted so hard
brippalcharrid 4y ago
Archived: https://archive.ph/Z501w https://archive.ph/Z501w
darig 4y ago
version_five 4y ago
- redwood 4y ago
  Never heard of? Maybe that's because they're based in europe... they're one of the biggest travel sites
- 725686 4y ago
  Absolutely this. I always use Expedia et al. to get an idea of the hotel @ price point I want and then go directly to the hotel site.
- dawnerd 4y ago
  Booking.com is huge, they're part of the same group that owns Kayak, Priceline, etc. Now, I have friends that have had really bad experiences with Priceline. I think the general rule of thumb if you're worried about having a bad time is to just stick to the big hotel brands and book directly. Personally I use hotels.com and never had an issue but I only stick with the big chains (Hilton mainly).
  - ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
    Caveat: when booking directly you still need to confirm your reservation by phone. I have twice had Wyndham hotels book for earlier dates than what I had input on their website when making the reservation. (After it happened the first time, I triple-checked the input fields, and it happened again.) It appears that this hotel chain has a glitchy website. Traveller beware.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I've heard of booking.com and travel agents aka aggregators. (And I do frequently end up booking with a hotel directly.) However, I've also booked packages of various types through specialized agents that would have been very difficult to have done myself if even possible. So I don't think there's a general rule. I do expect that there is a general rule with a lot of things that if you're fishing for deals that are too good to be true sometimes you'll be burned.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  > It never pays to use a travel aggregator. > Book through the hotel website Actually, it does pay. Literally. Because the same hotel is often cheaper if you book it through the booking website, while mainly business travelers book the hotel directly.
  - rhino369 4y ago
    It used to be so much cheaper to book an aggregator back in the early days. Hotwire is still pretty good since the deals aren't advertised. But you are rolling the dice on whether your hotel * rating is actually accurate.
  - 725686 4y ago
    In my experience, absolutely not. Unless sites like hotwire in which you don't know the name of the hotel until you pay.
  - mleo 4y ago
    The hotel cannot offer a cheaper public rate than Booking.com or Expedia, even though they take 15% or more. The hotel has to include other perks not available or limit the availability of the offer to members. The aggregators can run promotions that discount the rates, which the hotel still covers the difference.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      The hotel can offer a cheaper rate, if you are a member of the hotels’ free rewards program. All the chain hotels offer a discounted “members” discount price for reserving directly and saving them commissions.
  - atourgates 4y ago
    This is not really true any longer. Every major hotel chain and many independent properties have "Best Price Guarantees" that, well, guarantee you'll get the best price with them. Often if you CAN find a lower rate at an OTA, they'll give you some kind of incentive (aka an extra credit etc.) Examples: * Marriott - https://help.marriott.com/s/article/Article-22050 https://help.marriott.com/s/article/Article-22050 * Hilton - https://www.hilton.com/en/p/price-match-guarantee/ https://www.hilton.com/en/p/price-match-guarantee/ * IHG - https://www.ihg.com/content/us/en/customer-care/bwc-lp https://www.ihg.com/content/us/en/customer-care/bwc-lp * Hyatt - https://www.hyatt.com/info/best-rate-guarantee https://www.hyatt.com/info/best-rate-guarantee There are a few exceptions, such as Hotwire-style hidden rates, or rates negotiated for conferences and events, but displayed rates from places like Booking.com, Expedia and the like nearly always qualify.
- divyekapoor 4y ago
  Booking.com is a large travel aggregator, Nasdaq listed (BKNG) with a 74B market cap - 6x the size of Expedia. They’re just not as big in North America. And the reason she experienced what she did is because of Project Roomkey and other similar initiatives - https://www.cdss.ca.gov/inforesources/cdss-programs/housing-programs/project-roomkey https://www.cdss.ca.gov/inforesources/cdss-programs/housing-... These initiatives saved the hotel industry during COVID when demand fell off a cliff. These hotels still had mortgages but no clients. State intervention saved the industry.
  - WillPostForFood 4y ago
    These initiatives saved the hotel industry This a massive overstatement. There are over 1,000 hotels in Los Angeles county, 35 participated in Project Roomkey. Hotels don't want to shelter homeless for obvious reasons. That's why LA now has a ballot initiative to force hotels to give up rooms to the homeless. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-08-05/initiative-would-require-l-a-hotels-to-provide-rooms-to-homeless-people https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-08-05/initiati...
- armchairhacker 4y ago
  I've heard of people booking hotels with those services and the room doesn't actually get booked and the hotel is full. Or the service just puts up whatever they think is a hotel and makes up amenities. Actual hotels can be converted into homeless shelter overflow. However in practice this almost never happens especially with more expensive hotels, only very temporarily in cases like natural disasters. I have heard hotel rooms being transformed into college dorms because the college enrolled too many students.
- chris_wot 4y ago
  If you didn't know who booking.com is, then how can you call it a "pointless intemediary"?
- leephillips 4y ago
  I’ve compared direct rates with these travel “aggregators” many times, and the rates I get through expedia, etc., are always cheaper. Also, the hotel never treats me like crap. I have been treated like crap by hotels, but those occasions happened to be when I booked directly. EDIT: Some commenters suggest asking the hotel to match the aggregator price. This seems like a good idea, and I may try it next time.
- atourgates 4y ago
  I disagree with both you and the columnist that somehow the poor quality of the hotel is in any way relevant to this story. She had, in the practical if not precise legal sense, a contract with Booking.com that she would pay them $150, and they would ensure she had a room at a specific hotel for that night. Regardless of whether she'd booked the Ritz Carlton or a crummy Quality Inn, she had paid Booking.com for a night in a hotel. They were responsible to deliver that to her. Halfway decent customer service would have, at the very least, entailed a room at the closest available equivalent or better hotel (not difficult in this case since it sounds like just about any property would qualify) and the cost of transportation there and back. On another note to travelers: don't book hotels through an OTA (Online Travel Agency like Booking.com, Expedia, TripAdvisor and the like) unless you have to. Nearly every property in America now has a "best price guarantee" that lets you get the best possible price direct from them. And you'll often additionally be eligible to earn status and points on the hotel's own program. DO book direct with the hotel/chain, or a traditional travel agent for higher-end properties who might have access to increased perks (aka Signature Travel, FHR etc.), and DO pay with a credit card that offers trip insurance so that if you find yourself in a situation like the above, you have some coverage.
  - nl 4y ago
    It's good advice to book directly with hotels, but way too many don't make it easy to get this "best price guarantee" online as easily as via booking.com.
  - lmm 4y ago
    > On another note to travelers: don't book hotels through an OTA (Online Travel Agency like Booking.com, Expedia, TripAdvisor and the like) unless you have to. Nearly every property in America now has a "best price guarantee" that lets you get the best possible price direct from them. And you'll often additionally be eligible to earn status and points on the hotel's own program. None of that's worth the hassle of booking directly. Go to the hotel site. Skip the intro video. Find the booking button under two levels of menus. Try to figure out what their cancellation terms are... nope, haha, good luck. Enter your name, address (your browser has autofill but if you use it their javascript highlights all the fields as having errors), credit card information and three security questions. Bzzt, your 8-character password didn't have a numeral and a special character, re-enter all your information again. Bzzt, ' is not an allowed password character, re-enter all your information again. There you are, you're booked, now just unsubscribe from their mailing list and delete the 3 spam mails they've already sent you and you're good. Oh, you booked with the wrong card? No problem, just click the link in your confirmation email, enter all your information and... haha, no, psych, the form just gives you an error page. Find their contact information under three levels of menus, email them, wait a week, and you'll get 2 more spam mails from the mailing list you already unsubscribed from, but no actual reply, nope. Wouldn't want you to miss out on having to make an international call. Screw that crap. Booking.com all the way.
- topherPedersen 4y ago
  This happened to me before. I booked a room in Austin at a La Quinta Inn through HotelTonight, and when I showed up the place looked abandoned. Turns out, it had been turned into a homeless shelter, and you couldn't stay there even if you wanted to. There was a big fence around the whole building, those portable chain-link type fences which are used around construction sites. And obviously there was no one working there that could give you a key to a room or anything like that. It was pretty upsetting.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- fortran77 4y ago
  > This seems exaggerated a bit. She booked a sketchy hotel and it turned out to be sketchy I read the article and it said the hotel wasn't operating as a hotel anymore. From the article: "A pregnant traveler arrived late at night at lodging she’d reserved through Booking.com, only to find it was no longer operating" That's not "sketchy". That's not a hotel
diogenescynic 4y ago
Actually had a similar experience at a hotel in San Jose (Courtyard Campbell) that I stayed at for a wedding. There were homeless people and prostitutes in the parking garage and when I asked the front desk if our vehicles were going to be safe, the concierge told me the people I saw were actually guests of the hotel due to some city program... I was flabbergasted and also really didn't feel safe having my 2 year old and 3 month old at a hotel like that.
- divyekapoor 4y ago
  Project Roomkey: https://www.cdss.ca.gov/inforesources/cdss-programs/housing-programs/project-roomkey https://www.cdss.ca.gov/inforesources/cdss-programs/housing-...
HeavenFox 4y ago
I am actually sympathetic here - one quirk of New York City is despite hosting some of the busiest airports in the country, there simply aren't any reasonable airport hotels. There used to be many, but the City bought most of them outright and converted them into homeless shelters. The remainder serve as overflow, so you probably don't want to stay there either. The common wisdom in the frequent flyer community seems to be to just head to Manhattan, or go to Flushing - it's more fun that way anyways. * The exception is probably the newly opened TWA hotel on JFK, which is really nice, albeit pricy
- kaishiro 4y ago
  I leapt into your comment to profess my love for the TWA Hotel but saw you actually mentioned it towards the end. I fly a Melbourne => JFK leg a couple of times a year and the fact that I can grab the AirTrain for one stop and then be at the hotel is pretty great. Doesn't really hit me that I'm back in the states until I walk into that lobby.
- _ZeD_ 4y ago
  not about the hotels, but a correction on the jfk. it's not one "of the busiest airport in the country". I can confirm that it's malebolge, the VIII circle of hell. I had my share of trips in my life: european countries, uae, Japan... But I never experienced anything remotely comparable. All the times I went there the flights were 3-4 hours late. One time I was in a plane that was taxing through the Airport for one hour just to wait for a free line to depart. The lines at the immigrations entrance started from the plane itself! And there was one time where, after waiting for the gate to open, already a couple hours late, the captain said that someone stole the airplane!!
  - codyb 4y ago
    You have had some very interesting experiences at JFK. I'm honestly always amazed at how fast I can move through security there. I just flew out recently and it took... maybe a half hour to check my bag and get through TSA security with an opt out request (for the scanners, so they pat you down instead). Maybe I'm lucky, but I've flown through JFK and LaGuardia a fair amount and never really had any staggering wait times. I do wish they could have just made the Air Tram part of the subway system cause taking a taxi during rush hour was certainly a mistake but Q ->... hmm I guess the A or J or whatever train would get me to the Air Tram -> Air Tram is a bit of a pain. Although, I will say, if you stand at the front of the air tram at night so you can look out the front window as you zoom down the track, that's pretty neat and beautiful.
FounderBurr 4y ago
Someone needs to grow a thicker skin and learn about reality.
- shepherdjerred 4y ago
  Are you not sympathetic for a pregnant woman who was alone at midnight not knowing where to go?
  - DocTomoe 4y ago
    That's how religious leaders are born.
Krisjohn 4y ago
Our travel agent is an individual with a reputation. An app is not. An app is self-service and self-service is no service. When travel agents were unable to get us something affordable in Paris, we attempted to solve it ourselves with an app. The experience was so bad I refuse to travel to Paris ever again, and now we only ever book through agents. My fault? Maybe. Enabled by a faceless marketplace that doesn't give a crap? Absolutely. If a travel agent goes "Yeah, you probably don't want to do that" even ONCE while you're sorting out your travel plans, they just paid for themselves.
- andrepd 4y ago
  Or you can just read wikivoyage and do 5 minutes of googling, but to each his own.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    You're being downvoted for a sarcatic remark but all these comments that simply point out obvious benefits seem less like genuine offers of advice and more like a way to keep damaging any big tech company. "Travel agents offer a more personal touch" No shit, who didn't know this?
    - andrepd 4y ago
      I wasn't even being sarcastic: for me saving potentially hundreds of € is worth it, for some people they might like the "personal touch" of a travel agent.
- colmvp 4y ago
  I've used apps many times over to travel to Asia/Europe/North America, book accommodations, rent cars... and haven't had a bad experience. That's not to say that I believe bad experiences don't ever happen, but more like they don't happen enough to me that I wouldn't ever use any of the apps. Most of my friends are more avid than myself at traveling, and they also don't use travel agents. It's possible it's just because I'm not super picky about my accommodations.
- 4y ago
ethotool 4y ago
Always book directly through the hotel website. Priceline has deals but their customer service is horrible. Also it seemed like the majority of the time I would book an express deal they would put me in an accessible room. I’m not disabled and generally no issues with it but I found it odd. Not only that, they will never honor their “price match guarantee.” They state that if you find a cheaper price on a express deal they will refund you up to 200% of the difference. They will act like you are crazy if you call them after finding a cheaper rate. I learned my lesson the hard way. Don’t book through 3rd party travel websites.
- hakfoo 4y ago
  Theory: people who need the disabled room are likely aware of this and are more likely to book ahead. Therefore, when you get to day-of or very close to it, if the disabled room is still available, it's unlikely it's suddenly going to be reserved by an actual disabled guest, so they may as well offer it cheap if it's more profitable than letting it sit empty.
steelframe 4y ago
My elderly mother and her (also elderly) friend recently booked a place in Lyon, France using a well-known online travel agency (OTA). The taxi cab driver dumped their stuff on the sidewalk and spun out of the area as quickly as he could get away. Apparently the "accommodations" were a collection of small apartments in a bad part of town. They punched in a code to open the door and get into the hallway, only to find that there was nothing there but a bunch of doors and a staircase leading to another floor with nothing but a bunch of doors. This went up for a few stories. There apparently was no way to turn the lights on. They had no indication as to which door they were supposed to go through or how to get through it. There was nobody in sight at the facility. After trudging up a few flights of stairs and back down again, they elected to ask some students passing by where they could find a hotel. Fortunately they were able to find a place that had a vacancy. Then they had to fight the OTA for a refund. Fortunately they are retired and had nothing better to do all day long than call them until they finally gave a refund. I've had a couple of really obnoxious problems with OTAs involving event tickets. In one case I bought the wrong type of Disneyland tickets. I had to purchase different tickets once I got to the park. Then trying to get a refund from the OTA was a living nightmare. After about a week of daily calls I finally reverse-engineered enough of their process of moving money between them and the park and what not to convince them to refund me for the wrong (and unused) tickets. Another time an OTA with a customer service stand at a hotel in Hawaii had worked with me for 20 minutes to book tickets for an event, and then at the very end they said, "The booking fee is $250. But we'll waive that if you attend a 1-hour sales pitch!" My strategy these days is to use an online travel agency to learn about hotels with vacancies and events in the area and then to go directly to the hotel or event web sites to purchase. If there's no way to book except through the OTA, I'm not going to have anything to do with said hotel or event.
- nexus7556 4y ago
  I will never use an OTA again too. I booked a massage at the Banyan Tree on Koh Samui via Expedia back in 2021. My email confirmation of the booking said I needed to contact a company Newway Travel via phone to confirm the reservation time. I attempted to call Newway Travel five times throughout via phone but nobody ever answered. I called the Banyan Tree Spa and they had no record of the booking. I waited until later in the day to see if there were just processing delays. Later in the evening I received an email from Newway Travel stating that “for chinese speaking , right ? Becasue this package 90 mins available for that market.” I asked them to call me to clarify their policy and they replied via email and reiterated "*Inform you that 90 mins package available for chainese market only and 60 mins package for worldwide market. Pls inform us guest what nationality ?” I told them I object to such race based discrimination and Newway replied: “As the hotel needs us to report the customer’s nationality and it’s about the different rates for each market as well.” I had to spend about 10 hours on the phone with Expedia trying to get a refund since we were refused service even after sharing the email correspondence I had with them. Horrible experience, horrible customer service.
alphabettsy 4y ago
I’ve had good experiences with Hotels.com and find the reviews helpful. The free nights are a nice perk too. Have contacted customer service only twice and can’t really complain. When reviews or other information weren’t available in the app I’ve called directly. This seems really unfortunate.
- Hnrobert42 4y ago
  I am a gold member with them, meaning I stay more than 30 nights a year. They definitely have tiered customer service. At the regular level, it’s meh. At gold, I left a complaint with a virtual agent about the app not working well with VPNs, and a person called me back the next day. The crazy thing is that I hit gold level staying at $30/night places in SE Asia.
imwillofficial 4y ago
imgabe 4y ago
I've completely sworn off third-party booking services. They never know what's going on and when anything goes wrong they just tell you they can't help you. Then the place tells you that they can't help you because you didn't book through them and they just point fingers at each other. Better to book directly from whatever hotel / airline / whatever you want to use. Whatever savings you might get is not worth it and a lot of times hotels appreciate direct bookings and they're cheaper anyway.
- bmitc 4y ago
  I agree. It never seems to go right. The third party either has the wrong room availability, wrong room type, wrong price, etc. And I actually side with the hotels because it’s exactly as if someone else bought the room for you and messed up, which the hotel can’t really deal with but they usually try. And for the most part, hotels seem like one of the last places you can still get actual customer service with.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    I think most places that require you to pay $100-200/day for the privilege of using them still have customer service.
    - tomrod 4y ago
      Most of the time those are very poor customer service
    - JamesianP 4y ago
      Sadly that's comparable to rent in some places these days, so not so special. But yes I've always been pretty happy with the level of service personally.
      - saghm 4y ago
        Yeah, the rent for my girlfriend and I is within that range, and the first two months we were in the apartment there were a total of six or seven days where our apartment had no heat and management would not answer our calls or emails until the city stepped in due to the number of complaints that we and our neighbors were filing. On the other hand, the hotel we stayed in for a bit during one of those stints had amazing customer service! They let us decide each day by 11 AM whether or not we wanted to extend our stay, and when we finally got confirmation that the heat in our apartment was working, they decided to let us stay until 1 PM with no extra charge just to save us some trouble.
ipython 4y ago
I get that hotels are safer but I have rented with booking.com (careful to book only apartments that have 9/10 ratings) with much success for my large-ish family. Traveling with more than two people is a huge pain and buying two hotel rooms is not only expensive but also never guarantees the two rooms are next to each other, making family travel inconvenient and expensive. My experiences with booking (in Europe mostly) have been very positive and I find them way more transparent about fees, etc than Airbnb.
topherPedersen 4y ago
This happened to me too in Austin! I booked a room at a La Quinta Inn in South Austin that they had turned into a homeless shelter. I was pretty upset and quit using HotelTonight and stopped staying at La Quinta Inn over it. I was able to get my money back though, and just showed up a different hotel downtown in person and got a room there instead.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- malshe 4y ago
  When was this? I stayed at the same La Quinta Inn just before the pandemic and it was not yet a homeless shelter!
neilv 4y ago
> It is hard to tell how to divide the blame between the service representative you spoke to — according to you, at a call center in a faraway country — or the system that trained her. I don't understand why the NYT is getting into company-internal blame. The customer's interface seems to have been Booking.com. Shouldn't any blame -- from the perspective of customer and this NYT writer -- stop at the company?
irjustin 4y ago
I've stopped booking through Kayak (used to be my favorite), other OTAs, even many budget airlines, because it's simply not worth the post booking headaches.
- laundermaf 4y ago
  Hotel searches on Kayak are pretty poor simply due to the fact that they somehow always show low-res images. I generally book on Agoda or search on Google Maps nowadays. Kayak is still my go-to for flights though.
golemiprague 4y ago
WirelessGigabit 4y ago
I'm actually sick of all of these intermediaries taking money but when something goes wrong they're like: oh we're just the middle man. I've got a contract with you, not with the hotel. I upheld my end of the bargain, now you uphold yours...
- nicbou 4y ago
  Agreed. It seems like every platform's goal is to ignore all rules and responsibility and grow large enough to become a toll road for an entire industry.
- Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
  Am I the only one who had a very positive experience with Booking? Once I had booked a hotel in Hong Kong for a week, pretty expensive, and I finally couldn't go. But this was in an especially hectic moment (personally and professionally) so I missed the full refund deadline for cancellation. It was obviously my fault, as the deadline had been clear from the beginning, so I just cancelled without refund (or maybe with partial refund, I don't remember) and moved on. The next day, and without having asked, I got an email from Booking saying that they would negotiate with the hotel to see if they could give me a full refund anyway. A day after that, I got the refund. It was a substantial amount of money so I'm quite grateful to whomever did that at Booking. On the other hand, I hate their pricing practices, e.g. presumably because I am a relatively frequent customer, the website often offers me worse prices than my wife who almost never used it. Also different prices on mobile and PC, etc.
  - codyb 4y ago
    I don't think it was booking but after hurricane Ian swept through the Ft Myers, Florida region this year my parents got a full refund before they even reached out. I don't know what service it was but they were very proactive about it. I haven't had much issue with Booking.com but I haven't had any times where I needed to refund either.
  - rosege 4y ago
    I had lots of positive experiences with them until one I didnt and they wouldnt do anything to help or refund me for sending me to a smoke filled crack house. Since then I don't use them anymore.
benatkin 4y ago
I just tried this to get past the paywall and it worked: https://gist.github.com/FermiDirak/f32032a30381f1b66dbc502984364217 https://gist.github.com/FermiDirak/f32032a30381f1b66dbc50298...
ggm 4y ago
Purely as an observation, as a driving holiday tourist I stayed in hotels in Penn. in the 2010s era, and even in off the main path motels, the reception was a wire mesh cage with a hole to pass money. For anyone who comes from other developed western economy cultures this can be a bit of a shock. "rough" is very contextually defined. If however, you wound up in the parts of town truck drivers in the UK have to put up with (they call them lorry parks, not truck parks) you could find similar things. Not that the drivers are a problem: far from it. They just get shunted to some of the worst parts of town. Lots and lots of cheap hotels and B&B in the UK are now de-facto housing otherwise homeless people: this started to be routine under Margaret Thatcher if not before, and has continued at varying pace ever since.
quickthrower2 4y ago
The old money taking intermediary that doesn’t take responsibility: happens all the time with all the things. Don’t take shit from these shoulder shruggers and try not to use them. Not just booking websites but tradespeople and wrapped finanical services too.
- jiggunjer 4y ago
  So you'd personally register at a stock exchange to avoid dealing with a broker?
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    No but I don’t have a choice there. I have had shares locked up for a year due to a broker blaming another bank dealing with shares moving to another exchange (not my choice) though. So just waiting and no organ grinders to help me.
  - acuozzo 4y ago
    Is it possible to do so for free?
encryptluks2 4y ago
I agree based on the good reporting that everyone is at fault here, but for gods sake Booking.com learn to react in situations like this by just getting the person a room and eat the costs and you will earn double that in more people using your service in the future. I imagine that Booking.com and related sites mostly exists due to their business partnerships where they handle bookings for employees for business travel, and that their consumer business is just a side business where they don't give a shit if people are left stranded in the middle of nowhere. If the hotel is accepting reservations, but not actually in regular communication with Booking.com or weekly checking boxes that they are still accepting reservations then that is on Booking.com for not doing any diligence and I believe they are guilty of negligence if something more serious did happen.
aaron695 4y ago
dangus 4y ago
I thought an interesting point of the article was that the customer wasn’t entirely blameless and the article said as much. Read her situation a couple more times over. This person arrived to check in at 11:30 PM and intended to catch a 6 AM flight the next day. So their original plan involved only sleeping from around 11:45PM to 4:30AM assuming they were right next to the airport. This is a complaint about missing out on less than 5 hours of sleep in the first place. Here’s the real issue: her itinerary wasn’t realistic to begin with, and she was never going to be properly rested regardless of her possession of a hotel room. You can’t catch a friend’s wedding on Saturday night and then expect to make your husband’s family reunion in a whole different state on Sunday without some major fatiguing circumstances. Arguably, Booking upheld their end of the bargain by refunding the hotel. This is all they’re obligated to do. No other type of business gives you any more than that. Sure, Booking had crappy ineffective customer service. What else is new with the corporate world? Even if they had a perfect concierge level process they physically couldn’t accommodate the customer’s needs because they can’t materialize vacant rooms. Every minute wasted in this situation defeats the purpose of a hotel room in the first place (I.e., she could have gotten a room further from the airport but that would have eaten up travel time that would have netted her 2 hours of sleep instead of 4, because of her own bad itinerary. If she could check in at an earlier hour this wouldn’t be a problem). When your flight gets canceled, you aren’t owed another flight at the same date/time. I’m not sure what kind of emergency service anyone would expect to receive from a business like this. At no point was she in tangible danger, and this entire experience was a piece of inconvenience that was essentially self-inflicted.
- watwut 4y ago
  5 hours of sleep is much much better then 3 which is much much better then 0.
  - dangus 4y ago
    Sure, but having more time in the first place would have opened up more options for alternative lodging. If you’ve only got 5 hours then you basically have to stay at a hotel within spitting distance of the airport, and that severely limits your options if something goes wrong. One of those options would be to find a hotel elsewhere in NYC. If her check-in time was more like 9PM that would have been entirely reasonable. The golden rule of travel is “shit happens” and that’s why you run a risk of all kinds of issues when you run a tight itinerary. When that shit happens, correctly assigning fault doesn’t tend to change one’s predicament. If I had a weekend with a family reunion and a friend’s wedding in two different cities I would personally just pick one.
jokoon 4y ago
For ethical reasons regarding climate change, I don't travel very much. Anything bought and paid online should not be trusted. Hotels are a luxury, in my view, so unless you pay a real price, expect to have problems.
nunez 4y ago
number one reason why i never EVER recommend booking hotels or cars through aggregators. you'll save very little money but deal with a lot of pain if something goes wrong.
Eavolution 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20221026050421/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/25/travel/tripped-up-hotel-booking.html https://web.archive.org/web/20221026050421/https://www.nytim...
prmoustache 4y ago
Shouldn't she just have registered at the shelter since at that point she was homeless in that particular city?
onetokeoverthe 4y ago
eb0la 4y ago
A customer runs a reservation engine that OTAs use as a white label backend. Their IT manager once told me that he didn't understand how people can actually get their rooms in an hotel since most reservations come to the hotel as an email (unless you are going to a big girl chain). Most hotel management systems do not talk with booking management systems and all transactions come via email. Of course they don't have their full inventory in the platforms just in case something like a spam filter happens.
DrNosferatu 4y ago
After bad experiences with Booking.com, I just use them as a search engine: call ahead to the property I want to stay in and propose a deal that we book directly with a discount (so split in half between us the Booking.com middleman commission) - it usually works! I suggest you do the same, as using Booking.com offers no protection for problems - don't give them your money! Booking.com operates like a monopoly and doesn't need to care whatsoever if the money they collect from you will correspond to a night of accomodation. Last bad experience: I successfully booked - and paid! - a room in an evening emergency (broken-down car) to find out that the hostel door was locked and no one would open. Called Booking.com customer support about them collecting money for a service they were not in a position to provide: a total back-and-forward mess and they couldn't care less. I did not get my money back.
WeylandYutani 4y ago

220 points by lxm 4y ago

breck 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
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tomcam 4y ago
I’ll allow it
- tomcam 4y ago
  I sincerely love that this was downvoted so hard

brippalcharrid 4y ago

Archived: https://archive.ph/Z501w https://archive.ph/Z501w

darig 4y ago

version_five 4y ago

redwood 4y ago
Never heard of? Maybe that's because they're based in europe... they're one of the biggest travel sites
725686 4y ago
Absolutely this. I always use Expedia et al. to get an idea of the hotel @ price point I want and then go directly to the hotel site.
dawnerd 4y ago
Booking.com is huge, they're part of the same group that owns Kayak, Priceline, etc. Now, I have friends that have had really bad experiences with Priceline. I think the general rule of thumb if you're worried about having a bad time is to just stick to the big hotel brands and book directly. Personally I use hotels.com and never had an issue but I only stick with the big chains (Hilton mainly).
- ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
  Caveat: when booking directly you still need to confirm your reservation by phone. I have twice had Wyndham hotels book for earlier dates than what I had input on their website when making the reservation. (After it happened the first time, I triple-checked the input fields, and it happened again.) It appears that this hotel chain has a glitchy website. Traveller beware.
ghaff 4y ago
I've heard of booking.com and travel agents aka aggregators. (And I do frequently end up booking with a hotel directly.) However, I've also booked packages of various types through specialized agents that would have been very difficult to have done myself if even possible. So I don't think there's a general rule. I do expect that there is a general rule with a lot of things that if you're fishing for deals that are too good to be true sometimes you'll be burned.
Semaphor 4y ago
> It never pays to use a travel aggregator. > Book through the hotel website Actually, it does pay. Literally. Because the same hotel is often cheaper if you book it through the booking website, while mainly business travelers book the hotel directly.
- rhino369 4y ago
  It used to be so much cheaper to book an aggregator back in the early days. Hotwire is still pretty good since the deals aren't advertised. But you are rolling the dice on whether your hotel * rating is actually accurate.
- 725686 4y ago
  In my experience, absolutely not. Unless sites like hotwire in which you don't know the name of the hotel until you pay.
- mleo 4y ago
  The hotel cannot offer a cheaper public rate than Booking.com or Expedia, even though they take 15% or more. The hotel has to include other perks not available or limit the availability of the offer to members. The aggregators can run promotions that discount the rates, which the hotel still covers the difference.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    The hotel can offer a cheaper rate, if you are a member of the hotels’ free rewards program. All the chain hotels offer a discounted “members” discount price for reserving directly and saving them commissions.
- atourgates 4y ago
  This is not really true any longer. Every major hotel chain and many independent properties have "Best Price Guarantees" that, well, guarantee you'll get the best price with them. Often if you CAN find a lower rate at an OTA, they'll give you some kind of incentive (aka an extra credit etc.) Examples: * Marriott - https://help.marriott.com/s/article/Article-22050 https://help.marriott.com/s/article/Article-22050 * Hilton - https://www.hilton.com/en/p/price-match-guarantee/ https://www.hilton.com/en/p/price-match-guarantee/ * IHG - https://www.ihg.com/content/us/en/customer-care/bwc-lp https://www.ihg.com/content/us/en/customer-care/bwc-lp * Hyatt - https://www.hyatt.com/info/best-rate-guarantee https://www.hyatt.com/info/best-rate-guarantee There are a few exceptions, such as Hotwire-style hidden rates, or rates negotiated for conferences and events, but displayed rates from places like Booking.com, Expedia and the like nearly always qualify.
divyekapoor 4y ago
Booking.com is a large travel aggregator, Nasdaq listed (BKNG) with a 74B market cap - 6x the size of Expedia. They’re just not as big in North America. And the reason she experienced what she did is because of Project Roomkey and other similar initiatives - https://www.cdss.ca.gov/inforesources/cdss-programs/housing-programs/project-roomkey https://www.cdss.ca.gov/inforesources/cdss-programs/housing-... These initiatives saved the hotel industry during COVID when demand fell off a cliff. These hotels still had mortgages but no clients. State intervention saved the industry.
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  These initiatives saved the hotel industry This a massive overstatement. There are over 1,000 hotels in Los Angeles county, 35 participated in Project Roomkey. Hotels don't want to shelter homeless for obvious reasons. That's why LA now has a ballot initiative to force hotels to give up rooms to the homeless. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-08-05/initiative-would-require-l-a-hotels-to-provide-rooms-to-homeless-people https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-08-05/initiati...
armchairhacker 4y ago
I've heard of people booking hotels with those services and the room doesn't actually get booked and the hotel is full. Or the service just puts up whatever they think is a hotel and makes up amenities. Actual hotels can be converted into homeless shelter overflow. However in practice this almost never happens especially with more expensive hotels, only very temporarily in cases like natural disasters. I have heard hotel rooms being transformed into college dorms because the college enrolled too many students.
chris_wot 4y ago
If you didn't know who booking.com is, then how can you call it a "pointless intemediary"?
leephillips 4y ago
I’ve compared direct rates with these travel “aggregators” many times, and the rates I get through expedia, etc., are always cheaper. Also, the hotel never treats me like crap. I have been treated like crap by hotels, but those occasions happened to be when I booked directly. EDIT: Some commenters suggest asking the hotel to match the aggregator price. This seems like a good idea, and I may try it next time.
atourgates 4y ago
I disagree with both you and the columnist that somehow the poor quality of the hotel is in any way relevant to this story. She had, in the practical if not precise legal sense, a contract with Booking.com that she would pay them $150, and they would ensure she had a room at a specific hotel for that night. Regardless of whether she'd booked the Ritz Carlton or a crummy Quality Inn, she had paid Booking.com for a night in a hotel. They were responsible to deliver that to her. Halfway decent customer service would have, at the very least, entailed a room at the closest available equivalent or better hotel (not difficult in this case since it sounds like just about any property would qualify) and the cost of transportation there and back. On another note to travelers: don't book hotels through an OTA (Online Travel Agency like Booking.com, Expedia, TripAdvisor and the like) unless you have to. Nearly every property in America now has a "best price guarantee" that lets you get the best possible price direct from them. And you'll often additionally be eligible to earn status and points on the hotel's own program. DO book direct with the hotel/chain, or a traditional travel agent for higher-end properties who might have access to increased perks (aka Signature Travel, FHR etc.), and DO pay with a credit card that offers trip insurance so that if you find yourself in a situation like the above, you have some coverage.
- nl 4y ago
  It's good advice to book directly with hotels, but way too many don't make it easy to get this "best price guarantee" online as easily as via booking.com.
- lmm 4y ago
  > On another note to travelers: don't book hotels through an OTA (Online Travel Agency like Booking.com, Expedia, TripAdvisor and the like) unless you have to. Nearly every property in America now has a "best price guarantee" that lets you get the best possible price direct from them. And you'll often additionally be eligible to earn status and points on the hotel's own program. None of that's worth the hassle of booking directly. Go to the hotel site. Skip the intro video. Find the booking button under two levels of menus. Try to figure out what their cancellation terms are... nope, haha, good luck. Enter your name, address (your browser has autofill but if you use it their javascript highlights all the fields as having errors), credit card information and three security questions. Bzzt, your 8-character password didn't have a numeral and a special character, re-enter all your information again. Bzzt, ' is not an allowed password character, re-enter all your information again. There you are, you're booked, now just unsubscribe from their mailing list and delete the 3 spam mails they've already sent you and you're good. Oh, you booked with the wrong card? No problem, just click the link in your confirmation email, enter all your information and... haha, no, psych, the form just gives you an error page. Find their contact information under three levels of menus, email them, wait a week, and you'll get 2 more spam mails from the mailing list you already unsubscribed from, but no actual reply, nope. Wouldn't want you to miss out on having to make an international call. Screw that crap. Booking.com all the way.
topherPedersen 4y ago
This happened to me before. I booked a room in Austin at a La Quinta Inn through HotelTonight, and when I showed up the place looked abandoned. Turns out, it had been turned into a homeless shelter, and you couldn't stay there even if you wanted to. There was a big fence around the whole building, those portable chain-link type fences which are used around construction sites. And obviously there was no one working there that could give you a key to a room or anything like that. It was pretty upsetting.
deleted 4y ago
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fortran77 4y ago
> This seems exaggerated a bit. She booked a sketchy hotel and it turned out to be sketchy I read the article and it said the hotel wasn't operating as a hotel anymore. From the article: "A pregnant traveler arrived late at night at lodging she’d reserved through Booking.com, only to find it was no longer operating" That's not "sketchy". That's not a hotel

diogenescynic 4y ago

Actually had a similar experience at a hotel in San Jose (Courtyard Campbell) that I stayed at for a wedding. There were homeless people and prostitutes in the parking garage and when I asked the front desk if our vehicles were going to be safe, the concierge told me the people I saw were actually guests of the hotel due to some city program... I was flabbergasted and also really didn't feel safe having my 2 year old and 3 month old at a hotel like that.

divyekapoor 4y ago
Project Roomkey: https://www.cdss.ca.gov/inforesources/cdss-programs/housing-programs/project-roomkey https://www.cdss.ca.gov/inforesources/cdss-programs/housing-...

HeavenFox 4y ago

I am actually sympathetic here - one quirk of New York City is despite hosting some of the busiest airports in the country, there simply aren't any reasonable airport hotels. There used to be many, but the City bought most of them outright and converted them into homeless shelters. The remainder serve as overflow, so you probably don't want to stay there either. The common wisdom in the frequent flyer community seems to be to just head to Manhattan, or go to Flushing - it's more fun that way anyways. * The exception is probably the newly opened TWA hotel on JFK, which is really nice, albeit pricy

kaishiro 4y ago
I leapt into your comment to profess my love for the TWA Hotel but saw you actually mentioned it towards the end. I fly a Melbourne => JFK leg a couple of times a year and the fact that I can grab the AirTrain for one stop and then be at the hotel is pretty great. Doesn't really hit me that I'm back in the states until I walk into that lobby.
_ZeD_ 4y ago
not about the hotels, but a correction on the jfk. it's not one "of the busiest airport in the country". I can confirm that it's malebolge, the VIII circle of hell. I had my share of trips in my life: european countries, uae, Japan... But I never experienced anything remotely comparable. All the times I went there the flights were 3-4 hours late. One time I was in a plane that was taxing through the Airport for one hour just to wait for a free line to depart. The lines at the immigrations entrance started from the plane itself! And there was one time where, after waiting for the gate to open, already a couple hours late, the captain said that someone stole the airplane!!
- codyb 4y ago
  You have had some very interesting experiences at JFK. I'm honestly always amazed at how fast I can move through security there. I just flew out recently and it took... maybe a half hour to check my bag and get through TSA security with an opt out request (for the scanners, so they pat you down instead). Maybe I'm lucky, but I've flown through JFK and LaGuardia a fair amount and never really had any staggering wait times. I do wish they could have just made the Air Tram part of the subway system cause taking a taxi during rush hour was certainly a mistake but Q ->... hmm I guess the A or J or whatever train would get me to the Air Tram -> Air Tram is a bit of a pain. Although, I will say, if you stand at the front of the air tram at night so you can look out the front window as you zoom down the track, that's pretty neat and beautiful.

FounderBurr 4y ago

Someone needs to grow a thicker skin and learn about reality.

shepherdjerred 4y ago
Are you not sympathetic for a pregnant woman who was alone at midnight not knowing where to go?
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  That's how religious leaders are born.

Krisjohn 4y ago

Our travel agent is an individual with a reputation. An app is not. An app is self-service and self-service is no service. When travel agents were unable to get us something affordable in Paris, we attempted to solve it ourselves with an app. The experience was so bad I refuse to travel to Paris ever again, and now we only ever book through agents. My fault? Maybe. Enabled by a faceless marketplace that doesn't give a crap? Absolutely. If a travel agent goes "Yeah, you probably don't want to do that" even ONCE while you're sorting out your travel plans, they just paid for themselves.

andrepd 4y ago
Or you can just read wikivoyage and do 5 minutes of googling, but to each his own.
- themitigating 4y ago
  You're being downvoted for a sarcatic remark but all these comments that simply point out obvious benefits seem less like genuine offers of advice and more like a way to keep damaging any big tech company. "Travel agents offer a more personal touch" No shit, who didn't know this?
  - andrepd 4y ago
    I wasn't even being sarcastic: for me saving potentially hundreds of € is worth it, for some people they might like the "personal touch" of a travel agent.
colmvp 4y ago
I've used apps many times over to travel to Asia/Europe/North America, book accommodations, rent cars... and haven't had a bad experience. That's not to say that I believe bad experiences don't ever happen, but more like they don't happen enough to me that I wouldn't ever use any of the apps. Most of my friends are more avid than myself at traveling, and they also don't use travel agents. It's possible it's just because I'm not super picky about my accommodations.
4y ago

ethotool 4y ago

Always book directly through the hotel website. Priceline has deals but their customer service is horrible. Also it seemed like the majority of the time I would book an express deal they would put me in an accessible room. I’m not disabled and generally no issues with it but I found it odd. Not only that, they will never honor their “price match guarantee.” They state that if you find a cheaper price on a express deal they will refund you up to 200% of the difference. They will act like you are crazy if you call them after finding a cheaper rate. I learned my lesson the hard way. Don’t book through 3rd party travel websites.

hakfoo 4y ago
Theory: people who need the disabled room are likely aware of this and are more likely to book ahead. Therefore, when you get to day-of or very close to it, if the disabled room is still available, it's unlikely it's suddenly going to be reserved by an actual disabled guest, so they may as well offer it cheap if it's more profitable than letting it sit empty.

steelframe 4y ago

My elderly mother and her (also elderly) friend recently booked a place in Lyon, France using a well-known online travel agency (OTA). The taxi cab driver dumped their stuff on the sidewalk and spun out of the area as quickly as he could get away. Apparently the "accommodations" were a collection of small apartments in a bad part of town. They punched in a code to open the door and get into the hallway, only to find that there was nothing there but a bunch of doors and a staircase leading to another floor with nothing but a bunch of doors. This went up for a few stories. There apparently was no way to turn the lights on. They had no indication as to which door they were supposed to go through or how to get through it. There was nobody in sight at the facility. After trudging up a few flights of stairs and back down again, they elected to ask some students passing by where they could find a hotel. Fortunately they were able to find a place that had a vacancy. Then they had to fight the OTA for a refund. Fortunately they are retired and had nothing better to do all day long than call them until they finally gave a refund. I've had a couple of really obnoxious problems with OTAs involving event tickets. In one case I bought the wrong type of Disneyland tickets. I had to purchase different tickets once I got to the park. Then trying to get a refund from the OTA was a living nightmare. After about a week of daily calls I finally reverse-engineered enough of their process of moving money between them and the park and what not to convince them to refund me for the wrong (and unused) tickets. Another time an OTA with a customer service stand at a hotel in Hawaii had worked with me for 20 minutes to book tickets for an event, and then at the very end they said, "The booking fee is $250. But we'll waive that if you attend a 1-hour sales pitch!" My strategy these days is to use an online travel agency to learn about hotels with vacancies and events in the area and then to go directly to the hotel or event web sites to purchase. If there's no way to book except through the OTA, I'm not going to have anything to do with said hotel or event.

nexus7556 4y ago
I will never use an OTA again too. I booked a massage at the Banyan Tree on Koh Samui via Expedia back in 2021. My email confirmation of the booking said I needed to contact a company Newway Travel via phone to confirm the reservation time. I attempted to call Newway Travel five times throughout via phone but nobody ever answered. I called the Banyan Tree Spa and they had no record of the booking. I waited until later in the day to see if there were just processing delays. Later in the evening I received an email from Newway Travel stating that “for chinese speaking , right ? Becasue this package 90 mins available for that market.” I asked them to call me to clarify their policy and they replied via email and reiterated "*Inform you that 90 mins package available for chainese market only and 60 mins package for worldwide market. Pls inform us guest what nationality ?” I told them I object to such race based discrimination and Newway replied: “As the hotel needs us to report the customer’s nationality and it’s about the different rates for each market as well.” I had to spend about 10 hours on the phone with Expedia trying to get a refund since we were refused service even after sharing the email correspondence I had with them. Horrible experience, horrible customer service.

alphabettsy 4y ago

I’ve had good experiences with Hotels.com and find the reviews helpful. The free nights are a nice perk too. Have contacted customer service only twice and can’t really complain. When reviews or other information weren’t available in the app I’ve called directly. This seems really unfortunate.

Hnrobert42 4y ago
I am a gold member with them, meaning I stay more than 30 nights a year. They definitely have tiered customer service. At the regular level, it’s meh. At gold, I left a complaint with a virtual agent about the app not working well with VPNs, and a person called me back the next day. The crazy thing is that I hit gold level staying at $30/night places in SE Asia.

imwillofficial 4y ago

imgabe 4y ago

I've completely sworn off third-party booking services. They never know what's going on and when anything goes wrong they just tell you they can't help you. Then the place tells you that they can't help you because you didn't book through them and they just point fingers at each other. Better to book directly from whatever hotel / airline / whatever you want to use. Whatever savings you might get is not worth it and a lot of times hotels appreciate direct bookings and they're cheaper anyway.

bmitc 4y ago
I agree. It never seems to go right. The third party either has the wrong room availability, wrong room type, wrong price, etc. And I actually side with the hotels because it’s exactly as if someone else bought the room for you and messed up, which the hotel can’t really deal with but they usually try. And for the most part, hotels seem like one of the last places you can still get actual customer service with.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I think most places that require you to pay $100-200/day for the privilege of using them still have customer service.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Most of the time those are very poor customer service
  - JamesianP 4y ago
    Sadly that's comparable to rent in some places these days, so not so special. But yes I've always been pretty happy with the level of service personally.
    - saghm 4y ago
      Yeah, the rent for my girlfriend and I is within that range, and the first two months we were in the apartment there were a total of six or seven days where our apartment had no heat and management would not answer our calls or emails until the city stepped in due to the number of complaints that we and our neighbors were filing. On the other hand, the hotel we stayed in for a bit during one of those stints had amazing customer service! They let us decide each day by 11 AM whether or not we wanted to extend our stay, and when we finally got confirmation that the heat in our apartment was working, they decided to let us stay until 1 PM with no extra charge just to save us some trouble.

ipython 4y ago

I get that hotels are safer but I have rented with booking.com (careful to book only apartments that have 9/10 ratings) with much success for my large-ish family. Traveling with more than two people is a huge pain and buying two hotel rooms is not only expensive but also never guarantees the two rooms are next to each other, making family travel inconvenient and expensive. My experiences with booking (in Europe mostly) have been very positive and I find them way more transparent about fees, etc than Airbnb.

topherPedersen 4y ago

This happened to me too in Austin! I booked a room at a La Quinta Inn in South Austin that they had turned into a homeless shelter. I was pretty upset and quit using HotelTonight and stopped staying at La Quinta Inn over it. I was able to get my money back though, and just showed up a different hotel downtown in person and got a room there instead.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
malshe 4y ago
When was this? I stayed at the same La Quinta Inn just before the pandemic and it was not yet a homeless shelter!

neilv 4y ago

> It is hard to tell how to divide the blame between the service representative you spoke to — according to you, at a call center in a faraway country — or the system that trained her. I don't understand why the NYT is getting into company-internal blame. The customer's interface seems to have been Booking.com. Shouldn't any blame -- from the perspective of customer and this NYT writer -- stop at the company?

irjustin 4y ago

I've stopped booking through Kayak (used to be my favorite), other OTAs, even many budget airlines, because it's simply not worth the post booking headaches.

laundermaf 4y ago
Hotel searches on Kayak are pretty poor simply due to the fact that they somehow always show low-res images. I generally book on Agoda or search on Google Maps nowadays. Kayak is still my go-to for flights though.

golemiprague 4y ago

WirelessGigabit 4y ago

I'm actually sick of all of these intermediaries taking money but when something goes wrong they're like: oh we're just the middle man. I've got a contract with you, not with the hotel. I upheld my end of the bargain, now you uphold yours...

nicbou 4y ago
Agreed. It seems like every platform's goal is to ignore all rules and responsibility and grow large enough to become a toll road for an entire industry.
Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
Am I the only one who had a very positive experience with Booking? Once I had booked a hotel in Hong Kong for a week, pretty expensive, and I finally couldn't go. But this was in an especially hectic moment (personally and professionally) so I missed the full refund deadline for cancellation. It was obviously my fault, as the deadline had been clear from the beginning, so I just cancelled without refund (or maybe with partial refund, I don't remember) and moved on. The next day, and without having asked, I got an email from Booking saying that they would negotiate with the hotel to see if they could give me a full refund anyway. A day after that, I got the refund. It was a substantial amount of money so I'm quite grateful to whomever did that at Booking. On the other hand, I hate their pricing practices, e.g. presumably because I am a relatively frequent customer, the website often offers me worse prices than my wife who almost never used it. Also different prices on mobile and PC, etc.
- codyb 4y ago
  I don't think it was booking but after hurricane Ian swept through the Ft Myers, Florida region this year my parents got a full refund before they even reached out. I don't know what service it was but they were very proactive about it. I haven't had much issue with Booking.com but I haven't had any times where I needed to refund either.
- rosege 4y ago
  I had lots of positive experiences with them until one I didnt and they wouldnt do anything to help or refund me for sending me to a smoke filled crack house. Since then I don't use them anymore.

benatkin 4y ago

I just tried this to get past the paywall and it worked: https://gist.github.com/FermiDirak/f32032a30381f1b66dbc502984364217 https://gist.github.com/FermiDirak/f32032a30381f1b66dbc50298...

ggm 4y ago

Purely as an observation, as a driving holiday tourist I stayed in hotels in Penn. in the 2010s era, and even in off the main path motels, the reception was a wire mesh cage with a hole to pass money. For anyone who comes from other developed western economy cultures this can be a bit of a shock. "rough" is very contextually defined. If however, you wound up in the parts of town truck drivers in the UK have to put up with (they call them lorry parks, not truck parks) you could find similar things. Not that the drivers are a problem: far from it. They just get shunted to some of the worst parts of town. Lots and lots of cheap hotels and B&B in the UK are now de-facto housing otherwise homeless people: this started to be routine under Margaret Thatcher if not before, and has continued at varying pace ever since.

quickthrower2 4y ago

The old money taking intermediary that doesn’t take responsibility: happens all the time with all the things. Don’t take shit from these shoulder shruggers and try not to use them. Not just booking websites but tradespeople and wrapped finanical services too.

jiggunjer 4y ago
So you'd personally register at a stock exchange to avoid dealing with a broker?
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  No but I don’t have a choice there. I have had shares locked up for a year due to a broker blaming another bank dealing with shares moving to another exchange (not my choice) though. So just waiting and no organ grinders to help me.
- acuozzo 4y ago
  Is it possible to do so for free?

encryptluks2 4y ago

I agree based on the good reporting that everyone is at fault here, but for gods sake Booking.com learn to react in situations like this by just getting the person a room and eat the costs and you will earn double that in more people using your service in the future. I imagine that Booking.com and related sites mostly exists due to their business partnerships where they handle bookings for employees for business travel, and that their consumer business is just a side business where they don't give a shit if people are left stranded in the middle of nowhere. If the hotel is accepting reservations, but not actually in regular communication with Booking.com or weekly checking boxes that they are still accepting reservations then that is on Booking.com for not doing any diligence and I believe they are guilty of negligence if something more serious did happen.

aaron695 4y ago

dangus 4y ago

I thought an interesting point of the article was that the customer wasn’t entirely blameless and the article said as much. Read her situation a couple more times over. This person arrived to check in at 11:30 PM and intended to catch a 6 AM flight the next day. So their original plan involved only sleeping from around 11:45PM to 4:30AM assuming they were right next to the airport. This is a complaint about missing out on less than 5 hours of sleep in the first place. Here’s the real issue: her itinerary wasn’t realistic to begin with, and she was never going to be properly rested regardless of her possession of a hotel room. You can’t catch a friend’s wedding on Saturday night and then expect to make your husband’s family reunion in a whole different state on Sunday without some major fatiguing circumstances. Arguably, Booking upheld their end of the bargain by refunding the hotel. This is all they’re obligated to do. No other type of business gives you any more than that. Sure, Booking had crappy ineffective customer service. What else is new with the corporate world? Even if they had a perfect concierge level process they physically couldn’t accommodate the customer’s needs because they can’t materialize vacant rooms. Every minute wasted in this situation defeats the purpose of a hotel room in the first place (I.e., she could have gotten a room further from the airport but that would have eaten up travel time that would have netted her 2 hours of sleep instead of 4, because of her own bad itinerary. If she could check in at an earlier hour this wouldn’t be a problem). When your flight gets canceled, you aren’t owed another flight at the same date/time. I’m not sure what kind of emergency service anyone would expect to receive from a business like this. At no point was she in tangible danger, and this entire experience was a piece of inconvenience that was essentially self-inflicted.

watwut 4y ago
5 hours of sleep is much much better then 3 which is much much better then 0.
- dangus 4y ago
  Sure, but having more time in the first place would have opened up more options for alternative lodging. If you’ve only got 5 hours then you basically have to stay at a hotel within spitting distance of the airport, and that severely limits your options if something goes wrong. One of those options would be to find a hotel elsewhere in NYC. If her check-in time was more like 9PM that would have been entirely reasonable. The golden rule of travel is “shit happens” and that’s why you run a risk of all kinds of issues when you run a tight itinerary. When that shit happens, correctly assigning fault doesn’t tend to change one’s predicament. If I had a weekend with a family reunion and a friend’s wedding in two different cities I would personally just pick one.

jokoon 4y ago

For ethical reasons regarding climate change, I don't travel very much. Anything bought and paid online should not be trusted. Hotels are a luxury, in my view, so unless you pay a real price, expect to have problems.

nunez 4y ago

number one reason why i never EVER recommend booking hotels or cars through aggregators. you'll save very little money but deal with a lot of pain if something goes wrong.

Eavolution 4y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20221026050421/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/25/travel/tripped-up-hotel-booking.html https://web.archive.org/web/20221026050421/https://www.nytim...

prmoustache 4y ago

Shouldn't she just have registered at the shelter since at that point she was homeless in that particular city?

onetokeoverthe 4y ago

eb0la 4y ago

A customer runs a reservation engine that OTAs use as a white label backend. Their IT manager once told me that he didn't understand how people can actually get their rooms in an hotel since most reservations come to the hotel as an email (unless you are going to a big girl chain). Most hotel management systems do not talk with booking management systems and all transactions come via email. Of course they don't have their full inventory in the platforms just in case something like a spam filter happens.

DrNosferatu 4y ago

After bad experiences with Booking.com, I just use them as a search engine: call ahead to the property I want to stay in and propose a deal that we book directly with a discount (so split in half between us the Booking.com middleman commission) - it usually works! I suggest you do the same, as using Booking.com offers no protection for problems - don't give them your money! Booking.com operates like a monopoly and doesn't need to care whatsoever if the money they collect from you will correspond to a night of accomodation. Last bad experience: I successfully booked - and paid! - a room in an evening emergency (broken-down car) to find out that the hostel door was locked and no one would open. Called Booking.com customer support about them collecting money for a service they were not in a position to provide: a total back-and-forward mess and they couldn't care less. I did not get my money back.

WeylandYutani 4y ago