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I would like to know ow the world of hotel booking looks like these days. Is everybody here using booking.com? Or is anybody using alternatives as well? If y

I would like to know ow the world of hotel booking looks like these days. Is everybody here using booking.com? Or is anybody using alternatives as well? If you use something else: What? If you only use Booking.com: Why?

samplenoise 3y ago
Find places online, then call to reserve. Just last week I called a place I found on Booking and found they had a room at half the price shown online. This is in France though where there seem to be rules about how rates are advertised.
- petesergeant 3y ago
  I’ve stayed at a few places where when I went to the front desk to extend my stay, they discretely told me to book via Booking.com rather than with them, because I’d get a better rate that way, and they were right. Like flight pricing, hotel room and channel pricing is complicated. Booking.com have a price guarantee, and a good one, so you will rarely get a better price from the hotel _unless you’re a member of their loyalty programme_ … so for the big hotel chains, sign up to those and book via their apps
  - netsharc 3y ago
    I guess the front desk has no discretion to give discounts, in smaller places the owner can give you the booking.com price because it means they don't have to give a cut (is it 30%?) to the bastards from Amsterdam. I remember walking into a hotel at around 10 PM (I was road-tripping around Iceland and could've slept in the car too) and asking if they'd give me a discount (1 room more to sell), and the front desk person clicked around on a lot on his computer and when a colleague asked him, he said "I'll just give him the agency rate.".
    - fwlr 3y ago
      I believe commissions are pretty standardized at 10-12% by now; OTAs have been competing on commission in the fight to sign up hotels. The most likely reason you might get a better rate from a third-party booking site than from the hotel direct is if the hotel allows the site to do variable pricing to try to capture more willingness-to-pay; sometimes that variable pricing will work out in your favour.
      - splonk 3y ago
        I wonder if commissions have dropped a lot in the past ~5 years, or if your hotel just has a better rate. I remember hearing that average commission back then was in the 20% range (less for major chains with negotiating power), and I know that Booking/Expedia would be happy to kick down 8-12% for any traffic people referred to them. Any startup with zero volume could sign up for an affiliate account to get access to Expedia's availability and booking APIs and get 8% for each booking, and larger customers could negotiate that upwards. I think I saw 14% for one supplier, but I don't remember if that was Booking or Expedia or a smaller company.
        rootsudo 3y ago
        That's interesting info - Thanks! But the standard for booking.com is for sure 20% for any new operator.
        smueller1234 3y ago
        Wow really? When did that change? It was 12% as recently (hah) as 2018.
        fwlr 3y ago
        I have only recent direct experience (OTAs all being 10-12%), but I do know one recent change is that “AirBnB model” listings are turning up on Booking.com a lot more now (renting out your holiday home as if it were a hotel with one unit). I know AirBnB charges 20% commission (I think they call it a service fee), perhaps for these cases Booking.com is offering those operators 20% as well.
stcroixx 3y ago
Never heard of booking.com until today, never used it. I sometimes book directly with a hotel or use Expedia or whatever else returns the cheapest price.
switch007 3y ago
I associate Booking with higher prices. I find better deals on Google Maps/Super(.com) Though, Google Maps' UI is buggy and often the deals are out-of-date/sold out, but I still find it better overall
ww520 3y ago
Use OTA for research. Book direct with the hotel.
- oezi 3y ago
  The issue is that booking directly is usually crappy and the hotels rarely care (or are under gag order not to say otherwise).
- petesergeant 3y ago
  Only true for the big-brand hotels in my experience. This is almost always true for flights though
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    The exception I've found for flights is that sometimes the OTAs can setup selling-airline and codeshare combinations that would be impossible to do direct. e.g. an airline won't book flights on its own metal through its codeshare partners. Maybe I could call in and get it, but that's a hunt I don't wish to do. Had a flight on all American Airlines metal that the OTA purchased through Iberian airlines on a mix of AA bookings and Finnair codeshares. The flight did not touch Finland or Spain.
    - robocat 3y ago
      I try to avoid multiple carriers after getting caught out missing a flight in Dubai due to maintenance delays in Sydney. With a single carrier, the carrier has to pay for accomodation etcetera and it is their problem to get you to your destination. With multiple carriers, sometimes things become your problem. If you buy multiple independent tickets to get the cheapest fares possible, you can be really screwed. So it really depends on your appetite for risk. I sometimes choose the lowest risk to get to my destination, and a high risk option on the way home where I am less time constrained and can be more flexible dealing with any issues. New Zealand is the antipodes to Europe and can take 24 hours to arrive (including stopovers), so any flight problems are significantly worse than for many other countries.
slater 3y ago
Just anecdata from the other side (i was a hotel manager for the last 7 years): BDC has nigh-unbeatably good SEO, you can't beat it even with e.g. searching for "[hotel name] in [city]", 99% of the time. The other 1% is Expedia in the search results :D A note on alternatives - loads of former competitors have been bought by either BDC or EXP, i.e. hotels.com is just Expedia, kayak or priceline are BDC, etc.
- switch007 3y ago
  Btw you should probably define such a non standard abbreviation such as “BDC” the first time you use it
dmd 3y ago
I have never had anything but bad experiences with any non-first-party booker; I now book only directly with {hotels, airlines, rental car companies}. It's just not worth the couple bucks you sometimes save; if there's a problem nobody is willing to be the one to fix it.
LastNevadan 3y ago
I travel a lot. I used to use various sites, but I realized that if I concentrated on Marriott/Bonvoy I could reach their highest status level (Ambassador). I've almost reached the dollar value and night count to retain my status through 2024, and it's only April! I'm quite happy with them. I get a lot of free upgrades, lots of points for free nights, free breakfast, late checkout, etc. And if anything is the least bit out of order, they fix it for me. I hate AirBnb. There are lot of bad actors now, and AirBnb customer support is useless. Even if I need a flat for a long period (like a month or more), I try to find an independent agency and use them. Searching on AirBnb can be a good starting point: if the listing shows an agency name you can usually find them on Google. AirBnb "protection" is useless anyway, so I don't understand why I should pay such a huge premium for it. Booking.com is fine. I didn't get stressed out about the messages that the author writes about. But now I only use Booking.com when there is no Bonvoy hotel in the place I'm going. I have never had to escalate anything to Booking, but in general the places in booking are as described. There aren't as many bad actors as there are with AirBnb. EDIT: I'm not employed. All my travel is personal travel paid out my own pocket.
- oezi 3y ago
  Loyalty programs are just a scam for you and the hotel to rip off your employer, right? Or are you really getting a cheaper/better deal than using a marketplace such as booking.com
  - petesergeant 3y ago
    In my experience Hilton, Bonvoy-affiliated, Sofitel, etc give better prices when a member and when you book directly than via any other channel
  - LastNevadan 3y ago
    Yes, that's part of their strategy. But it doesn't apply in my specific case. I'm not employed. I pay for everything out of my own pocket. I bet a better deal from Marriott directly as a member than by going through a third-party.
brabel 3y ago
I've been booking using booking.com for several years, but not exclusively. As the author notes, it was not always full of dark patterns as it is today... and it's always been reliable and easy to book, view locations, compare prices etc. One of the best UIs for booking hotels I've found. I sometimes check AirBnb as well (if hotel is not my favourite option for some trip) and even the hotel's websites directly. Booking.com seems to get lower prices or at least match the hotels in most cases. There are lots of other websites for booking hotels. But after trying a few, I don't see any advantage over booking.com so that's what I use (and ignore the dark patterns if possible).
fwlr 3y ago
I’m a receptionist, handle about 150 bookings a week. Two-thirds direct, the other one-third are third-party booking sites. Booking.com (Agoda, Priceline, Kayak) makes up about half of that one-third. The other half of the one-third is equally split between Expedia (hotels.com, Orbitz, Travelocity, Wotif, Trivago) and a big bunch of various corporate travel agents and agencies. Despite the proliferation of booking sites on the web, all of them are either part of Bookings Holdings (Booking.com’s parent company, 17bln revenue last year), or part of Expedia Group (11bln revenue last year), and I would expect the distributions of third party bookings at most hotels to roughly reflect that revenue split. There is one other competing group, Trip.com (5bln), but they mostly service China and don’t have as much penetration into Western markets as far as I know.
- gardenhedge 3y ago
  Very interesting! Do you think there is space for small or niche players?
  - fwlr 3y ago
    No. Yes, there is space for small niche sites with certain angles, but all of those sites will still be owned by one of the big two parents. There isn’t even much space for a niche player intending to eventually get bought out by one of the big groups like you see in some software fields, because hotels are pretty risk-averse in general and won’t just hand out access to their reservation channels to small players easily.
    - ricktdotorg 3y ago
      great mini-thread! thank you for your industry insight!
  - splonk 3y ago
    I did some work on hotel booking for one of the the "small" players in the space (at the time, a distant third in the EU after Booking/Expedia). The majority of their room availability was sourced through the two big players. That's probably going to be the case for most aggregators, and there's a fair chance that your favorite non-Booking/Expedia aggregator is actually just selling you their content and collecting around 10%.
mr_mitm 3y ago
I travel quite a bit and I like hotels.com much better than booking.com

samplenoise 3y ago

Find places online, then call to reserve. Just last week I called a place I found on Booking and found they had a room at half the price shown online. This is in France though where there seem to be rules about how rates are advertised.

petesergeant 3y ago
I’ve stayed at a few places where when I went to the front desk to extend my stay, they discretely told me to book via Booking.com rather than with them, because I’d get a better rate that way, and they were right. Like flight pricing, hotel room and channel pricing is complicated. Booking.com have a price guarantee, and a good one, so you will rarely get a better price from the hotel _unless you’re a member of their loyalty programme_ … so for the big hotel chains, sign up to those and book via their apps
- netsharc 3y ago
  I guess the front desk has no discretion to give discounts, in smaller places the owner can give you the booking.com price because it means they don't have to give a cut (is it 30%?) to the bastards from Amsterdam. I remember walking into a hotel at around 10 PM (I was road-tripping around Iceland and could've slept in the car too) and asking if they'd give me a discount (1 room more to sell), and the front desk person clicked around on a lot on his computer and when a colleague asked him, he said "I'll just give him the agency rate.".
  - fwlr 3y ago
    I believe commissions are pretty standardized at 10-12% by now; OTAs have been competing on commission in the fight to sign up hotels. The most likely reason you might get a better rate from a third-party booking site than from the hotel direct is if the hotel allows the site to do variable pricing to try to capture more willingness-to-pay; sometimes that variable pricing will work out in your favour.
    - splonk 3y ago
      I wonder if commissions have dropped a lot in the past ~5 years, or if your hotel just has a better rate. I remember hearing that average commission back then was in the 20% range (less for major chains with negotiating power), and I know that Booking/Expedia would be happy to kick down 8-12% for any traffic people referred to them. Any startup with zero volume could sign up for an affiliate account to get access to Expedia's availability and booking APIs and get 8% for each booking, and larger customers could negotiate that upwards. I think I saw 14% for one supplier, but I don't remember if that was Booking or Expedia or a smaller company.
      - rootsudo 3y ago
        That's interesting info - Thanks! But the standard for booking.com is for sure 20% for any new operator.
        smueller1234 3y ago
        Wow really? When did that change? It was 12% as recently (hah) as 2018.
        fwlr 3y ago
        I have only recent direct experience (OTAs all being 10-12%), but I do know one recent change is that “AirBnB model” listings are turning up on Booking.com a lot more now (renting out your holiday home as if it were a hotel with one unit). I know AirBnB charges 20% commission (I think they call it a service fee), perhaps for these cases Booking.com is offering those operators 20% as well.

stcroixx 3y ago

Never heard of booking.com until today, never used it. I sometimes book directly with a hotel or use Expedia or whatever else returns the cheapest price.

switch007 3y ago

I associate Booking with higher prices. I find better deals on Google Maps/Super(.com) Though, Google Maps' UI is buggy and often the deals are out-of-date/sold out, but I still find it better overall

ww520 3y ago

Use OTA for research. Book direct with the hotel.

oezi 3y ago
The issue is that booking directly is usually crappy and the hotels rarely care (or are under gag order not to say otherwise).
petesergeant 3y ago
Only true for the big-brand hotels in my experience. This is almost always true for flights though
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  The exception I've found for flights is that sometimes the OTAs can setup selling-airline and codeshare combinations that would be impossible to do direct. e.g. an airline won't book flights on its own metal through its codeshare partners. Maybe I could call in and get it, but that's a hunt I don't wish to do. Had a flight on all American Airlines metal that the OTA purchased through Iberian airlines on a mix of AA bookings and Finnair codeshares. The flight did not touch Finland or Spain.
  - robocat 3y ago
    I try to avoid multiple carriers after getting caught out missing a flight in Dubai due to maintenance delays in Sydney. With a single carrier, the carrier has to pay for accomodation etcetera and it is their problem to get you to your destination. With multiple carriers, sometimes things become your problem. If you buy multiple independent tickets to get the cheapest fares possible, you can be really screwed. So it really depends on your appetite for risk. I sometimes choose the lowest risk to get to my destination, and a high risk option on the way home where I am less time constrained and can be more flexible dealing with any issues. New Zealand is the antipodes to Europe and can take 24 hours to arrive (including stopovers), so any flight problems are significantly worse than for many other countries.

slater 3y ago

Just anecdata from the other side (i was a hotel manager for the last 7 years): BDC has nigh-unbeatably good SEO, you can't beat it even with e.g. searching for "[hotel name] in [city]", 99% of the time. The other 1% is Expedia in the search results :D A note on alternatives - loads of former competitors have been bought by either BDC or EXP, i.e. hotels.com is just Expedia, kayak or priceline are BDC, etc.

switch007 3y ago
Btw you should probably define such a non standard abbreviation such as “BDC” the first time you use it

dmd 3y ago

I have never had anything but bad experiences with any non-first-party booker; I now book only directly with {hotels, airlines, rental car companies}. It's just not worth the couple bucks you sometimes save; if there's a problem nobody is willing to be the one to fix it.

LastNevadan 3y ago

I travel a lot. I used to use various sites, but I realized that if I concentrated on Marriott/Bonvoy I could reach their highest status level (Ambassador). I've almost reached the dollar value and night count to retain my status through 2024, and it's only April! I'm quite happy with them. I get a lot of free upgrades, lots of points for free nights, free breakfast, late checkout, etc. And if anything is the least bit out of order, they fix it for me. I hate AirBnb. There are lot of bad actors now, and AirBnb customer support is useless. Even if I need a flat for a long period (like a month or more), I try to find an independent agency and use them. Searching on AirBnb can be a good starting point: if the listing shows an agency name you can usually find them on Google. AirBnb "protection" is useless anyway, so I don't understand why I should pay such a huge premium for it. Booking.com is fine. I didn't get stressed out about the messages that the author writes about. But now I only use Booking.com when there is no Bonvoy hotel in the place I'm going. I have never had to escalate anything to Booking, but in general the places in booking are as described. There aren't as many bad actors as there are with AirBnb. EDIT: I'm not employed. All my travel is personal travel paid out my own pocket.

oezi 3y ago
Loyalty programs are just a scam for you and the hotel to rip off your employer, right? Or are you really getting a cheaper/better deal than using a marketplace such as booking.com
- petesergeant 3y ago
  In my experience Hilton, Bonvoy-affiliated, Sofitel, etc give better prices when a member and when you book directly than via any other channel
- LastNevadan 3y ago
  Yes, that's part of their strategy. But it doesn't apply in my specific case. I'm not employed. I pay for everything out of my own pocket. I bet a better deal from Marriott directly as a member than by going through a third-party.

brabel 3y ago

I've been booking using booking.com for several years, but not exclusively. As the author notes, it was not always full of dark patterns as it is today... and it's always been reliable and easy to book, view locations, compare prices etc. One of the best UIs for booking hotels I've found. I sometimes check AirBnb as well (if hotel is not my favourite option for some trip) and even the hotel's websites directly. Booking.com seems to get lower prices or at least match the hotels in most cases. There are lots of other websites for booking hotels. But after trying a few, I don't see any advantage over booking.com so that's what I use (and ignore the dark patterns if possible).

fwlr 3y ago

I’m a receptionist, handle about 150 bookings a week. Two-thirds direct, the other one-third are third-party booking sites. Booking.com (Agoda, Priceline, Kayak) makes up about half of that one-third. The other half of the one-third is equally split between Expedia (hotels.com, Orbitz, Travelocity, Wotif, Trivago) and a big bunch of various corporate travel agents and agencies. Despite the proliferation of booking sites on the web, all of them are either part of Bookings Holdings (Booking.com’s parent company, 17bln revenue last year), or part of Expedia Group (11bln revenue last year), and I would expect the distributions of third party bookings at most hotels to roughly reflect that revenue split. There is one other competing group, Trip.com (5bln), but they mostly service China and don’t have as much penetration into Western markets as far as I know.

gardenhedge 3y ago
Very interesting! Do you think there is space for small or niche players?
- fwlr 3y ago
  No. Yes, there is space for small niche sites with certain angles, but all of those sites will still be owned by one of the big two parents. There isn’t even much space for a niche player intending to eventually get bought out by one of the big groups like you see in some software fields, because hotels are pretty risk-averse in general and won’t just hand out access to their reservation channels to small players easily.
  - ricktdotorg 3y ago
    great mini-thread! thank you for your industry insight!
- splonk 3y ago
  I did some work on hotel booking for one of the the "small" players in the space (at the time, a distant third in the EU after Booking/Expedia). The majority of their room availability was sourced through the two big players. That's probably going to be the case for most aggregators, and there's a fair chance that your favorite non-Booking/Expedia aggregator is actually just selling you their content and collecting around 10%.

mr_mitm 3y ago

I travel quite a bit and I like hotels.com much better than booking.com