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Booking.com doesn't handle the reservations themselves, just facilitates you interacting with the hotel's reservation system. Booking.com probably plugs into th

Booking.com doesn't handle the reservations themselves, just facilitates you interacting with the hotel's reservation system. Booking.com probably plugs into the Central Reservation System for the hotel at some point whether it be at the chain level, the hotel level, or through something like the GDS (Global Distribution System). When booking.com starts a transaction it first asks for availability from the hotel, presents that availability to the user, then the user chooses if they want to accept any of the availability. Once the user chooses the reservation it's blocked off directly in the Central Reservation System at the hotel so it can't be double booked. If the rooms fill up between the availability being presented and the user deciding the CRS won't accept the reservation then booking.com then has to handle that use case with the user. So Booking.com itself probably doesn't really have any "floating" reservations where the user is told it's booked and the hotel doesn't know about it. It's all pretty much done in real-time.

dasil003 3y ago
Your opening is mostly right, but your conclusion is wrong. Booking.com optimizes for availability for a variety of reasons. The most important is that they are fighting for market share in real time for every room night. Hotels tend to overbook anyway since there are always last minute cancellations and no shows, so Booking.com gets a commitment to sell a certain number of rooms and then they sell that number regardless of whether they can immediately confirm it through connectivity. This is important because the distributed network of connectivity systems is not reliable, both due to the laws of distributed systems, but even more poignantly because the margins for the middlemen and small operators don’t allow for the same level of operational excellence as you would expect from a name brand tech company.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Your description is unfortunately not correct. Booking.com does not work like that, they will connect with the booking system of the hotel in real time through XML and put the reservation directly into your system when the client makes the reservation. Likewise, they will ping you to know if you have any available rooms, before presenting to the customer. Allotment of rooms hasn't really been a thing for at least a decade, although there are still some old fashioned resellers that might manage to scam clueless small hotel owners into working with allotments, but booking.com doesn't do that. Even for a tiny hotel there are cheap and extremely well made booking systems that can connect with booking.com, AirBnB, Expedia, as well as a bunch of other resellers in real-time, keeping everything synchronized and avoiding overbooking. Of course, you can opt to not have any booking system of your own and put your listing on booking, and then yes booking.com will sell rooms without checking anything - since there's nothing they can check against. If you arrange things like that, you'd have to manually remove rooms from bookings system when you make a sale yourself. But that's self-inflicted harm. I used to run a hotel a long time ago, and a couple of the large regional resellers tried to scam me into giving them allotments. I said "Sure, will you pay for your allotted rooms wether you sell them or not?", they said "Of course not!" - and that was the end of it.
jaclaz 3y ago
Maybe what you describe happens with automated/integrated tools, but I doubt it. The "manual" way to interact with booking.com from a hotel is simply to create on booking.com a list of available rooms while on the hotel side those rooms are pre-booked to booking.com (or if you prefer removed from the local list). At any time you (the hotel) can grow or reduce the list. As soon as booking.com gets a reservation it confirms it (to the customer), removes that room from the available rooms list and notifies the hotel of the reservation. The hotel can then decide to leave the list "as is" or add to it one or more rooms.
- PurpleRamen 3y ago
  > Maybe what you describe happens with automated/integrated tools, but I doubt it. The claim is not wrong, for flights. There are big systems (Amadeus, Sabre, mostly) who manage flight-reservations for big airlines. But it's a bit expensive, and airlines usually also offer their own reservation-systems now. There are also lowcost airlines and charter flights which are normally not available through them. But probably 90% of commercial flights in the western world happen through those reservation-systems. And Hotels have a similar situation. You can theoretically book hotels, and even trips with train, ships, buses or cars through the centralized systems, but usually only the big companies are available through the reservation-systems. This has mostly historical reasons, but also because it's expensive, and is a bit complicated. This is why alternatives like booking.com emerged, who are cheaper, and could adapt faster to the changing market. Amadeus & Sabre are annoyingly old and "heavy" in how they operate. Though, this all is changing slowly. The travel-industry is trying to move to new APIs for handling modern demands of travelers. And The old gangsters have started to branch out to web-stack, with JSON and restful APIs, offer free documentation on Github and youtube, and even have discord now.
  - jaclaz 3y ago
    >The claim is not wrong, for flights. Sure, but we are talking of hotel rooms and booking.com, not of flights. And surely large hotel chains (national and international) have their own systems and interfaces to whatever booking system, but booking.com is AFAIK mainly about small, independent hotels, at the most these latter ones have softwares that integrate booking.com reservations into their internal reservation tableau, but (again AFAIK) they also work with the same mechanisms I described for manual interaction, there is a pool of pre-allocated rooms on which booking.com can make reservations.
mejutoco 3y ago
Many small hotels use software provided by booking.com to manage their own hotel or b&b. The hotel reservation center would, in those cases, be software written by booking.com

dasil003 3y ago

Your opening is mostly right, but your conclusion is wrong. Booking.com optimizes for availability for a variety of reasons. The most important is that they are fighting for market share in real time for every room night. Hotels tend to overbook anyway since there are always last minute cancellations and no shows, so Booking.com gets a commitment to sell a certain number of rooms and then they sell that number regardless of whether they can immediately confirm it through connectivity. This is important because the distributed network of connectivity systems is not reliable, both due to the laws of distributed systems, but even more poignantly because the margins for the middlemen and small operators don’t allow for the same level of operational excellence as you would expect from a name brand tech company.

carlosjobim 3y ago
Your description is unfortunately not correct. Booking.com does not work like that, they will connect with the booking system of the hotel in real time through XML and put the reservation directly into your system when the client makes the reservation. Likewise, they will ping you to know if you have any available rooms, before presenting to the customer. Allotment of rooms hasn't really been a thing for at least a decade, although there are still some old fashioned resellers that might manage to scam clueless small hotel owners into working with allotments, but booking.com doesn't do that. Even for a tiny hotel there are cheap and extremely well made booking systems that can connect with booking.com, AirBnB, Expedia, as well as a bunch of other resellers in real-time, keeping everything synchronized and avoiding overbooking. Of course, you can opt to not have any booking system of your own and put your listing on booking, and then yes booking.com will sell rooms without checking anything - since there's nothing they can check against. If you arrange things like that, you'd have to manually remove rooms from bookings system when you make a sale yourself. But that's self-inflicted harm. I used to run a hotel a long time ago, and a couple of the large regional resellers tried to scam me into giving them allotments. I said "Sure, will you pay for your allotted rooms wether you sell them or not?", they said "Of course not!" - and that was the end of it.

jaclaz 3y ago

Maybe what you describe happens with automated/integrated tools, but I doubt it. The "manual" way to interact with booking.com from a hotel is simply to create on booking.com a list of available rooms while on the hotel side those rooms are pre-booked to booking.com (or if you prefer removed from the local list). At any time you (the hotel) can grow or reduce the list. As soon as booking.com gets a reservation it confirms it (to the customer), removes that room from the available rooms list and notifies the hotel of the reservation. The hotel can then decide to leave the list "as is" or add to it one or more rooms.

PurpleRamen 3y ago
> Maybe what you describe happens with automated/integrated tools, but I doubt it. The claim is not wrong, for flights. There are big systems (Amadeus, Sabre, mostly) who manage flight-reservations for big airlines. But it's a bit expensive, and airlines usually also offer their own reservation-systems now. There are also lowcost airlines and charter flights which are normally not available through them. But probably 90% of commercial flights in the western world happen through those reservation-systems. And Hotels have a similar situation. You can theoretically book hotels, and even trips with train, ships, buses or cars through the centralized systems, but usually only the big companies are available through the reservation-systems. This has mostly historical reasons, but also because it's expensive, and is a bit complicated. This is why alternatives like booking.com emerged, who are cheaper, and could adapt faster to the changing market. Amadeus & Sabre are annoyingly old and "heavy" in how they operate. Though, this all is changing slowly. The travel-industry is trying to move to new APIs for handling modern demands of travelers. And The old gangsters have started to branch out to web-stack, with JSON and restful APIs, offer free documentation on Github and youtube, and even have discord now.
- jaclaz 3y ago
  >The claim is not wrong, for flights. Sure, but we are talking of hotel rooms and booking.com, not of flights. And surely large hotel chains (national and international) have their own systems and interfaces to whatever booking system, but booking.com is AFAIK mainly about small, independent hotels, at the most these latter ones have softwares that integrate booking.com reservations into their internal reservation tableau, but (again AFAIK) they also work with the same mechanisms I described for manual interaction, there is a pool of pre-allocated rooms on which booking.com can make reservations.

mejutoco 3y ago

Many small hotels use software provided by booking.com to manage their own hotel or b&b. The hotel reservation center would, in those cases, be software written by booking.com