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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 a

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.

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.