8 ms·

That travel deal you found online may be a one-way ticket to misery

28 points by sanj 3y ago

version_five 3y ago
https://archive.md/tpqui https://archive.md/tpqui At this point basically any third party booking should be considered a scam. Even if the booking company is "legit", you're still a second class citizen with the hotel or whatever you booked and subject to no help, arbitrary fees, no points, etc. It's just as much scamming on the side of the hotels - they accept third party booking but misrepresent that they treat you the same.
- chrismcb 3y ago
  This party booking is the opposite of a scam. Calling it such is libelous.
- nwellinghoff 3y ago
  Seriously correct. You call the hotel to change something and they act like its not their hotel anymore. You call expidia or whatever and they tell you to talk to the hotel. Translation, never pay up front for anything that requires service at a future date. Note I have breached this wall by doing what used to be common before 2000 before we all got a little too polite. Getting really angry and not going away. Eventually they will cave and do what they knew was fair all along. Definitely NOT worth it though.
  - xwdv 3y ago
    Pro tip: making a point of slamming a fist hard on the counter gets them to cooperate 90% of the time when they’re being difficult.
  - CoffeeOnWrite 3y ago
    > Translation, never pay up front for anything that requires service at a future date. Would you say more? For things like hotels in popular destinations, it lets me sleep at night to put down a deposit up front, I feel like it incentivizes the hotel to hold my room. Knowing the room is better secured is more important to me than money. Now with Booking, I’ve never had them ask for a deposit. They either have me pay at the hotel, or they run my card after the “free to cancel” period expires (which is always very generous, expiring from 5 days to 1 day before my stay). This doesn’t help me sleep at night, when making bookings a month or more out, I worry that I’ll be cancelled on or be offered a lesser room than the one I booked. Fortunately I’ve only had good experiences with Booking so far, but once I have my first bad experience, I will switch to booking direct or with another platform that lets me put down a deposit up front.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  With booking.com I have customer support I can talk to, would not even touch some hotel's own half broken booking system (much less give them my payment info... nope) Unlike hotels large airline booking systems are generally decent so I am okay with them, many are just white labelled Amadeus I think. But still, with expedia for flights I can (at least pre covid) get cancellations free of charge even if airline tariff doesn't have that, useful when applying for visa etc. But let's not talk about AirAsia, once booked with them direct and now get spammed for eternity, they don't unsub you no matter how hard you try. Had to set up a filter...
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Real world scenario: Last year I booked 7 days at the Hilton San Francisco Financial District for a hybrid work/pleasure trip. We arrived late and really didn’t like the hotel. We checked out the next day and went to the Hilton Parc 55. The first Hilton charged us for one night when we checked out. That simple change would have been next to impossible through a third party where I prepaid the third party and they paid the hotel. It definitely wouldn’t have been seamless
    - throwaway290 3y ago
      Did similar a few times in the past year. There is no difference, as soon as I check in it's hotel's discretion. Some hotels are accommodating in this way, some will want to squeeze the full amount and stick to the rules. Edited: I see that you changed length of booking, at first I misread. That's possible, especially if booking listing doesn't take a pre-payment. But generally if I am uncertain I find and book two options with easy cancellation and then cancel the other one if I like the first one (or not cancel and move the next day). Easy enough when you have one panel for all your bookings. But I travel not in home country, in home country sure you know how stuff works you can just call your hotels or sweet talk reception staff and negotiate everything.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        > But I travel not in home country, in home country sure you know how stuff works you can just call your hotels or sweet talk reception staff and negotiate everything. I guess the other part is that I would still use a chain hotel in my case hotels affiliated with Hilton and Hyatt. I’ve also never had to deal with a hotel that didn’t cater to Americans even outside the country - mostly Mexico. I’m sure it would be more complicated once we start doing more overseas traveling.
- dacryn 3y ago
  I feel always conflicted about expedia. I travelled a lot with them before people pointed out that you get subpar rooms, and worse treatment. Like, a lot. 150 nights or so. And I do confirm those rumours, many subpar rooms, sleep next to elevator, that wonky corner room that is smaller than the others, ... I liked it because it was business travel to an area without a Hilton or Mariott, so I still got some points for my personal holidays. But now years later, I still use expedia a lot. Somehow their prices are better than what Hilton can offer, even if I call them up for a price match (because I do prefer hilton points over Expedia points). Same for IHG. Yes I get the occasional room with the broken door on the closet, and sleep next to the elevator practically alwyas, but anytime I needed support from Expedia, they came through. And I use them for personal travel if I actually have to pay for it myself
- wayfinder 3y ago
  Still saves a lot of money a lot of time and I've never had a problem with a booking company and I've booked a lot of things via booking companies. That doesn't mean I won't go to a hotel website if it's a chain I have points with or I won't avoid a booking company that looks sus. Eventually you figure out whether you should be using a booking site or the hotel website.
- nebula8804 3y ago
  Its not like hotels are some amazing entity to deal with. Many hotels are stuck in prehistoric times. Story: After being burned multiple times via booking.com and other third party sites, I tried to book directly with the hotel. I was planning a last minute trip with multiple stops and so i just booked a hotel and forgot about it thinking that once I arrive in Ireland i'll look up the details. There was this hotel in Ireland that accepted my booking, charged my damn card the day after the first night, but never actually sent me any confirmation or any emails. When I arrived I didn't remember whatever stupid quaint name the hotel was because I had booked about two weeks prior. I guess this was my bad because I was used to a hotel freaking emailing you something when you book. When I arrived I was desperately trying to search for any indication that I made the booking and my credit card didn't even have a record. I gave up and ended up booking elsewhere. Then all of a sudden after the first night I got charged. I was absolutely livid. I demanded an explanation. Turns out what happened was then when I first tried to book, their email form had an issue where my broswers autocomplete added the name of my email after the .com so it was email@gmail.comemail. The site rejected it and I realized the error. I hadn't entered my credit card info so I thought I was fine. I resubmitted it with the correct email and then entered my credit card info. Booking was accepted.....turns out their system somehow retained the first email and send out the confirmation to that email and they had no indication that the email bounced until the person looked up the issue AFTER they had charged me. Whats even crazier is that on the second day they emailed me first asking where I was before I could reach out to them! So they had the correct email in their records but their internal billing system captured the wrong email! You can't win either way it seems! Fortunately I had a long email chain where they admitted their system never sent out a confirmation. my credit card company sided with me in this regard when I attempted a chargeback.
  - vikingerik 3y ago
    So you literally forgot what hotel you booked... and entered the wrong email... and they emailed you anyway about the no-show, with someone probably manually fixing the address to contact you... and you're still blaming the hotel for being hard to deal with? I'm not so sure the problems were on the hotel's end here.
nebula8804 3y ago
Travel just sucks regardless. It feels like solving this problem is harder than putting people on Mars. There are too many bad actors in the system, nothing is really standardized so customers can't compare or new businesses can't compete 1 to 1. Its all scams at literally every level starting with "travel influencers" > booking sites > transportation to/from airports > the airports themselves > airlines > hotels and finally > the actual activities to do when you arrive. All layers are optimized to scrape as much as they can from your wallet. As a CS person, this unoptimized situation really grinds my gears.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ttymck 3y ago
  > optimized to scrape as much as they can from your wallet. What should they be optimized for?
  - nebula8804 3y ago
    Competing against each other but because of the lack of 1 to 1 mapping of offerings it is really hard for consumers to differentiate so there isn't real competition.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- scarface_74 3y ago
  My wife and I literally travel 7 months of the year flying around to different cities and staying in hotels. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966 It’s not that difficult. I have a primary and secondary airline (Delta and American) and a primary and secondary hotel brand (Hilton and Hyatt). I know the corresponding apps and loyalty programs inside and out. I know what to expect when I travel. When we get to a city or before we go, we search for “top things to do in $City”. Admittedly, this would be a bit harder once we start flying overseas and we will have to do more research. We are starting our second year and the only international travel we have planned right now are mostly within US time zones.
thedigitalone 3y ago
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/ej1Su https://ghostarchive.org/archive/ej1Su
mighmi 3y ago
Hostelworld has absolutely cornered the hostel market, with most venues signing away pricing. This allows hostelworld to equalize prices in a given location, raising them above board although occupancy is down (many empty places during the busy season) while the guests are focused in a few places (as lower rated places can't lower their prices). So for hostels, 3rd party booking is all that is left. Often, contacting them directly, they won't even know what their price is (while a few years ago they would give a discount to hostelworld, hostelbookers etc.)
nocoiner 3y ago
99% of the time, you’ll get the same or better deal by booking online with the hotel directly. (Airfares, I’m less sure - the proliferation of hyper segmented economy and fees make me dubious about what the actual all-in cost of any given flight is.) And the other 1% of the time, calling the hotel will get you the same (or better) outcome or you’ll find out straight from the horse’s mouth they don’t actually have any availability for the room you want, and you’ll save yourself a lot of grief upon arrival.
- landgenoot 3y ago
  > calling the hotel will get you the same (or better) outcome Not my experience. In Europe, in low-end hotels / B&B's they will get annoyed. Wouldn't it be possible to build a decentralized booking.com/expedia alternative based on activity pub?
  - j1elo 3y ago
    My experience in Europe is that some low-end places (especially apartments) gave me a phone number or even a card with contact details, and told me to call them directly next time so I could save the Booking fee. Makes sense: remove the middleman!
    - landgenoot 3y ago
      Yes, that is after they have had you as a guest. That is different from strangers calling them demanding a lower price.
    - xwdv 3y ago
      No, they say call direct so you can pay higher prices and not those online promo deals.
- j1elo 3y ago
  I learned from calling that hotels have a set of rooms that are reserved exclusively for Booking. So they might tell you no availability at this time, but Booking showing that they have "only 2 rooms left in this place".
nness 3y ago
The interesting thing for me is that a lot of people assume Skyscanner does what Google Flights actually does... Maybe a decade or so ago it was only an aggregator or maybe it was always a booking agent that just felt more transparent at the time, so no one noticed. As an aside, Google Flights is a fantastic — but at least in my recent experience — prices for multi-city bookings are off by 10-20% then the price quoted by the airline. Enough to make me think the taxes are just omitted or calculated differently...
Supermancho 3y ago
https://archive.ph/tpqui https://archive.ph/tpqui
vrc 3y ago
The issue is agent v. merchant. Historically Expedia uses the merchant model (hood inventory, company as seller), and Booking used to prefer the agent model (no inventory, venue as seller). The former allows some advantage to what the company can offer but with added inventory risk, and means that the hotel doesn’t see you as “their” customer. With the agency model you do have recourse with the venue and will likely be a “normal” room to them. Unfortunately Booking is increasingly shifting towards the merchant model to find more profits.
tonymet 3y ago
This reminds my of the scams I encountered two weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37447652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37447652 I recommend booking in person you will save a lot. In an extreme example: we booked part of a trip to Greece ahead of time and part on the spot. The in-person bookings were > 75% cheaper than the pre-booked stays, and the quality was the same or better It’s not zero risk. sometimes a hotel will be booked and you move on. But if you appreciate a little spontaneity it’s very much worthwhile
xnx 3y ago
Hotel pricing tools are useless if they don't include arbitrary "resort fees" hotels can spring on you when you're standing in the lobby at midnight after a full day of travel.

28 points by sanj 3y ago

https://archive.md/tpqui https://archive.md/tpqui At this point basically any third party booking should be considered a scam. Even if the booking company is "legit", you're still a second class citizen with the hotel or whatever you booked and subject to no help, arbitrary fees, no points, etc. It's just as much scamming on the side of the hotels - they accept third party booking but misrepresent that they treat you the same.

chrismcb 3y ago
This party booking is the opposite of a scam. Calling it such is libelous.
nwellinghoff 3y ago
Seriously correct. You call the hotel to change something and they act like its not their hotel anymore. You call expidia or whatever and they tell you to talk to the hotel. Translation, never pay up front for anything that requires service at a future date. Note I have breached this wall by doing what used to be common before 2000 before we all got a little too polite. Getting really angry and not going away. Eventually they will cave and do what they knew was fair all along. Definitely NOT worth it though.
- xwdv 3y ago
  Pro tip: making a point of slamming a fist hard on the counter gets them to cooperate 90% of the time when they’re being difficult.
- CoffeeOnWrite 3y ago
  > Translation, never pay up front for anything that requires service at a future date. Would you say more? For things like hotels in popular destinations, it lets me sleep at night to put down a deposit up front, I feel like it incentivizes the hotel to hold my room. Knowing the room is better secured is more important to me than money. Now with Booking, I’ve never had them ask for a deposit. They either have me pay at the hotel, or they run my card after the “free to cancel” period expires (which is always very generous, expiring from 5 days to 1 day before my stay). This doesn’t help me sleep at night, when making bookings a month or more out, I worry that I’ll be cancelled on or be offered a lesser room than the one I booked. Fortunately I’ve only had good experiences with Booking so far, but once I have my first bad experience, I will switch to booking direct or with another platform that lets me put down a deposit up front.
throwaway290 3y ago
With booking.com I have customer support I can talk to, would not even touch some hotel's own half broken booking system (much less give them my payment info... nope) Unlike hotels large airline booking systems are generally decent so I am okay with them, many are just white labelled Amadeus I think. But still, with expedia for flights I can (at least pre covid) get cancellations free of charge even if airline tariff doesn't have that, useful when applying for visa etc. But let's not talk about AirAsia, once booked with them direct and now get spammed for eternity, they don't unsub you no matter how hard you try. Had to set up a filter...
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Real world scenario: Last year I booked 7 days at the Hilton San Francisco Financial District for a hybrid work/pleasure trip. We arrived late and really didn’t like the hotel. We checked out the next day and went to the Hilton Parc 55. The first Hilton charged us for one night when we checked out. That simple change would have been next to impossible through a third party where I prepaid the third party and they paid the hotel. It definitely wouldn’t have been seamless
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    Did similar a few times in the past year. There is no difference, as soon as I check in it's hotel's discretion. Some hotels are accommodating in this way, some will want to squeeze the full amount and stick to the rules. Edited: I see that you changed length of booking, at first I misread. That's possible, especially if booking listing doesn't take a pre-payment. But generally if I am uncertain I find and book two options with easy cancellation and then cancel the other one if I like the first one (or not cancel and move the next day). Easy enough when you have one panel for all your bookings. But I travel not in home country, in home country sure you know how stuff works you can just call your hotels or sweet talk reception staff and negotiate everything.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      > But I travel not in home country, in home country sure you know how stuff works you can just call your hotels or sweet talk reception staff and negotiate everything. I guess the other part is that I would still use a chain hotel in my case hotels affiliated with Hilton and Hyatt. I’ve also never had to deal with a hotel that didn’t cater to Americans even outside the country - mostly Mexico. I’m sure it would be more complicated once we start doing more overseas traveling.
dacryn 3y ago
I feel always conflicted about expedia. I travelled a lot with them before people pointed out that you get subpar rooms, and worse treatment. Like, a lot. 150 nights or so. And I do confirm those rumours, many subpar rooms, sleep next to elevator, that wonky corner room that is smaller than the others, ... I liked it because it was business travel to an area without a Hilton or Mariott, so I still got some points for my personal holidays. But now years later, I still use expedia a lot. Somehow their prices are better than what Hilton can offer, even if I call them up for a price match (because I do prefer hilton points over Expedia points). Same for IHG. Yes I get the occasional room with the broken door on the closet, and sleep next to the elevator practically alwyas, but anytime I needed support from Expedia, they came through. And I use them for personal travel if I actually have to pay for it myself
wayfinder 3y ago
Still saves a lot of money a lot of time and I've never had a problem with a booking company and I've booked a lot of things via booking companies. That doesn't mean I won't go to a hotel website if it's a chain I have points with or I won't avoid a booking company that looks sus. Eventually you figure out whether you should be using a booking site or the hotel website.
nebula8804 3y ago
Its not like hotels are some amazing entity to deal with. Many hotels are stuck in prehistoric times. Story: After being burned multiple times via booking.com and other third party sites, I tried to book directly with the hotel. I was planning a last minute trip with multiple stops and so i just booked a hotel and forgot about it thinking that once I arrive in Ireland i'll look up the details. There was this hotel in Ireland that accepted my booking, charged my damn card the day after the first night, but never actually sent me any confirmation or any emails. When I arrived I didn't remember whatever stupid quaint name the hotel was because I had booked about two weeks prior. I guess this was my bad because I was used to a hotel freaking emailing you something when you book. When I arrived I was desperately trying to search for any indication that I made the booking and my credit card didn't even have a record. I gave up and ended up booking elsewhere. Then all of a sudden after the first night I got charged. I was absolutely livid. I demanded an explanation. Turns out what happened was then when I first tried to book, their email form had an issue where my broswers autocomplete added the name of my email after the .com so it was email@gmail.comemail. The site rejected it and I realized the error. I hadn't entered my credit card info so I thought I was fine. I resubmitted it with the correct email and then entered my credit card info. Booking was accepted.....turns out their system somehow retained the first email and send out the confirmation to that email and they had no indication that the email bounced until the person looked up the issue AFTER they had charged me. Whats even crazier is that on the second day they emailed me first asking where I was before I could reach out to them! So they had the correct email in their records but their internal billing system captured the wrong email! You can't win either way it seems! Fortunately I had a long email chain where they admitted their system never sent out a confirmation. my credit card company sided with me in this regard when I attempted a chargeback.
- vikingerik 3y ago
  So you literally forgot what hotel you booked... and entered the wrong email... and they emailed you anyway about the no-show, with someone probably manually fixing the address to contact you... and you're still blaming the hotel for being hard to deal with? I'm not so sure the problems were on the hotel's end here.

nebula8804 3y ago

Travel just sucks regardless. It feels like solving this problem is harder than putting people on Mars. There are too many bad actors in the system, nothing is really standardized so customers can't compare or new businesses can't compete 1 to 1. Its all scams at literally every level starting with "travel influencers" > booking sites > transportation to/from airports > the airports themselves > airlines > hotels and finally > the actual activities to do when you arrive. All layers are optimized to scrape as much as they can from your wallet. As a CS person, this unoptimized situation really grinds my gears.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ttymck 3y ago
> optimized to scrape as much as they can from your wallet. What should they be optimized for?
- nebula8804 3y ago
  Competing against each other but because of the lack of 1 to 1 mapping of offerings it is really hard for consumers to differentiate so there isn't real competition.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
scarface_74 3y ago
My wife and I literally travel 7 months of the year flying around to different cities and staying in hotels. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966 It’s not that difficult. I have a primary and secondary airline (Delta and American) and a primary and secondary hotel brand (Hilton and Hyatt). I know the corresponding apps and loyalty programs inside and out. I know what to expect when I travel. When we get to a city or before we go, we search for “top things to do in $City”. Admittedly, this would be a bit harder once we start flying overseas and we will have to do more research. We are starting our second year and the only international travel we have planned right now are mostly within US time zones.

thedigitalone 3y ago

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/ej1Su https://ghostarchive.org/archive/ej1Su

mighmi 3y ago

Hostelworld has absolutely cornered the hostel market, with most venues signing away pricing. This allows hostelworld to equalize prices in a given location, raising them above board although occupancy is down (many empty places during the busy season) while the guests are focused in a few places (as lower rated places can't lower their prices). So for hostels, 3rd party booking is all that is left. Often, contacting them directly, they won't even know what their price is (while a few years ago they would give a discount to hostelworld, hostelbookers etc.)

nocoiner 3y ago

99% of the time, you’ll get the same or better deal by booking online with the hotel directly. (Airfares, I’m less sure - the proliferation of hyper segmented economy and fees make me dubious about what the actual all-in cost of any given flight is.) And the other 1% of the time, calling the hotel will get you the same (or better) outcome or you’ll find out straight from the horse’s mouth they don’t actually have any availability for the room you want, and you’ll save yourself a lot of grief upon arrival.

landgenoot 3y ago
> calling the hotel will get you the same (or better) outcome Not my experience. In Europe, in low-end hotels / B&B's they will get annoyed. Wouldn't it be possible to build a decentralized booking.com/expedia alternative based on activity pub?
- j1elo 3y ago
  My experience in Europe is that some low-end places (especially apartments) gave me a phone number or even a card with contact details, and told me to call them directly next time so I could save the Booking fee. Makes sense: remove the middleman!
  - landgenoot 3y ago
    Yes, that is after they have had you as a guest. That is different from strangers calling them demanding a lower price.
  - xwdv 3y ago
    No, they say call direct so you can pay higher prices and not those online promo deals.
j1elo 3y ago
I learned from calling that hotels have a set of rooms that are reserved exclusively for Booking. So they might tell you no availability at this time, but Booking showing that they have "only 2 rooms left in this place".

nness 3y ago

The interesting thing for me is that a lot of people assume Skyscanner does what Google Flights actually does... Maybe a decade or so ago it was only an aggregator or maybe it was always a booking agent that just felt more transparent at the time, so no one noticed. As an aside, Google Flights is a fantastic — but at least in my recent experience — prices for multi-city bookings are off by 10-20% then the price quoted by the airline. Enough to make me think the taxes are just omitted or calculated differently...

Supermancho 3y ago

https://archive.ph/tpqui https://archive.ph/tpqui

vrc 3y ago

The issue is agent v. merchant. Historically Expedia uses the merchant model (hood inventory, company as seller), and Booking used to prefer the agent model (no inventory, venue as seller). The former allows some advantage to what the company can offer but with added inventory risk, and means that the hotel doesn’t see you as “their” customer. With the agency model you do have recourse with the venue and will likely be a “normal” room to them. Unfortunately Booking is increasingly shifting towards the merchant model to find more profits.

tonymet 3y ago

This reminds my of the scams I encountered two weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37447652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37447652 I recommend booking in person you will save a lot. In an extreme example: we booked part of a trip to Greece ahead of time and part on the spot. The in-person bookings were > 75% cheaper than the pre-booked stays, and the quality was the same or better It’s not zero risk. sometimes a hotel will be booked and you move on. But if you appreciate a little spontaneity it’s very much worthwhile

xnx 3y ago

Hotel pricing tools are useless if they don't include arbitrary "resort fees" hotels can spring on you when you're standing in the lobby at midnight after a full day of travel.