I use booking.com both as a customer and hotelier.

Usually I’ll search booking.com to find a hotel to stay and if the hotel belongs to a brand let’s say Hilton or Marriott I’ll email them directly to get a better price. For smaller hotels or apartments I use booking.com for the security it provides me with. By security I mean that in the unfortunate case that the hotel of apartment I booked is overbooked or something similar, I trust booking.com and on its ability to force the hotelier to reaccomodate me somewhere else. I’ve had this happened to me previously as a client and booking.com managed to straight it out. Now if you book directly through a small hotel or apartment or even use the likes of Airbnb or something at points you risk being out of accommodation and just getting your money back which in a busy season that there is no availability left in the area and the closest room is 2 times more expensive than you booked. I know that people think that’s an extreme scenario but let me tell you that I run my hotel like airlines do. It’s cheaper to overbook and relocate someone to a near hotel having 105% capacity than having running lower than 100% on high season. And of course I had that happen to me as a client previously and just getting money back wasn’t nice at all. But overall look at hotels and email them, most hotels will knock off the 15-20% commission booking.com is charging.

>It’s cheaper to overbook and relocate someone to a near hotel having 105% capacity than having running lower than 100% on high season.

And your relocated customers are surely happy about that.

I (used to) travel a lot for work and the one thing I am pretty sure is that I never returned to a hotel that overbooked and had me relocate, additionally I told everyone I knew about the shitty behaviour and made sure that noone in the company I worked for ever booked there again.

Now, I make some consulting work for a small, independent, hotel, and - luckily enough - even if it is "cheaper" to overbook, the management holds the care and respect for the customer well above that.

Thankfully we have websites such as booking.com to sniff out fraudulent operations like GP's. Reviews where guests have been turned away with a valid reservation are the reddest of red flags for me.

Dirty rooms can be cleaned, cockroaches can be eradicated, but intentional overselling indicates an incurable dishonesty at the heart of management.

Marriott/Hilton/IHG/Accor/Choice/Wyndham/Hyatt, everyone overcooks. The systems are set to allow a certain number of rooms to be overbooked every night, since there is a high probability of a certain percentage of people not showing up or wanting to cancel every night. The more rooms a hotel has, the more they can overbook. Although all the major brands have a policy of providing a free room night and transportation to an equivalent quality hotel nearby.

All the airlines do it to, too. Also, if a VIP comes in wanting to spend a month at the hotel and the hotel has to overbook a couple nights, they’re not going to turn away thousands in revenue. Even the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan cancels reservations when the Saudi royal family is in town.

Sadly, many (if not most) hotels will oversell their capacity. I'm now a Marriott Platinum member and one of the benefits of being Platinum is that they are bound to pay a premium to me if they oversell my room. IIRC it's 200%, meaning they don't charge me, buy me a comparable nearby room AND give me a credit for the original reservation price.

I would sometimes need to arrive to check-in really late, like 3 a.m. If the hotel was nearly full I'd actually get a call on my mobile phone from the desk manager around 10p or 11p asking if I was still going to be checking in. I'm sure it was only because the hotel would get dinged by corporate for having to pay me out if they gave away my room. Too bad they don't care enough to do that for everyone before selling out their room from under them.

An alternate strategy I use with other chains when I'm concerned there might be an oversold situation is to call the hotel around the normal check-in time (~3p) and get the front desk to check-in my room while I'm on the phone and insist on getting the actual room number. That way, it'll be some other poor schmuck who trying to check in at midnight that will get shafted.

Maybe there is something different where you live (I presume the US).

Here (Italy) you make a reservation, and if you do that through one of the portals such as booking.com you surely already provide your credit card number and the authorization to either bill the room price or bill the "no-show", which usually is one night unless you cancel 24 or 48 hours prior your reservation.

For the hotel it is a win situation, as the room you reserved will have no costs attached (laundry, maid, cleaning as it will be not used) and no costs for (the actual ingredients of) your breakfast, while the hotel will cash the same money.

Not only, a few (again according to my personal standards dishonest) hotels will bill you the "no show" and sell anyway "your" room to someone arriving late, thus doubling the income.

>Now, I make some consulting work for a small, independent, hotel, and - luckily enough - even if it is "cheaper" to overbook, the management holds the care and respect for the customer well above that.

Overbooking and caring about the customer is a completely different thing.

Overbooking is about running a business. We are almost on 2020 and currently its a stats game for any business out there. In order to min/max my own business I have to overbook, that's how i'll turn profit.

Caring and respecting the customer - anyone that is not doing that shouldn't be running a hotel imho. (Ryanair as an example should never ever run a hotel)

Also on hotels you do have ratings nowadays, service is not something you can compromise on. If you are having unhappy customers then that will show on your tripadvisor, booking.com, hotels.com and whatever have you. Then you'll have to drop your prices, meaning making less and devaluing your product. Customer service/happiness should be the number one priority for any hotel out there.

My kind of hotel allows me to make a profit by capitalizing on overbookings. I've kept the hotel on 4 stars whilst is an actual 5 star hotel with all the amenities a 5 stars hotel has. I kept it that way because the expectations of the customer are lower when they visit a 4 star hotel vs a 5 star hotel.

The pricing nowadays doesn't go by stars anyways it goes by rating. The higher your ratings and publicity the higher your price. There is less than a handful of 5 stars around me that can be more expensive than I am. The rest of them are cheaper due to their ratings/size etc.

When a customer arrives and learns that his room has been overbooked, he also learns that he'll be staying at a close-by hotel that usually is of 5 stars. The quality of the hotel that I'll put my customer because he remains my customer is either similar or higher than my hotel. If the customer check the prices also for that hotel, he'll find that they are the same as the room he booked. (I get them cheaper through the hotels I do business with and that's where profit comes from).

But I'll never have the customer feel that he is getting less than he paid for, or have his holidays ruined or altered.

8/10 times he'll stay at a slightly cheaper hotel than mine but of similar or higher quality/star rating. 2/10 i'll go in the bank and i'll be putting the customer on a more expensive hotel than mine.

Again its a stats game but I won't compromise on customer service and that's running a hotel.

Also personally let me tell you that I am not very keen towards returning customers in my area. My experience has shown me that returning customers expect the hotel prices and offers to remain the same and the hotel is currently on a developing area which has its prices going up yearly. I had returning customers asking why I was X more expensive this year than their last visit in 2016. For me its straight forward: inflation and the market prices around me will set the prices to where they need to be. For the customer is a bit more complicated and the customer will usually believe that my hotel is just becoming more expensive without a reason. Again this thing on the returning customer is totally personal and it affects my area as its highly touristic and not a business area and my hotel being of a certain boutique size. I am aware that most hotels out there have loyalty programs and they do make their money of returning customers.

Again as a hotelier I'll never ever compromise on quality and try to capitalize on someones holidays by ruining them or making them feel awful. If there is no room available at my price point around the area, the customer is going to stay at a more expensive room than mine and me going out of pocket on that.

It depends a lot on the kind of hotel, the type of customers, the location, and a number of other things, incuding the distance to the other hotel(s).

If you are having tourists as customers, they may be not much inconvenienced by having to move to a nearby (really near) other hotel, if you are working with business customers they won't likely ever return.

In both cases, by my personal standards (not necessarily valid universally) when someone books a room in a hotel he/she is entering in a contract where one side guarantees the availability of the (specific, meaning in the specific hotel/building) room and the other promises to pay for that room (or the cancellation rate) and overbooking and moving the customer to another hotel, no matter whether it is 4, 5 ot 6 stars is:

1) a breach of that unwritten contract

2) a lack of respect towards the customer

And the "stats game" is the usual (poor) excuse to justify a less than correct behaviour, worse - if you are doing that extensively and to tourists (possibly foreigners that are not familiar with the city or the local language) - you are actually leveraging on their inferior position and their lack of power/alternatives.

Thanks for taking the time to write it up

> if the hotel belongs to a brand let’s say Hilton or Marriott I’ll email them directly to get a better price.

Does this work differently than calling the front desk? I tried that a few times over the years and never got a price improvement over the online brokers or the hotel website itself.

>Does this work differently than calling the front desk? I tried that a few times over the years and never got a price improvement over the online brokers or the hotel website itself.

That depends (now) from a lot of factors and until not so long ago the contract with booking.com didn't allow to publicize lower prices than what was on the booking.com site.

But it depends also on the hotel (how it is organized, if it is a chain, etc.).

Think at the front desk employee as an unsupervised/lazy employee of a largish organization.

You book through booking.com, it means less work for him/her and no change in his/her pay (but less revenue for the hotel).

I have had more than once conversations on the telephone with the front desk of an hotel, where they just told me to "go book online".

If I have no time I simply choose another hotel, if I have some spare time I call again and talk to the director about the matter.

Now think at the front desk employee as someone that has an interest in the income of the hotel (directly or indirectly) , the amount of work is the same (as there is not any "web reservation center" or the like) whether your booking is made by means of booking.com or directly (at the telephone and possibly with a confirmation e-mail) and he/she has the possibility to increase - even if slightly - the income of the company.

Bigger hotels tend to have a reservations team. Not every hotel will give you a better offer than whats on booking but depending on how you'll put it on your email etc yes you do get some discount against booking.com. Don't forget that a hotel has to pay 15-20% fee on the booking at booking.com and also has to deal with booking.com's rating system afterwards.

For me so far its worked everytime I am emailing the reservations team at a hotel. (I am in their trade though and tend to use my business email when booking) I reckon phoning a hotel might be harder to get you a discount because most of the times the frontdesk staff won't put you through to the reservations rep because he might be unavailable or whatever so they'll just give you whatever price the system tells them which is what you'll get on their website if you go to book directly. Its important to be able to contact the person that can amend the booking prices and frontdesk staff usually can't do that.

After long at booking.com, I once went directly to a hotel website to book, but still ended up with a booking.com reservation...

I've made around 50 reservations in last couple of years through them and I really like it for the uniform experience across chains, cities and countries. They've been helpful and I've never run and into actual problems. I also probably ignore their dark patterns subconsciously.. I dont have proper incentives to try other platforms, agoda, trivago etc. seem worse (without trying).

> I use it to remind myself that very few people think like me, and making things to my liking (straight and to the point) will get me nowhere.

There are many people that like straight and to the point. Most people would actually say they like it, although more are susceptible to these sales tactics than would like to admit.

Booking.com is actually one of the best experiences I have with reserving places. It's quick for me to reserve something, and in my experience works better than most alternatives. Airbnb would be a far better experience but it targets different properties.

I also tend to use Booking.com more often than not. I don't like the pressure tactics but in the end all I'm doing is looking at the price, the location map, the amenities, and the reviews. The UI lets me do all that easily so I can often find a great place without much trouble.

The convenience of not having to learn another interface is worth it to me. booking.com may suck, but the individual hotel's website will probably be less usable in the basic sense of taking more clicks to get a booking done and be unfamiliar. Agoda is no better than booking.com, Google doesn't have enough coverage. So what's the alternative?

I use roomkey.com, and always reserve and email directly with hotels themselves to confirm stay details, as well as secure the lowest non commissionable price.

Tried to take a look and the website took over 30 seconds to load, lol. Guessing it was only ever tested in the US.

I use Expedia, it's the same. But it's always cheaper than contacting the hotel directly either via website or phone. Always.

Never in a million years. I booked a hotel in Hollywood, specifying a king size bed through Expedia, and I had to go around with the hotel management about it to actually get the king size bed. They told me that the booking they got from Expedia was not specific. That was the last time I used Expedia. In fact I won't use any of the booking sites because I don't need the complication of wondering who is responsible for a problem.

Hilton/Marriott/IHG/choice/Wyndham/Hyatt all guarantee cheaper prices for reserving directly on their websites. Google them, if you see a lower price they will give you a hefty discount, but the computer systems shouldn’t allow it.

Have you ever tried to tell them that you're getting x price on Booking? They have always at least matched the price in my experience.