Booking.com smacked by EU competition bods. Yeah, yeah, yeah Booking.com has promised three European countries it will stop blocking other hotel and holiday deal sites, following an EU investigation. Competition authorities in Sweden, Italy and France have accepted assurances offered by the slumber search site that it will no longer force hotels to give it lower prices than everyone …
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That they aren't the cheapest.
I found a quote for a hotel on their site and found it a good 10% cheaper on another similar site.
You have to shop around.
Plus there is a hotel I use fairly frequently. On booking.com I can't book for one night. Go to the Hotel's own site and you can.
The booking conditions are not identical.
Hint - look at the pet clause.
This is what the hotels presently use to get around Booking.com contract. They publish on Booking.com a "no pets alowed rate" and they do a special "pets welcome rate" for direct booking. The pet rate is not advertised on Booking.com so Booking.com can go stuff it on their exclusivity clause.
I know at least several hotels in 4 countries which all do that (Bulgaria - 2, Spain 4 off the top of my head, Hungary - 1, Czech republic - 2 off the top of my head). And this is only the places I know and use :)
I'm seeing semi-permanent Google server-side based cookies. . .
. . . does that mean I have to go to a data-centre somewhere with a magnet to erase my cookies in the future? they are unerasable no matter what else I do. ( I set up a new fixed IPv4 PC, never been online before, and I searched Google.es for a speed-test program, did a speed-test - got 1GB/s upload & download, and now for the whole lan that hangs off this gateway PC, all the adverts are in Spanish - but I'm not in Spain. I just use random Google websites to try and de-bubble)
Also, I tried the two laptops in location One & contemporaneous phone call to family in location Two, we all tried to get a fare price for 9 people flying from UK to Greece on EasyJet, for a flight two months later. All four laptops got different prices, the prices changed all the time, (there were loads of seats available as all 4 x 9 seats blocs were available) After a few days they went up dramatically. So I bought, shudder, RyanAir. Saved a packet and there was much less wind/cookie/data-driven pricing!
They may be in that infinitesimal quantum of time when it is offered on their site.
I could not book via booking.com any of the usual sites I stop over the summer for next summer. I went direct and all of them had availability so I booked direct. I bet they will offer the remnants on booking.com ~ a couple of months before actual dates, but not prior to that.
Based on the market behavior, the 10% they used to charge were pallatable to everyone. The new commission from this year of 15% - not so much. So effectively, they shot themselves in the foot.
Three years ago I tried to book a hotel, where I have stayed before, by ringing them: no vacancies for the time I wanted. However, booking.com had rooms available in the same hotel - I booked, I stayed.
The following year I went straight to booking.com: no vacancies. I rang the hotel - got a room. In both cases, the two attempts were within minutes of each other.
Do such sites reserve rooms up to some deadline or do the hotels reserve rooms up to some deadline?
Booking.com (and other online travel agencies) will get their rooms from one or more Bedbanks (companies that buy up tons of rooms). If the Bedbank (or Bedbanks) they are using doesn't have availability then they won't show any, yet other travel agencies using different suppliers may still have some, as would the hotel directly.
It's also possible (indeed almost certain) that Booking.com contracts directly with many hotels. In those situations they will get an allocation, but again not access to the entire inventory. So still other channels could have rooms when they don't.
Source - I'm a software engineer for a large online travel agency (not booking.com!)
> I've turned up at a hotel booked through booking.com, and they are full, farming us off on another hotel!
It is is common practice in the hotel industry to overbook their rooms by a small margin, as they tend to get no shows and cancellations. When they do get enough no shows and cancellations, they end up with an overbooking which they then have to "Walk" to another hotel.
Disclosure - I work at the front desk of a hotel.
> Three years ago I tried to book a hotel, where I have stayed before, by ringing them: no vacancies for the time I wanted. However, booking.com had rooms available in the same hotel - I booked, I stayed.
This can happen where the hotels are not directly connected to Booking.com and have to update their inventory on the Bookink.com site manually. I have had this happen where my my hotel had sold out for a particular day and before we were able to get into Bookiing.com to close out inventory, had received a reservation through them, which we took. Luckily, we had a cancellation, which balanced it out.
The whole hotel booking site world is like a zoo. You've got booking sites doing deals with hotels, booking sites doing deals with bedbanks, booking sites that consolidate from other booking sites, possibly including other consolidators, and so ad infinitum. Over and above that is the suspicion that the hotel puts you in a crap room when you use a booking site.
I've never used Booking.com. As other commentards have pointed out, they rarely seem to be the cheapest, which makes this story rather surprising.
> I've never used Booking.com. As other commentards have pointed out, they rarely seem to be the cheapest, which makes this story rather surprising.
Speaking from experience, we have never put anyone in a "crap" room because they used a booking site to book. We want these people to have just a good experience as any other guest. If anything, we want to impress them, so next time they will book directly with us, saving us the cost of commission that we pay the booking site for that room.
As for being more expensive or cheapest, most hotels that deal with third party agents like Booking.com or Expedia, have to follow rate parity rules, meaning they cannot offer a rate to one site that is higher or lower than what they advertise on their own site or offer to another site. However, when the third party site books a room at a hotel, the hotel then pays them a commission on that room. It is not common, but it has happened where the third party site will offer a lower pre-paid rate to try and get a booking. Even though the third party site is offering the lower rate, which the guest has to pay up front, the site actually pays the hotel the full rate. They take a hit on their commission so as to undercut their competition and make the sale.
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