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Travel website Booking.com leaves hoteliers thousands of dollars out of pocket (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 41 points 11 months ago

All of these middle-men platforms are out of control. They're running a website with listing cards, why would that make them huge multinational companies. Listen I get that with some growth they need to make some amount of money and have a team, but booking.com was trying to open a 5000 people campus in Amsterdam, why the fuck is that needed.

At the end of the day the actual business is between the hotel and the customer, these guys should be making bare cents on these transactions at most.

[-] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago

Judging by their revenue and profit listed in the article, these dirtbaga are making 20% profit on every booking while offering little to nothing to the rentals involved.

[-] [email protected] 39 points 11 months ago

Fleecing the little guy, just because they can. Really scummy business practices.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

People not inside hotel industry would have zero clue about what kind of a leeching monopoly that is. Especially for little /boutique ones.

[-] [email protected] 35 points 11 months ago

Not a surprise at all. In the UK I used to take calls for activehotels.com, a booking.com subsidiary, and this company had a deal with yell.com (formerly the Yellow Pages, a prestigious phone book in the days before the internet) where they replaced all the hotel phone numbers with their booking line. We'd get people calling saying they'd just left the hotel and forgot their wallet, but we weren't allowed to give them the hotel number.

They don't care about customers, be they hotel guests or the hotels themselves.

[-] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

Was there any benefit to the company you worked for?

Asking because the whole "book directly" advice has existed for 10 years and if we just followed it, sites like booking.com would die out.

And yet it still stands.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

I usually look at Priceline to get a feel for all hotels somewhere. This is especially useful if you're not tied to a certain brand, or somewhere with a lot of independent hotels. I wouldn't mind booking directly, but I have actually had Priceline give a better rate. I've also called the hotel directly to double-check their pet policy, ask if they'd match the rate while I'm on the phone with them, and they refuse. So I book with Priceline.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

The benefit for them is that once your public phone number is no more un your control, they can ransom you any amount of money in perpetuity

Once an agency that pretended to be Google wanted to sell this feature to us "in this way you will know how many people will call you from seeing your Google maps profile, it's great and it's mandatory" - yeah but then once I stop paying the subscription I lose all the incoming phone calls

[-] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Travel website Booking.com has left many hotel operators and other partners across the globe thousands of dollars out of pocket for months on end, blaming the lack of payment on a “technical issue”.

The issue is widespread in Thailand, Indonesia and Europe among hoteliers who are venting their frustrations in Facebook groups as rumours swirl about the cause of the failure to pay.

“Both room nights and gross bookings came in ahead of our previous expectations as a result of the favourable demand environment,” the CEO, Glenn Fogel, said at the time.

It has led many to attempt other ways to reach the company, including LinkedIn messaging, directs emails to the Booking group CEO and looking up individual financial officers online.

Emily Stanley, an Australian running a two-bedroom villa in Bali, managed to get paid out last week for the A$11,000 she was owed since March by tracking down a finance officer on Facebook.

Stanley said the payment delay meant she couldn’t pay rent on her own home, and was forced to take a travel nursing job where accommodation was provided for free.

The original article contains 1,023 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 82%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
166 points (97.7% liked)

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