Timeline for How does Expedia manage to sell a room significantly cheaper than the hotel itself?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
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| Jan 5, 2019 at 14:59 | comment | added | Damon | It's also worth to note that everything, really everything in life is fraud. Including hotel room fares. What you pay and what you get has absolutely zero correlation, and profit margins are much, much larger than what you may think. If they can, they'll sell at the highest price. If nobody falls for that, things may as well go for half as much, and there's still profit. I recently RMAed a harddisk which Amazon sold for 130€. The CN22 declaration on the returned new disk said "12.30€". So if you buy something 50% cheaper, there's still a 40% profit marge... | |
| Jan 4, 2019 at 12:19 | comment | added | Matthieu M. | @alephzero: It's actually worse than that, most hotels don't even know how many rooms they have available because some distributors (possibly Expedia) pre-reserve a number of rooms in advance but will return the non-sold ones only 24h (or less) before check-in time. So the hotel is blind, Expedia is blind (they only know of the rooms they reserved), etc... nobody knows how many rooms are available :/ | |
| Jan 3, 2019 at 11:31 | vote | accept | karancan | ||
| Jan 2, 2019 at 17:25 | comment | added | Willeke♦ | In this case the deal on the site was much better than what the hotel was offering from its front desk. | |
| Jan 2, 2019 at 17:24 | comment | added | alephzero | @Willeke "May also be that the direct bookable rooms were full" - don't believe the "number of rooms still available" quoted either on booking sites or at the hotel desk. Often the number is set artificially low, to encourage people to "book something now while they still can" rather than carry on searching for a better deal. | |
| Jan 2, 2019 at 16:08 | comment | added | Willeke♦ | I even heard that some hotels tell walk in customers to check a certain booking site and book the room from there, rather than from the hotel, as the site was a lot cheaper and they could not meet that price. (May also be that the direct bookable rooms were full.) | |
| Jan 2, 2019 at 15:44 | comment | added | Tom | That last paragraph is worth a +1. I've walked into hotels to ask for a room after checking their prices online, and if they quote me a higher price, I show them the online price and so far I've always immediately received the room at the price listed online, whether on their own website or some booking service. | |
| Jan 2, 2019 at 14:22 | history | edited | Zach Lipton | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 115 characters in body
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| Jan 2, 2019 at 5:16 | history | answered | Zach Lipton | CC BY-SA 4.0 |