Timeline for Rebooking same hotel for cheaper price - ethical?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 3, 2021 at 22:31 | comment | added | Simon Rose | I have just done this (twice!) for the same hotel in London. Though my booking in both cases was direct (Premier Inn). | |
| Feb 27, 2017 at 15:27 | comment | added | user13044 | @JonathanReez - Booking.com and Agoda.com are part of the same business selling out of the same allotment in many cases. And yes they block XX number of rooms at many of the properties and yes they can be liable for block units they don't sell. They don't do this with every hotel, as each hotel has a different way of setting up contracts with re-sellers. | |
| Feb 27, 2017 at 12:43 | comment | added | JonathanReez♦ | @MatthieuM If I'm not mistaken the hotel updates Booking.com's systems with each new booking, this makes it perfectly feasible. | |
| Feb 27, 2017 at 12:35 | comment | added | Matthieu M. | @JonathanReez: I am not sure it's as much a matter of charging as it is a matter of IT. I expect booking.com will "pre-reserve" rooms to ensure that when it says they're available, they really are. Their brand would suffer if clients are rebuked at the hotel because of overbooking. Also they can't go querying 1000s of hotels IT systems for availability for a single request, it would not be sustainable and would have terrible latency, so they need a local (aggregated) view of the inventory. | |
| Feb 27, 2017 at 11:53 | comment | added | JonathanReez♦ | @MatthieuM. The hotel can set it's own pricing on Booking.com if they want to. Also note that Booking.com never charges hotel guests, only the hotel itself can do so. This is different on services such as Agoda. | |
| Feb 27, 2017 at 11:49 | comment | added | Matthieu M. | @JonathanReez: It's a bit more complicated. What is likely happening is that booking.com reserves X rooms from the hotel, attempts to sell them, and then returns the unsold rooms to the hotel (without compensation). Of course, booking.com will attempt to sell the rooms regardless, they don't make profit off unsold ones; in that sense they are losing money if they don't sell. | |
| Feb 27, 2017 at 7:37 | comment | added | JonathanReez♦ | @Tom AFAIK Booking.com doesn't contract for XX rooms, they don't pay anything if a room goes unbooked. They're simply a booking service. | |
| Feb 26, 2017 at 20:37 | comment | added | user13044 | Actually the OP has a contract with booking.com and it is booking.com that is offering the lower price to sell off its block. The big OTAs like booking.com contract for XX rooms each day and guarantee payment for that block. They don't want to eat the unsold rooms so they discount them big time, just before the dropdead date. | |
| Feb 26, 2017 at 19:57 | comment | added | Aganju | I have done that before, multiple times, nobody ever cared or even mentioned it. No worries. They will probably not even realize it. | |
| Feb 26, 2017 at 15:30 | vote | accept | SBF | ||
| Feb 26, 2017 at 14:20 | history | answered | JonathanReez♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |