European hotel owners are angry over the "best price" clause at the online booking giant they say had kept them from offering rooms for less on their own websites.
That platform should be open source/free/public. There’s no reason they need over 24 000 employees to manage what is basically a listings website. They only succeed by meddling with transactions between two other parties, and their actual role is extremely limited. I just need to find the place and see price and availability, and the hotels just need to be shown to customers, that’s it that’s the need, everything else is just tech bro nonsense to squeeze as much as possible out of both customers and hotels. I’m glad they’re a big European company but they shouldn’t exist at all (same with Uber and all these other platforms).
Well if the hotels would provide their prices transparently, booking.com would die quickly.
The value booking.com adds, in my opinion, is to force hotels to actually provide information in machine readble format to booking.com who then have a decent interface across all hotels.
Agreed, their site offers much more than just a simple listing. It is so tedious to have to navigate multiple different websites, trying to find the relevant information. Having a single, straightforward, centralised source showing availability, options and prices was amazing when they first started. Hotels have improved their online presence a lot in the last 20 years, but being able to filter consistently for detailed parameters is still valuable, as are their reviews.
I just wish they had stuck with their core business; I don’t want to be offered insurance or car rental or any of the rest of it :/
There is another case why I always use booking except for places I know. A place once did a bait and switch on me. I wrote them (the place) an email that I want the room (this was even a different location mind you) that was advertised, they basically told me to go fuck myself. I forwarded the mail exchange to booking. The place contacted me thirty minutes later, apologized and assured me I’d get the room I booked, which I did then. Funny how that works.
They also offer houses like airbnb, I actually had some issues with a hotel once and they definitely helped, so it’s not just a listing, they also provide some service if you get scammed.
That platform should be open source/free/public. There’s no reason they need over 24 000 employees to manage what is basically a listings website. They only succeed by meddling with transactions between two other parties, and their actual role is extremely limited. I just need to find the place and see price and availability, and the hotels just need to be shown to customers, that’s it that’s the need, everything else is just tech bro nonsense to squeeze as much as possible out of both customers and hotels. I’m glad they’re a big European company but they shouldn’t exist at all (same with Uber and all these other platforms).
Well if the hotels would provide their prices transparently, booking.com would die quickly. The value booking.com adds, in my opinion, is to force hotels to actually provide information in machine readble format to booking.com who then have a decent interface across all hotels.
Agreed, their site offers much more than just a simple listing. It is so tedious to have to navigate multiple different websites, trying to find the relevant information. Having a single, straightforward, centralised source showing availability, options and prices was amazing when they first started. Hotels have improved their online presence a lot in the last 20 years, but being able to filter consistently for detailed parameters is still valuable, as are their reviews.
I just wish they had stuck with their core business; I don’t want to be offered insurance or car rental or any of the rest of it :/
There is another case why I always use booking except for places I know. A place once did a bait and switch on me. I wrote them (the place) an email that I want the room (this was even a different location mind you) that was advertised, they basically told me to go fuck myself. I forwarded the mail exchange to booking. The place contacted me thirty minutes later, apologized and assured me I’d get the room I booked, which I did then. Funny how that works.
Sure there’s value there but does booking really need 24k employees and billions in revenue to make that happen?
They also offer houses like airbnb, I actually had some issues with a hotel once and they definitely helped, so it’s not just a listing, they also provide some service if you get scammed.