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.
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.
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?