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Comment by caw | Hacker News Reader

A few months ago I booked a hotel for a trip. I checked the 3rd parties, found a hotel and then tried to go direct. HHonors claims the best prices online if you're logged in--it was the same as the booking third party (Groupon Getaways via Expedia), except Groupon gave 10% back in Groupon Bucks.

I arrived at the hotel, they noted my HHonors basic membership and mentioned I wasn't receiving points due to booking with third party. I said I got the room for 10% less than their best online rate and their response was that I should have called bookings to talk to them. So now there's even more hoops to jump through to book direct? No thanks.

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I called a Hilton once after seeing the same place cheaper on HotelTonight, the woman said she couldn't match the rate... So I got it for the "impossible" to match rate (and the hotel paid a commission for the privilege!).

Price matching is great when it works, but infuriating when you can't actually back it up. It should all be automated, I can't imagine someone at Hilton is manually setting HotelTonight prices and not telling anyone.

Hilton is setting the distressed inventory price algorithmically and offering it to the GDS (or directly to HT), and no one local is empowered to override. You pay HotelTonight, They pay for your room with their corp MasterCard, and everyone is happy.

Some processes and business practices are super hard to change.

I know how HotelTonight works, but since they advertise matching the lowest price they should empower anyone doing booking to match the lowest price.

My mistake. I agree.

They are right.

Hotels will almost always match lowest rate because they care much more about having low vacancy and not having to pay booking.com for your reservation. And you won't sacrifice points or chances at upgrades.

Booking.com is a good way of finding low prices that hotels will match.

Hotel aggregators are best places to find low prices not booking.com. It's possible that Expedia family of sites have better deals which you won't see on booking.com. So TripAdvisor and Trivago are better.

Disclosure: Used to work at TripAdvisor.

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