Overbooking airplanes means someone might be stuck sitting in the terminal for hours. Overbooking.com means someone might be made to drive around late at night, tired, with nowhere to sleep.
It also might mean you miss getting somewhere in an emergency, like visiting a loved one before surgery. And it also might mean you miss things you couldn't miss, like a job interview.
One of the worst memories of my life started by missing a flight (and it wasn't my fault).
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/business/hotels-overbooke...
It sounds petty but having paid for a room, being exhausted from a Pacific flight and being moved to a hotel twice the walk from the conference (important if you're going to be back and forth all day) was mildly annoying.
I'm not 100% sure - but the one time I was walked I had picked the cheapest available room. You know those bullshitty-looking price differences where you can book on floors 9-11 for X and floors 12-14 for X+5? I suspected I had signalled my place on the hierarchy by picking the cheapest room available. Subsequently, especially while on an expense account (sorry, Intel! :-) ) I always picked the ever-so-slightly more expensive room and have never been walked again, even in the middle of conference season. This may be bogus reasoning, of course.
I have trip this coming month through Expedia and the last leg of our bargain basement flight got cancelled. The rep told me there were no flights for days surrounding our original flight date.
I had to sit on hold for a long time but I have to say they were great. United swept our transportation out from under our feet but the rep was able to wrangle a flight with fewer stops that arrives earlier without us having to pay the difference. We had those locked-in cheap tickets that charge you a couple hundred just to upgrade your ticket before the price difference is even considered.
Needless to say we were greatly relieved...
How so?
It sounds like a very reasonable policy -- the person responsible for making the mistake needs to rectify it.
No one's out of pocket -- the double booking was never going to make double revenue, after all. The time / inconvenience imposition is on the responsible party, who also likely has more service industry & local knowledge than the customer.
This policy makes me feel more positively towards booking.com.
As per TFA, AirBNB does that hand-wavey thing where they assert some problems are beyond their competence to solve -- the kinds of problems other sectors and organisations have already got policies and procedures in place to deal with.
She explained to me pretty thoroughly that the ticket change required higher approval to switch ticket classes and she seemed to do a bunch of back and forth with United. In all I was probably on the phone for 2 hours but on hold for 110 minutes of that while I was working.
I had no idea what would happen. I expected Expedia to punt me off to United to sort it out. But no, almost totally painless to my and my partner’s great relief.
Mind you I wonder if the order made a difference as we booked the flight, a vacation rental, and a car all at once through them and paid up front so the onus was sort of on them to make sure we could even check into our rental on time. And we’re heading to Kona so there’s not really an alternative mode of transportation available...
I've since sworn to only ever book the flight directly from the airline.
Another example is Marriot will commonly let the local management control inventory. They commonly use the cheapest room to book to max capacity and upgrade people until they are fully booked. It almost never makes sense to book a more expensive room unless you are booking within 30 days.
I would say most of these cases, the renter wouldn't have a car. I've been stuck in cafes after booking/Airbnb scams