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Comment by ratww | Hacker News Reader

I would say hotels are better in general, sure, but there's plenty of exceptions.

The worst for me was a hotel in Paris I booked via Booking.com. It was completely different from the announced, and had several issues, such as having an outside bathroom without a lockable door. Luckily it closed during the pandemic.

Booking.com not only fought tooth and nail to charge me, claiming to my credit card that I needed to be charged since I "actually stayed at the hotel", but they then deleted my review claiming that "I didn't stay at the hotel". The key to getting a chargeback was sending the email of the deleted review to the credit card company.

Today I just search using Booking.com but make reservations via phone.

The problem is not AirBnB or Booking.com. The problem is "internet companies". They all suck.

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I learned (the hard way), that hotels have "ghetto rooms," that they can't book out to other guests (think next to the elevators or vending, or with dysfunctional amenities).

If you book with one of the booking agencies (I will not name the two that I used), the hotel will often give you one of these rooms, off the bat. You can complain, and they'll get you another one, but that is not something that you want to do, when you just checked in at 11PM, and your first meeting is at 8AM, the next morning.

BTW: Hotels are not supposed to do that, but they do, anyway. It's hard to prove.

Please name the names so we can avoid your fate

Every hotel has 'good' and 'bad' rooms in this sense, and they will absolutely prefer putting their loyal/higher-paying/most-likely to complain[1] guests into the 'good' ones. The 'bad' ones are often the last on the list to get filled.

[1] That's because if the front-desk guy/gal has any agency in this, they will absolutely not try to put a Karen into a bad room. Because they don't want to deal with his/her freakout over the noise of the vending machine, or the elevator, or some other factor that they can't control, but will get the guest to complain to management.

I'm not up to doing that, because lawyers. Also, the fault really lies with the hotels; not the booking services (one hotel was in London, another in Manhattan).

However, if you search the English alphabet for the letters between "N" and "Q," you are likely to find the first letter of the name of each booking service (not hotel).

Talk about a chilling effect, lawyers silencing anonymous online message boards.

Well, I choose not to post anonymously. As a result, I am more careful about what I "say" online, than many (Actually, a lot of folks that think they are "anonymous," are not, in fact, "anonymous," if a Big Dog gets pissed at them).

Of course, I've had pretty bad [1] hotel rooms booking directly with major chains as well.

[1] Bad as in little or no natural lighting, unusually small, etc. Some of the time a tall big city hotel abuts other buildings and has a lightwell and, especially on the lower floors, things can be pretty dark.

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