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Comment by frereubu | Hacker News Reader

It's not just the front end though. I used booking.com to book a hotel room with my wife and daughter, and it had a label on the booking option saying "your child's stay is free!" or similar. Turns out that her staying might be free, but the bed for her to sleep in is £30 per night, which was an extra I had to pay when we arrived. Booking.com is fine for finding somewhere because so many places are on it, but in the future I'll always book directly with the location through their website.

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> in the future I'll always book directly with the location through their website

I've tried this with a hotel in Italy, and found out that the price was actually higher. I couldn't believe it. I actually asked the reception whether they were really sure. Yes, this is our price, they said.

That's because the terms of use of bookings.com insist that you can't offer a price lower than on booking.com.

I don't even if this is legal in your country, but in Germany they ruled against it: https://www.thelocal.de/20210518/germany-upholds-ban-on-book...

Beyond the TOS nobody reads (not even sellers), this sort of difference might be due to a number of factors. It could well be that they provide rooms discounted to Booking.com because they want to fill a certain amount no matter what, and then do price-anchoring for other rooms on their website. This is more or less like them giving rooms massively discounted to package sellers (Thomas Cook etc).

100% wrong. You can't advertise a lower price - for obvious reasons, but you can of course give a lower price to people who call, email or walk in.

Many hotels are idiotic about this and will put a cheaper price on booking, then wonder why booking is taking all their reservations. Unexplainable...

It's common with many online businesses. On large online aggregators (booking.com, amazon, steam etc.), they have to post a low price to be competetive in a sea of other available option. Whereas, on their own website, they can charge whatever they want, and hope to get a price-insensitive sucker who didn't check on amazon first.

You can often get them to drop the cost if you say "if you're not going to match them I'll just book it on booking.com" because they'll get less income. That rather depends on the person you're talking to caring about the hotel's income though, so the larger they are the less likely it is.

I'm very much ashamed of this, but when the receptionist couldn't match the Booking.com price I made a reservation through Booking.com while I was in the lobby. Two minutes later the booking came through in their system and I got the keys to the room.

I don't see it as something to be ashamed of as a customer. Some manager made a nutty pricing descision and now they have to live with stupid behaviour.

Why ashamed? I don’t see anything wrong with this.

I sure hope you used the hotel's wifi in the lobby to do so! ;)

Did you ask Booking.com to solve the discrepancy? After all, the extra charge may have been something the hotel came up with.

The charge was buried deep in the small print on Booking.com so technically they'd advised me about the charge. I challenged it, but it was a live chat with someone who clearly had no power to change anything. I decided I'd rather just suck up the charge and treat it as a learning experience rather than spend any more time on it.

From their customer FAQ:

> "Typically, additional costs for children (including extra beds/cots) are not included in the price. Please contact the property directly 1-2 days before your stay to find out more." https://www.booking.com/tpi_faq.html

After this, what's the point of using Booking.com?

That’s so messed up. I’d probably report their dark pattern crap to the advertising standards agency. They don’t like that sort of thing.

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