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Comment by catiopatio | Hacker News Reader

This reads like a bizarro-world advertisement.

You book through booking.com, and upon arrival, regularly find your reservation bumped due to overbooking?

That’s not positive for booking.com!

It is not booking that does the overbooking, it is the hotels. It doesn't matter that I made the reservation in advance, pre-paid, and spoke to someone at the hotel the day prior to arrival. They probably give away my room to avoid confrontation with someone else who was overbooked. By the time I roll into town, which is usually 1-2am because I like driving at night, the hotel is locked down tight and the clerk is pretty comfortable behind his intercom telling me to sleep in my car because they gave away my room (yeah! they actually said that). So I called booking and 45 minutes later I'm checking into a hotel (they had to call several places and talk to people to find one that actually had a room because the computers kept seeing availabilities even though the hotels were at capacity).

Not sure if it needs to be said, but try informing your hotel the day of, but close enough to when you're actually arriving that you're speaking to the same person, that you will be checking in late so they're less likely to give it to a walk in.

People _do_ book hotels and no-show enough that they're more than willing to assuming you're not gonna use it if you don't give them a heads up.

They'll overbook before the day

We did that, and to emphasize again we pre-paid, they could have left the room empty for the entire night and been compensated. Instead they gave it away, and this has happened several times now. I suspect what is going on is they give away any rooms during normal hours to avoid conflicts with other people who were overbooked, then let the night clerk who is safely locked away inside the office deal with the rest.

This happens no matter whom you book with. The difference between booking directly and booking through booking.com is the difference between "sorry, sucks to be you, bye" and "there's this more expensive accommodation available for you and you don't have to pay anything extra".

This is just as anecdotal as your story and the original post: For the last 15 years I've spent about 100 nights in hotels per year all over the world and this has never happened to me. When I had a reservation it has always been honored.

I've booked directly with small hotels, using chain sites and various aggregators (trivago, hrs, booking, Expedia, hotels.com). The experience has been pretty much the same. My only reason to use aggregators is to collect rewards across different hotels.

It's happened to me once and to my parents once, and we don't even book that often. Maybe it depends on the country.

It probably depends on your time of arrival. With some rooms sold as fully refundable or as "one night fee for no show", the hotel does not know, even at 10PM, how many people will actually show up, so many go with first come first serve method. As a single data point, I had two cases of booked room not being available and both happened when I got to the hotel after midnight. My 2c.

I have spent far fewer nights but it has happened to me twice. Once in New York City and once in Portugal. Both times the hotels between the lines admitted that it was their fault and compensated me with better rooms in other hotels just a short walk away.

If you book an airline ticket and get bumped from your flight, it has to do with the airline not whoever sold you the ticket. Booking in this case is your intermediary who gets you a seat on another flight on the spot.

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