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Comment by jerlam | Hacker News Reader

Hotels generally dislike third-party booking sites, because they're just skimming off profits while offering a worse service, so they usually offer to match all third-party quotes.

I wonder if a single computer with a VPN could generate screenshots of those discounted quotes for the sole purpose of price-matching.

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In my experience it used to be direct booking was often more expensive. Often absurdly.

Now I find it is almost always the opposite. Outside some more super low budget hotel options. Booking direct on the direct site more often than not is cheaper than the travel / third party sites.

I like the new trend, the third party sites were too disconnected and wonky.

I recall working as contractor in 2000s to a company that had one arm trying to compete in a used car market niche and they had a laptops pretending to be consumers in the usual ways crammed in in shelves that were scanning craigslist and other websites to repackage and resell the info to used car dealers. IIRC craigslist blocked naive dedicated scraping at the scale they were doing it so I assume but don't know that they needed to mix up the IPs in way that required that volume of laptops to do it nation/world wide. This sort of thing probably has been going on as long as the web browser have been commonly available.

At that point why even bother making it legit? Just use dev tools to edit the price you want into the page and send a screenshot to the hotel…

“Oh, you don’t see that price too? Sorry Mr Manager, I guess it must be because you’re booking it from another location. Nevermind then, I’ll continue to book through this partner instead…”

> Hotels generally dislike third-party booking sites, because they're just skimming off profits while offering a worse service

The problem is, the customers tend to want said third-party sites. Hotels have, at least for the masses, become a commodity - 99% of people just need a place to crash because they're out all day - and so customers expect to be able to shop around purely based on price and a bit on the location.

A lot of hotel websites are terrible too and I’ll be damned if I have to actually call someone and waste my time when I’m trying to compare prices, or if there is a significant language barrier.

There is wider variability in hotel quality than you know...

I live near a decent-sized college town and there is a hotel right off the interstate. It's a well-known hotel name in a decent (even semi-posh) location, so you'd think it was good and safe. In reality, it is run down, dirty, smelly, has pest problems, long-term residents, and lets just say is frequently the subject of police activity and only the occasional murder. The owner lives outside the country and has no interest in cleanliness, upkeep, or safety. The health department and local government have been trying to get it shut down but there's only so much they can do. The owners pay people to post positive reviews online and try very hard to get the bad reviews taken down.

Their prices are only slightly below most other hotels in the area and all of the photos are from rooms at other locations. So unless you actively went and searched the Internet for reviews for this specific location, you wouldn't know what you were getting into.

Practically if you go to a bigger city, it's just not feasible to look at hotels directly. Who has the time to check the 100 of pages, each with their own lookup/booking system, each possibly not available, each listing the size / facilities differently?

I have run into a hotel where the staff sent people to the third party booking site. They had decided to bite the bullet and cut the booking function from their in-house staff. Third party booking is expensive so they might as well drop their in-house staff and realize these savings.

Some places have worse service than booking.com - mostly cheaper and / or smaller places. Most real hotels indeed have quite good service on their own.

My roommate works front desk at a hotel, a common problem is that a third party site books things incorrectly or promises things that don't exist, then the customer is in the hotel lobby mad at the hotel over something they had nothing to do with

This happened twice on two vacations and stopped me from ever using third party booking sites. I go to them, find a deal, then go directly to the hotels site and book. It was eye opening to know the discount from the third party was not that much more than booking directly with the hotel/resort.

I've had this happen when booking directly with an IHG hotel. My reservation in their system said I had a 2x queen room, but the hotel's end showed 1x king.

I don't think that's only the third party problem. The way the inventory and availability is managed is not only delayed, but often done manually through a terrible interface. I suspect large chains get better automation, but I've seen how it works in smaller places. The mistakes can be either fat fingering something or just a concurrency issue where the booking happens at a third party while someone else books the same room on the phone. The responsibility there is somewhere in between.

The responsibility is completely with the hotel owner. Professional hotel management software that syncs instantly with third parties is very cheap and accessible.

You're really assuming the third party is reasonable and honest. For the record it's a holiday inn, a major hotel chain. I doubt the issue is a lack of them working with third parties

I'm not assuming. I've worked in hotel management and big third parties don't manipulate their reservations. However it's very convenient for a hotel to blame them when they've messed up themselves, since guests eat it up.

Most hotel chains won't price match due to agreements with third party entities that account for a majority of their bookings.

One off hotels in popular supply constrained tourist destinations are the exception.

Most hotel chains are trying to stop those agreements. Some of the agreements are fairly long term, but chains are starting to see that agents rarely give them enough to be worth what they are paying and so the chain is no longer making such agreements.

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