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Comment by causal | Hacker News Reader

Booking.com is also just a terrible service. Their search is one of the better hotel search tools, but I stopped using them after they "lost" a booking but continued to charge me for it anyway. They denied it existed when I finally reached someone on the phone, despite the very real credit card charge. Only after I got my CC company to chargeback did they send me a cancellation notice.

Incompetence at that level feels like malice.

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Recently they've blocked selecting a hotel's address. I do so to look at the area or public transport options on Google Maps, but I guess too many people look up the hotel website from there and book directly.

My gawd. You don't need to be a "nerd" to know that almost every modern device these days will happily take a screen shot, read the text in the screen shot, and let you copy or even translate that text.

Sheesh, yeah, sure, but that's some extra annoying steps, at least on desktop.

One could also open the DevTools, Ctrl-F for part of the address, and copy it from the HTML source...

You can't (simply) take screenshots inside the booking.com app (at least on android)

Their response will be to block screen shots.

And as long as customers continue to tolerate it, they're not wrong. You get more of what you tolerate.

Fortunately, you have more power than you think. Just don't do business with these companies. Picking a hotel and calling them directly always works for me.

As far as I remember, that happens with the app!

There is usually no sense to book directly. Many times I checked there is the same offer or worse than booking.

The problem is the alternatives to Bookingdotcom are worse, for both flight and hotels.

Google and many other services direct you to the hotel itself, which means you need to create an account at the hotel's and enter your cc data... so yeah, tough luck if the hotel's 1990 era website gets hacked. Meanwhile, for Bookingdotcom, I enter my data once, don't have to worry about newsletter spam for the hotels, or my credit card data being exfiltrated. And same for airfare or train rides that can't be booked on Deutsche Bahn.

Hmm, had some fun positive experiences with Kiwi.com. They are also shady as f by constantly combining solo tickets and other stuff, but their app was awesome and pretty useful for checking in and keeping up to date on things.

On the flipside, sometimes you just cannot deal with hotels directly either. At least not their digital systems. Many of these mom and pop shops run absolutely terrible booking systems.

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