> ...we would pull in at multiple hotels and someone would have to go in and ask for prices and if they had vacancy.

Did they say they had only room left and 3 people were looking at it right now, despite it being obvious the hotel was only half occupied?

Actually, I recall being able to haggle prices at hotels before the online booking sites became prominent. Also, there were travel agents (a rare breed these days) who could assist with booking flights, hotels, and sightseeing. There seems to be advantages and disadvantages to each era.

However, I largely consider technology advances to be rather unimpressive, especially services and apps built on the internet. Access to information has definitely been improved though, but this is one of the few major improvements and now with more information being siloed behind corporate mega-sites we may be regressing back to the libraries for free access again.

> Actually, I recall being able to haggle prices at hotels before the online booking sites became prominent.

On family trips in the 90s, I'm pretty sure my dad almost never paid the asking price for our rooms. If you were coming in from about the mid-evening on, without a reservation, but they still had some rooms unlikely to be filled, and there were any other hotels with vacancies around, they'd gladly knock off a few dollars if you asked, since the alternative was likely having $0 of income for that room, that night.

What I've noticed traveling more recently is that there seem to be fewer vacancies if you try that "just show up and find a room" thing (which used to almost always work out fine, except at extremely popular places on very busy travel weeks), like the whole industry's running with way less slack (i.e. more efficiently). But also room prices have gone batshit crazy, even more so than general inflation, so the savings from that efficiency doesn't seem to be reaching customers.

You can always come to the less technologically advanced country and haggle all you want. I'm in one of those countries right now, and believe me, it's a lot worse when you actually need to do that every time you try to use any service.

After moving there I've started to appreciate a decent, frictionless, fixed price service a lot more.

I find some of these platforms to be far from frictionless. Try doing a basic sort based on price in AirBnb; it does not include the fees in the sorted price making it difficult to find the best deal. Many sites have false reviews that are manipulated to increase their ratings and push an undesirable hotel into a “deal” that hides the actually hotel for instance. Priceline, for example, is no longer the deal that it used to be and many of the actual hotel sites have better prices or match the ones on Priceline.

I mean, yes, there's a lot to improve because of bad actors and review manipulations. But for example, you can find a taxi through Uber relatively easy instead of wasting half an hour finding a driver who will a) get you where you want and b) take what's advertised through Uber instead of 4x-5x of that price.