> It's not that hard. And you get the benefit that they actually book the hotel room.

Haha no you don't. Hotels "forgetting" bookings that you made directly on their website absolutely happens. I'd be willing to bet that it happens (proportionately) more often than losing a booking that you made via a big aggregator.

> I'm kind of mystified how Booking.com was able to say they booked a room at this hotel, when they apparently never even contacted the hotel to reserve the room. Clearly if they had contacted them, they would have learned that it was turned into a homeless shelter and not available.

They might have had a standing allocation of rooms from the hotel, or they might have contacted the owners and had them straight-up lie about the hotel still operating. Certainly the article is describing a monumental fuck-up; as with any large system failure I suspect multiple things went wrong for this to happen.

> Haha no you don't. Hotels "forgetting" bookings that you made directly on their website absolutely happens.

If this happens at any major brand (Hyatt/Hilton/Marriott/IHG/Choice/etc), you will get sent a check for the expenses you incurred that night if you call the 800 number.

If those hotels are unable to accommodate your reservation for whatever reason, they are supposed to “walk” you to an equivalent hotel at their expense, including travel to and from the other and pay for your stay at the other hotel for 1 night and not charge you at all of course.

Not how it actually works out in my experience. Maybe if I'd been more persistent I'd've got some more money back, but it sounds like the person in the article was also offered more money once they were more persistent, so that doesn't seem like a clear win for direct booking.

The person in the article did not reserve a room at a major chain hotel, so they would not get the benefits of having the hotel brand’s policies enforced.

That is the benefit of reserving Hyatt/Hilton/Marriott/IHG/etc. They have contracts with the hotel owner (franchisee) that will allow them to get their money that they recompense you and heavy penalties to the franchisor for the franchisee not following policy, incentivizing the hotel to not screw the customer in the first place.

Hotel owners change brands all the time too, and the existing hotel brand notifies and migrates reservations to other area hotels when that happens. As opposed to this situation at some random unaffiliated hotel in NYC.

I'm saying that from my own experience of reserving rooms at major chain hotels, they're not so helpful in practice.