Perhaps perspectives are based on whether you're booking domestically or not. Domestically you get the same protections, same language, not much benefit. In the US most of the market is domestic.
I've had the best success when traveling abroad booking directly. Anyone in the hospitality industry is going to have someone on staff with enough English to assist you, and most of the nicest places are smaller hotels that often don't work well with big booking companies.
> If I buy from Booking UK I get UK consumer protections
I worked in a travel startup (not Booking), there's a lot of fine print to all those "protections" that will leave you high and dry in most cases.
Only use 3rd party apps for search, never book directly through them especially, in my experience, for International travel.
You're right that we're lucky as English speakers, there's often someone to help, but that's not true of most other languages. Small places can provide some of the best experiences I agree, but finding them and getting in contact can be difficult.
[1] At least last time I looked into it. Haven't had a change to travel since a few years.
This happens all the time with every single type of service provider, why would some shitty service like Booking.com get to mandate no one can offer any other discounts?
What, just because there's some sort of aggregator service out there that you've partnered with you are not allowed to offer coupons, discounts, or your own booking services yourself? I would find that VERY difficult to believe.
Plus, based on what we're hearing everywhere, potentially losing your contract w/Booking.com seems like a blessing.
You also get points if it is a chain hotel that can be used for future stays. The points can be worth from 7% to 20% of the cost based on what combination of base points, credit cards, and status you have.
You'd call a number, "I can take your order for XYZ whenever you're ready!"
"Is this XYZ restaurant?"
No yes or no answer, just "What's your order for XYZ restaurant?"
Maybe I am wrong and this is a common tactic?
True, but not uncommon! Captive market.
However, in reality, people want more than a place to lay immobile for roughly eight hours. These are not commodities. Check-in time. Check-out time. Type of bed. Bathroom? Bathroom with tub? Bathroom with waterjet tub? Pets? Dogs? View. Floor. Proximity to whatever. Bedbugs. Television, microwave, refrigerator, coffee pot, hair dryer. Free wifi? Breakfast? "Continental" breakfast?
If "hotel room" were some kind of spec, it might take years to hammer it out. And then hotels may or may not be honest about their rooms, or even understand the spec. Then there's the periodic keeping the listings up to date. "We had to take the TV out last week, it was on the fritz." "This room was upgraded." When was the last bedbug check? Finally, who is the system of record for any given room? And then the discount policies, wowza.
Looks fungible, really isn't. These aren't pork bellies.
There’s a lot of variability, but it’s also pretty impossible to know at a non-commodity level unless I’ve stayed there before or do a ton of research.
I’m not going to trust anything online for the latest bedbug check. Id like to know, but let me know how they factors into your decision making process.
Even if you’re not happy with the response from the hotel - and I’ve never had a problem with a chain hotel making things right, I can call corporate customer service.
You're right there's certainly no formal spec here and everyone is going to have the things they care about that others may not, but for any given person there are going to be many places that satisfy their needs, basically interchangeably.
The very reason I don’t use third party portals is because it’s always a hassle when you need to make any changes.
Last year I booked a week at the Hilton San Francisco Financial District for a hybrid work/personal trip.
We arrived late that night and we were not impressed. We went downstairs the next morning, shortened our stay to that one night. Paid it and moved over to another hotel - the Hilton Parc 55. This would have been much more of a headache if not impossible going through a third party portal.
I’ve also increased my stay by a day before arriving and the published price had changed. I called the hotel and asked them to extend my stay by one day at the original price - no problem.
I was a customer of the hotel, not the third party portal.
In my specific case, I am Diamond with Hilton and Globalist with Hyatt. I would get no status benefits or points for going through the portal.
That incident in S.F. I mentioned? When I changed hotels I got an upgrade for free to the “fitness room” with a gym inside the room.
JFTR, my last stay in Prague I paid 80 EUR for a perfectly fine Hotel room, the cheapest room in the Prague Hilton I can find (being flexible for whole Oct+Nov) is 130EUR, usually more like 140+, close to double.
So I suppose if I had to just take a different room in a different hotel every fifth time (and that never happened to me) I'd still be about equal with the price.
A "middleman", or search engine, or discovery system, or price comparison site, is worth a lot to me and to most travellers.
Edit: it's worth a lot when you... don't speak the language in the country the hotel is in... when you want the consumer protections of the country you or the middleman is based in... these sorts of concerns are much more of an issue in some parts of the world, and this might be reflected in the fact that Booking.com grew up in Europe.