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.

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.

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!

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)

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

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.

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.

I was concerned about this happening to me, as I booked somewhere really early and prices have since gone 5x. Knowing that booking.com will do this means I'll never now use them, and will tell others the same. Thankfully I used another and got the hotel to confirm it.

This is why consumer laws should be really hard and executed very fast, it's the balance to big companies and "perfect" markets.

Why?

There are plenty of full service travel agencies that offer to book guaranteed price reservations in pretty much any locale in most countries. There are some that even offer extra guarantees like a last minute cancellation by the hotel being refunded at double the cost, to ensure you can get a room elsewhere.

Can you recommend an agency that offers that double refund option? I haven't been able to find one.

Amex I believe for most of the popular countries. They also offer all kinds of niche insurance options that are effectively even better, for corporate and high end clients.

> Why?

Because you live in an attention economy and the probability of using another service is pretty low. We can also develop our own travel agent with LLMs but that's an outlier of the market, and financially negligible. The problem is about power in the economy.

This doesn’t make sense, how is your preferred range of attention expenditure even relevant?

If a dozen different HN users expressed a dozen different preferred ranges… would there now have to be viable competitors at each possible step?

> This doesn’t make sense, how is your preferred range of attention expenditure even relevant?

This is an ironic statement, insofar as it's myopic.

The implication was clearly a monopoly by market availability (convenience), which is not a legal precept, but a sociological one. Comparing rates across all possible locales and vendors is impractical. This is part of what makes Amazon so successful. Sheer momentum.

And a dozen different HN users could also claim the same for their preferencez?

Honestly, it is a difficult case. The consumer is obviously on the higher end of wealth here, booking a premium hotel suite for an expensive event.

Then, the consumer criticizes those of us that enjoy backpacking as not being "adults". This one really got me.

The concept that advertised prices that are genuine mistakes are generally not enforceable is a well established concept in many jurisdictions.

With that being said, I do believe that honoring ones advertised prices, even when they are mistakes, unless it would be egregious or impossible to do so, is generally a better way to do business.

But will this story prevent me from using a convenient and less expensive platform for booking cheap, bottom barrel hotels, for those of use who aren't "adults"? Probably not.

It's not a mistake to forget to apply a surcharge in my opinion. The "mistake" was that they underpriced the market, as the booker hedged their bets on the two weekends. A "mistake" would be $1 instead of $1000 which is the example in the TOS.