Thia is actually quite annoying, because the one time I've used their customer services they were really good. I needed to cancel half of a reservation (booked for 2 nights, needed to leave early), and the hotel staff said they couldn't do that as I'd booked through a third party. I called Booking.com and they made it happen. Hopefully whoever they outsource to can continue the good work.
I’ve had the same experience in the past. I travel to Japan a lot and outside the big cities many hotels there just don’t have anyone who speaks English, which obviously makes direct interaction with the hotel difficult. Booking.com customer service was always excellent. Never took too long to get connected to a real person, and that person was usually able to solve my problem or at least find a good compromise.
If their service declines I hope a new service gets created that replicates what they do, but I worry that if someone was to build a company like this nowadays they’d just not hire phone support staff.
This may be one of the reasons for the uproar. The CS employees far outnumber the rest of the company, and the in-house customer service was one of the moats B.com had against the competition. To have them suddenly transferred to a third party is shocking.
It’s hard to imagine the same level of service can be provided by call centers tending to multiple brands/products at the same time.
I’ve worked there and I can confirm that the customer service was very impressive and able to deal with particularly gnarly problems, in so many languages and cultures. It was a very large part of the company. It was under-utilised to understand customers’ concerns. There was some effort to include them: dedicated product org, include impact on CS metrics in A/B test results, but it often felt like the ugly duckling.
I was thinking or re-investing since the pandemic looked like slowing down and travel stock migth take over but that move tells me unequivocally not to bother.
Multi language support was a particularly impressive. I don’t know if it was in-house or not. Few times family members, who aren’t fluent in English, needed help with their reservations. I was expecting that I had to reach out on their behalf, but their were able to resolve it efficiently on their own.
>Hopefully whoever they outsource to can continue the good work.
I've never seen this go well. My most recent experience is one of many where "improvements" were terrible for me as a customer.
Amerigas, a national propane company, did the same thing the year before last. When I needed someone, I'd call the local office and talk to someone who knew the area and the business and would get whatever question or issue resolved almost immediately. When they "improved" customer service by firing all of these local people and consolidated them into a (not offshore, at least) customer service center, it was a total nightmare.
We were in the middle of a backyard renovation that required burying the propane line for our grill and stove. I called the local office and scheduled everything a couple months in advance. When the appointment time came, I received a notification that it was going to be delayed by a week, which would also hold up my project at a cost of $1000/day to pay for an idle crew and their equipment. Unfortunately, between the time I made the appointment and the time I called to see if it could be moved back, the customer service "upgrade" happened.
Every rep was super friendly, but no one had any knowledge of the business and every call required about 40 minutes of hold time just to speak with someone, 10 minutes of conversation, and then another 40 minutes of hold time to speak with the supervisor who was more knowledgable. Even the supservisors didn't have answers and would promise to call back by the end of the day. Of course, out of the 5-6 conversations we had with that promise, exactly zero resulted in a callback. When the work was finally done, it was done without a permit, which could only be pulled by the gas company, so the project was on hold again until that was resolved.
In the end, I had to find a customer service VP on LinkedIn and send them a very polite note about the "unpermitted gas line work" done on my property. That resulted in the issue being resolved the very next day. Before the upgrade, I could have spoken directly with the local rep, who would then just speak to the local tech, and resolve things almost immediately every time.
> Hopefully whoever they outsource to can continue the good work.
Run. Run far away and as fast as you can from this kind of move when you see it.
Outsourcing moves like this are a signal that the leadership views operations as a cost center of script-following monkeys. It won't blow them up, but it will consign a part of their organization to mediocrity, open to competitive attack.
Contrast that with the organizations I've seen who unlock the real value of operations: partners on the front line who feel the trends in their aggregate customer interactions, who are continuously, intricately involved in instrumenting operational data gathering based upon their gut feeling of those trends to drive rationalized product improvements. Software and data analytics makes it all possible, at a scale and granularity never before possible.
False, we used it, you can't cancel your order unless you talk to some shady agent and then you have to pay some amount of money, also, it's very expensive, booking.com you could cancel your order for free
I've used Hotels.com dozens of times and have never had to speak to anyone, shady agent or otherwise, to cancel. And I've also cancelled for free where "Free Cancellation" was mentioned as part of the fare rules.
You probably booked a VRBO accommodation; you have to be careful not to do that. Those really suck service wise. They might be nice and cheap but if something goes wrong, hotels.com isn't going to help you, while with the non-vrbo places they do. Places that are VRBO have a large VRBO logo next to them; they are not hotels.com bookings, just affiliates. Shitty, but I guess they found a way of making some more money.
Hotels.com as screwed up my booking twice (showed up and the hotel had no record of me booking a room) and had terrible customer service both times. Never again.
I have used them for 10 years now for close to a 1000 bookings and the times it went wrong I can count on one hand; they also always help fixing the issue. Sure you get some bad VOIP connection (why is that still a thing...) but
if you just immediately push for the rebooking agent (which is separate from the normal support), you will be fine quickly in no time and at no cost. Unlike some experiences I had with booking...
Booking at the venue itself will almost always be cheaper and provide more luxuries like a free drink in the bar or free breakfast.
The third party takes a cut of the cost. The hotel wants that cut badly, so just call them up, say you found a cheaper price at the third party and see what they do. They will likely give you a better offer and they themselves will have a better profit as well in the proces.
How much are you really saving? I value my time much more than I do saving $20. Booking.com does provide a really nice UI for finding great places as well.
Some of those hotel third party sites demands that the hotel don't give any other price than what they have on the third party site. So you really have to call to have a chance at a better price.
That's ok if you book a single hotel from time to time. But if you book several hotels for a road trip (our last Scotland road trip would have been 12 different hotels/BnBs, and because it was during a holiday season and we intended to visit islands just doing the classical "BnB" strategy of driving into town in the afternoon and look for a BnB was not feasible) having everything on a single site is hard to beat.
And with Covid hitting in early 2020 it was even easier to cancel everything on one site with just a few clicks.
Hotels.com price matches and has a pretty great loyalty program. It's like a punchcard where after 10 punches you get a free night's credit (avg. rate of your punches).
The one time I used booking.com I got screwed over. Their website is riddled with dark patterns and has probably been A/B tested into oblivion. The tactic they used that screwed me over was that they advertised 100% refunds on last minute cancellations. I used booking.com for this exact reason as I didn’t know if I’d be staying the night in the city I was driving past. Well turns out I didn’t need the booking but when I went to cancel I didn’t get a refund. When I went to go back to booking.com to see what their policy was, it was clear they carefully worded the last minute cancellation policy to really mean something completely different from what they knew they were advertising.
Lesson learned: never use any third party service when you can book the place directly. Also last minute cancellations probably just don’t exist
Many times booking directly from the hotel has benefits like more relaxed cancellation rules, which conveniently booking.com and others charge money for.
We submit to cutthroat and exploitive recruitment processes so we can submit to assholes in the workplace ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Some claim the remuneration package makes it worth it.
Yes indeed - I'm a pretty frequent user from Germany and I have used the free cancellation feature a few times without trouble. You can tell that it's real from the fact that offers with free cancellation, especially when close to the arrival date, are a few percent more expensive ;)
After spending most of my adult life in Germany, I have to be extra-vigilant when doing anything with money back in the US - from remembering that the prices on the shelves are several percent lower than what I’m actually going to have to pay (while being way lower than VAT, sales tax is not included in prices!) to anything to do with cellphones, and then stuff like this.
On the other hand, after growing up in the US I have to do the same when shopping in Germany or Switzerland. It’s almost unheard of for stores here to offer compensation such as a refund or exchange for many situations commonplace in the US, and many customer service interactions for other things like a phone bill have exhibited stubbornness to arbitrary policies that borders on hostility IMO.
I’m not sure sales tax excluded from prices is a matter of vigilance if it’s a nearly-universal national norm. It’s a bit like someone from the US complaining about being charged for bottled water at a restaurant in Spain after assuming they’d receive free tap water.
Yeah, I understand. It's definitely not ideal and I don't want to sound like I'm condoning it because it really should be improved. I'm just not sure there's an obvious solution given the US/Canadian regional/local autonomy over sales taxes, but I'm glad to hear ideas. Most towns in California, for instance, have their own sales tax rates and while this could obviously be accommodated in retail spaces (at the cost of confusing national advertising?) it makes displaying prices rather complicated on online marketplaces which currently add taxes once a shipping address is entered during the checkout process. In contrast, despite the reasonable regional autonomy in Switzerland (not too dissimilar from states in the US) a national VAT rate avoids this issue.
The obvious exception is for marketplaces that sell to other markets. For instance, the prices on Amazon.de (Germany) change if a Swiss shipping address is entered due to the different VAT rate.
What's so alarming about us not putting sales tax on products? I grew up in the US but in a non sales tax state so my experience until I was 25 was the same as yours. When I later moved to a sales tax state I knew the price was going to be ~5-10% higher than what was printed but I got used to it very quickly.
I hate to stereotype but I've found Germans in my experience to take particular offense to this practice. I'm married to someone from the UK and British people complain about this as well but probably only 1/10 as much. I feel like if I asked most Germans their least favorite thing about the US this is would be the MOST common response. I don't get it.
It's a real-life dark pattern. The benefits of showing the price with taxes for consumers vastly outweigh the minor problems for stores, other than makes them look cheaper.
A few percent higher prices aren't as much of a deal when paying with credit card, the transaction works exactly the same, but when paying cash, it might look very different (up to "don't actually have enough with me. oops.")
This stands to reason, credit card use in the UK is very high. So high in fact I recall several times before I had a chip card having trouble paying at cashless kiosks.
How can you not get it? It's completely annoying - stores show a price that is not the real price. So I have to now look up what is the sales tax before I can make an informed decision.
You may be fine with it if you live there and have learned to instinctively add 9% - but to a foreign traveler, one doesn't even know what percent they should add! _Of course_ it's annoying.
P.S. I am not German.
edited to add: It's just like the insane tipping culture in US. If you don't tip, somehow _you_ are the monster. It's not a problem that restaurants don't pay a living wage, it's not a problem that they don't even have to pay the minimum legal wage (!!!) - no, the problem is not with America. It's with the monsters that don't tip, because how else are those poor servers going to survive? Basically, when you look at the price in a US menu, you have to remember that the real price is at least 130% of that. And somehow, americans seem to be fine with it, and consider that it's the foreigners that are the oddballs here.
Do note, I don't have a problem with tipping, and I do tip even in my country, quite generously so sometimes (e.g. 50% at barbershops because I feel their prices are just too low, and also the person providing the service is actually doing most of the work too). But I don't like being forced to do it. It's one thing to tip as a sign of "thank you, good job!"; and it's a completely different feeling to tip as "here, this will give you something to eat this month"
This is true, but I remember reading an article where the journalist compared the "only X rooms left with these conditions" claim to the system of the given hotel in real time. Well, as it turned out, the hotel had more than X free rooms with those conditions allocated to booking.com...
Booking doesn't care, though. They'll happily overbook the rooms you assign them sometimes.
Edit: It might have gotten better since, but I still remember all those sad/defeated/angry faces of people who had booked trough Booking.com that I had to send away / find alternative hotels for because we were full. Back then when.
I had that in Asia quite a lot with Booking; that's not my problem though; it's theirs. But that's why I do not use them (booking) whenever I can prevent it. Hotels.com has this rarely but when they have it, they make sure you are well taken care off; I got much better and far more expensive hotels for the same price in those cases. I discovered ny favorite hotel in the world (so far) by a double (double double; the overbooked twice for the same room) booking; everything was full so they booked me in a hotel in the middle of a nature reserve which was much more expensive at that point, but I paid nothing more of course. Very nice for a business trip where I was supposed to sleep in a concrete bunker in a city.
I understood that airlines and hotels have a tiered system fist x at this rate next y and rate*y … etc
I have booked directly with Marion and IHG last minute and they both had prices change the next day when I took a peak.
Assuming the thread isn’t about some random number generator
Beware, Marion had a higher price after I visited trivago
How so? Afaik you don't even have proper laws for normal online purchasing returns. It's kinda hard to believe that in this section the US somehow managed to actually protect their people better than Europe.
> It's kinda hard to believe that in this section the US somehow managed to actually protect their people better than Europe.
Well, I don't know what to tell you. For instance, in the US you have 24 hours to cancel a flight booking for any reason if booked more than 7 days out. In Europe, you might get a 4 hour window if you're lucky, but often times not (especially with the vicious European LCCs).
I would tend to agree with this. I’ve rarely received a refund or other compensation at least in Switzerland (not in the EU) for things that would immediately be handled in the US, particularly for retail purchases. The Costco and Amazon effect is far more prominent in the US whereas I feel much more constrained as a consumer in many European countries.
I've lived in NY, CH and UK (where I'm from) and think Switerland is the odd one out in this respect.
Quality of life is highest in most respects there, but only really so long as you're happy to go along with things and not rock the boat. Get paid well, enjoy the contryside, but know your place were the vibes I got ha.
For the first 6 months, the legal assumption is that any defect was present at purchase which means - in practice - you can return pretty much any defective item no questions asked.
Most instances were in Switzerland as I mentioned, although a few were in the EU. Some weren't defective items but rather unneeded items. Returns based on changing one's mind, even if the item is in unused condition and remains re-sellable, seems to not be a "thing" in at least several European countries whereas American consumers typically expect these consumer protections not by law but by convention.
Another electronic device was defective, and even after selecting this in the online purchase return form I was charged a restocking fee despite returning the item within a few weeks of purchase. Not budging on this and refunding the fee would be unheard of for any serious US retailer.
You have, by law, two weeks to return any item you bought online for any reason whatsoever, and you have 6 months essentially "no questions asked" return for defective items - on top of the actual warranty periods (that, again, are by law).
As far as conventions go, I check some larger retailers from Europe, like Zalando, and they offer a 100 day return policy [1] by convention.
Zalando is famously an exception in multiple countries I’ve been in, to the extent that some shop there because of their lenient return policies. I’m not sure how unique Switzerland is here. It seemed relatively similar in Germany, for instance.
Just to check, the parent was talking about online purchases but did you mean physical retail? There you indeed have no legal right for a return, all sales are final as you had a chance to inspect the wares before the purchase.
In practice some stores do accept returns if you have a receipt, but personally I have never done that, didn't know it was even an option before an expat was asking about this online. The default is to sell forward in online second hand marketplaces. Especially gifts you receive, those are never returned (as apparently happens in the US said that expat).
Can you be specific then?
Like, you are aware that you have a 2 week period minimum, and a 6 month period for defective wares. There's also many shops that have more than a 2 week period because it's good customer policy. It's not just Zalando, I checked the next biggest German store (Otto) and they have a 30 day free return policy.
By contrast, in the US it all depends on store policy and, apparently, luck. I had some pretty bad customer experiences in the US, and there was nothing I could do then.
As Steve says in the video, in the US you have no recourse. There's no law. The shop in question didn't feel like being "nice" and the person is out of 500$. For Steve, this amounts to a scam, but the burden of proof is on him.
For specifically this reason, the EU has a law that says otherwise.
I personally prefer the EU setup, but I can explain what the GP is talking about.
Back when I was in the US, I could have bought a wetvac from a major chain store, shampoo my carpets, then returned it for a full refund. It would have been a fully functioning item that I gained beneficial use from, but the store would still take the used item back and return all my money.
This comes with a huge caveat. It’s a semi-official store policy, but not a legally binding requirement. If the manager doesn’t like you, then you’re on your own. Granted, the manager doesn’t care that much, because they’re just going to put the used wetvac and sell it to someone else. That person might discover that I broke the unit and they legitimately can’t use it. However, if they don’t have the same magic sprinkles I have (e.g. a title, a midwestern accent, white skin), the store might decide not to give them a refund, even though I’m the one that broke the appliance in the first place.
Since leaving the US, I haven’t had a store try to unload used merchandise on me and I like that I don’t have to put on a performance to get a refund on faulty items, but I’ve encountered other expats who found it a culture shock.
I don't know how many of the dark patterns I don't get to see as an EU user (not that I want to see them), but there are plenty still there: only showing positive reviews or stressing the positive features of an accommodation ("very quiet" because it's in the middle of nowhere etc.), pressuring you into booking by showing accommodations that are already fully booked, showing how many users are allegedly looking at the same offer "right now", showing that they only have 0.5 rooms left etc. etc. etc.
Just remember that they will list hotels as «full» if they don’t have any rooms out on booking.com. Many hotels never do, and some hotels only do when they have a lot of free rooms.
I used to do this, but recently I (somehow) got kicked into the upper tier of Booking.com’s genius program. The 20% discount you get by using B.c in that tier is unbeatable - I’ve actually had hotel front desk staff in multiple countries over the last few months tell me straight-up that they can’t price match that low and I’d be better off just using B.c.
Same here. I often tried to get s better price by just asking, but more than once the booking price was already far better than anything they could offer.
I never, and I mean never, got the genius welcome cocktail they always advertised for. No hotel ever heard of that
This is actually true with many online booking systems, especially the ones people actually use. I've been told this using at least 10 different booking sites at over 20 hotels since 2005. At one major chain in downtown Cincinnati the clerk brought the manager over, who looked at the rate, and proceeded to pick up the phone and contact corporate to adjust the rate up, they manager told me they were losing money at that rate.
Turning over a room (to make it habitable for a next guest) costs wages, and that's just the bare minimum cost that I can think of. There are probably a dozen hidden costs associated with allowing someone to stay in a room.
Yeah, I used similar site to booking.com last week, and asked the hotel if they can price match (they had best price guarantee on their site), and they straight face told me they can't ... baffling
Book directly with the hotels if possible. Lots of hotels will forgo the 24-hour cancellation charge if you ask nicely. Hotels can't do much if you book with a 3rd party since you're a customer of the 3rd party, not with the hotel.
Several commentors have written this advice, but almost always if I check the hotel website directly I see much higher prices than what are offered on booking. hotels.com, or agoda.
However, with flights and flight search websites I do sometimes see close to equal pricing, and in that domain I almost always check the airline website itself and book directly when possible.
In the past I've called and asked the hotel if they are willing to price match as I much rather want to be a customer of them, rather than Booking.com, and I think only around two times have they denied my request. Probably because those were very large hotel chains and didn't really care about one customer here and there. But smaller hotels have always accepted price marching for me.
Hotel websites aren't typically that great for good prices, nor for the ease of use. But talking to someone on the phone and quoting the booking.com (esp. genius) price can give you a good anchor, and many hotels will at least match it.
I travelled mostly Europe and SEA and ask directly for everything longer than a night or two. Yes, listed prices on websites are almost always higher, and no I couldn't get a better price than with booking in the majority of cases.
Usually booking maximal a week before arrival. So maybe that's why?
Maybe it depends on where exactly, or what kind of hotels, how late you are with your booking, or the booking genius I have, however I had the exact opposite impression.
I travel mostly Europe and it happens all the time. Also I have a past working in a travel/booking agency and if you are big enough you can get discount prices from hotels because they know you are going to book them X days of rooms over a month. So, they reduce their margin but gets more exposure/promotion by the travel agency.
With flights it's a different thing, but it can happen as well.
Hotels.com and some others have reward schemes; while travelling for business, I got 50+ free nights. Booking the hotel directly would need to be at least 10% cheaper and it just is not unless you are a regular or stay very long stretches.
While I most often use hotels.com, I have used booking many times. I have never had any trouble nor complaint with the website, but perhaps that's because I'm in the EU and there are more regulations (as another commentor noted).
Not related to Booking.com, but these types of companies sometimes screw you over in ways you didn't even imagine.
On my first trip to the USA (traveling from South Africa), Travelstart managed to somehow inject the word "DOCUMENT" into my name that was on the tickets.
So my name e.g. "JOHN DOE" became "JOHN DOCUMENT DOE". At the customs/border control in Atlanta they noted that my ticket's name didn't correspond to my passport, which was actually a huge problem. Luckily they eventually let me into the country because the TSA agent was super friendly and "vouched" - which is bizarre on its own.
Needless to say, I always order tickets directly from the airliner now.
This kind of thing is exactly what an ombudsman would be good for. Screwing a million people for a little bit of money each.
They should have the power to fine a firm that's found to not actually be checking whether other people are online, whether a hotel is actually empty, etc.
Here's a Booking.com employee that was part of the Consumer Psychology Team coming forward and arguing that what they've been doing is not illegal in the EU, after they were forced to change course because what they've been doing was incompatible with the law.
What I find amazing is that @techcode says, "Not sure what illegal consumer practice are you talking about." Dude! I know what the illegal practice his team (He says he was tech lead of the "Consumer Psychology Team" at the time.) did. It was "unduly putting time pressure on users", most likely related to misrepresenting what the "X people are looking at this" and "last available" means. I'm sorry, but you're not paid enough to play dumb for your employer. Especially when it's your team that has been singled out by government regulators.
A much better -- and honest -- defense would have been to state that it wasn't against the law when written, because the law didn't go into effect until January 2020, and the press release was from December 2019, and they would become in compliance within the six months as agreed to.
Last time I used booking.com, I remember that the cancellation policy differed depending on the specific hotel. Most have free cancellation but only if you cancel more than a day before your booking.
Anecdotal, but I’ve canceled booking.com reservations probably 50+ times over the past decade without issue.
They certainly use nefarious UX patterns like “10 people just booked this location!!” But I’ve always found the “free cancellation by” dates to be reliable.
On the other hand, booking hotels directly is an absolute nightmare of interfacing with whatever broken systems the underfunded “IT” departments of said hotel have bolted on. At that point you might as well just call the front desk and wait 20 mins to be transferred to 3 different people.
If you're booking with a major chain like Marriott, Hilton etc, it's always worth booking directly, because it's much better to at least interface directly with those broken systems. If/when things break down, their own customer support can usually sort you out (esp if you have elite status), plus they're much more willing to comp you to better rooms etc. If you book through a proxy, the odds of breakage increase and support on both sides will just point fingers at each other.
Or just pick up the phone and call? found it to be a better option in some cases. Got better prices than booking.com too.
The only problems we had with booking.com is that they give you no protection whatsoever. One case, the hotel clearly gamed the reviews and posted false info. It was so bad that we had to leave. But we were still charged the full amount, and booking.com just stood aside.
Just recently, my wife booked a hotel in Tel-Aviv. The hotel charged her card twice (booking.com seemed to have passed the card info to the hotel). We cancelled, and still waiting for the refund/release of the funds. Booking.com does nothing to help. We have to bounce between the unhelpful hotel and the slow-as-hell bank/credit card company.
OT: but are there any banks or credit card companies in Germany that actually help you when you're in this situation or need a chargeback? it seems like the low card fees in EU means much worse customer service compared to the US, or is it just my wishful thinking?
> OT: but are there any banks or credit card companies in Germany that actually help you when you're in this situation or need a chargeback?
In my experience the Sparkasse is pretty decent, but since they're regional institutions YMMV.
> it seems like the low card fees in EU means much worse customer service compared to the US, or is it just my wishful thinking?
We just don't have much credit card usage since SEPA-ELV works pretty well. SEPA Direct Debit stuff you can chargeback at almost all institutions via online banking or self-service ATMs, credit card depends on your institution.
not sure why you were downvoted, even though SEPA offers a terrible UX in my opinion, and in no way close to using cards. (both for the merchant and payer in my limited experience).
yes exactly! in this case we cancelled, but because it was an already bad experience before even checking in. And we have no way of sharing the bad experience with others. Both the hotel and booking.com seemed completely disinterested resolving the issue.
Perhaps it's cheating a bit, but most of the time they don't check credit cards you use for "booking confirmation". A friend of mine used to use 4242 4242 4242 4242 for quite some time, and when they've blocked it, he switched to his own debit card with spend limit set to $1.
You know the most effective pattern on booking.com to screw your guest? If you have something odd, you cancel their reservation. The guests will NEVER be able to give you a rating, nor booking.com will move a finger to refund them.
While I'm far from trusting booking I used late cancellation several times in EU. Usually those offers were more expensive, but I was charged late as promised (like a day before reservation date) and if cancelled before it just worked.
Usually I'm more worried that their places usually just get my credit card number in plain text, write it down in a notebook and some frontdesk person simply uses that CC numbers to charge me on my first day there or so, manually entering it into CC terminal.
I got burned by the opposite: I booked a nice place for my brother's wedding 4 months ahead. At that time the prices were quite good. Fast forward a week before the weeding and I receive an email that the host is unable to process my credit card. So I try to contact the host - by phone, email, all possible ways, telling them I have several other cards, I can also pay by Paypal or wire transfer - but they don't reply. I notice the prices rose by 100% in the meantime and the host is trying to cancel my booking in an innocuous way. I wrote to booking.com - no reply. After that a second email arrived that the host was unable to charge my credit card (with a limit 50x more than the value of the booking...) and booking.com cancelled my reservation. Of course when I read the comments online it turned out I was not the first victim of this scheme.
So, if booking.com cannot guarantee the very basics, why should I use them as an agent? It makes no sense to me - it's much better to book directly.
tldr; Almost all of booking.com customer support employees are having their contracts transferred (outsourced) to another company, Majorel. This Luxembourg based one, will offer 6 months contracts but it’s unclear what will happen next and also it’s not stated what will happen to those employees that don’t accept the transfer. Corporate tactics at work once more in order to reduce costs :-(
> Majorel came into being in January 2019 when Bertelsmann and Saham joined hands to create a leading customer experience organisation. Majorel brings together Arvato CRM Solutions, Phone Group,
Bertelsmann, Arvato, et al. Who ever tried their chance in Germany know these sweatshops. Working for them will impact one's mental wellbeing. Amazon receives all the hate in Germany meanwhile domestic slavers are allowed and doing well.
I once booked a room in a reputable international chain hotel through booking.com. My sister (living in a different country) booked the same hotel for the same night for a different price and paid with her card in a different currency.
The only "link" between the two bookings was that we booked rooms in the same hotel for the same nights, the bookings were made within an hour of each other, and we share a surname.
A few days later I checked my credit card statement and I had two charges. My sister hadn't been charged at all, but one of the amounts I was charged corresponded to what she paid.
Booking.com said "talk to the hotel" and the hotel said "talk to booking.com". We ended up getting free breakfasts but I'd have loved to know what really happened there.
> Booking.com said "talk to the hotel" and the hotel said "talk to booking.com".
I got trapped in a loop there as well, it was pretty wretched. Hotel would only except credit card details sent via plaintext emails (on the phone I couldn't reach anyone at the purported hotel, just a call center, where they couldn't deal with processing), nobody would release me from the obligation to pay, neither booking.com nor the hotel hotline. I just ignored their emails after a certain point, deleted my account, and hope nothing ever comes of it.
> Hotel would only except credit card details sent via plaintext emails
This seems very common issue in hotel business. I regularly travel with Amex business travel and our travel agency sends a temporary cc# to the hotel so I don't have to pay for the room.
So that's a temporary cc# which is a little safer, but it's e-mailed in cleartext to the hotel regularly for thousands of guests.
It is because the major hotel brands franchise their brands, and want the franchisees to take on all the merchant account risks of chargebacks and whatnot.
Marriott/Hilton/Hyatt/IHG/Choice/Wyndham/etc collect 5% to 20% of top line revenue from the hotel, and do not want to deal with losses from things like chargebacks and whatnot.
I despise the experience so much that I can’t feel bad about the demise of that website. They’re are guilty of all the dark patterns imaginable. The day you stop providing a useful tool to your users is the day you can start counting til you close shop. On the other hand google hotel is providing a top service.
This is actually my biggest worry with facebook. Even though I own their stocks, I’m scared that they are following a path where they maximize engagement versus providing utility. Facebook back in the days was definitely an amazing tool that you’d be crazy not to use. Today, not so much.
I'm not necessarily a huge fan but I'm not sure what the alternative there is. They're pretty comprehensive. If you have any suggestions by the way I'm very happy to jump ship!
I use Destinia.com. They usually have the same hotels as other sites but prices are usually much cheaper. Sometimes not just slightly cheaper, but €500+ cheaper. Been using them for more than 10 years.
Thanks, this is a new one for me. I've been happy with hotels.com for a very long time, but now I'll start comparing here. I'm amazed that Destinia appears to still be independent. Usually by this age of successful travel company, they would be owned by Expedia or Booking (Holdings).
I’ve had a decent 15 years or so of using Expedia (.de and .com, depending on where I was traveling and which credit card I wanted to use). Prices and availability generally in line (maybe slightly higher prices) as Booking.com, without the in-your-face FOMO inducements.
I banned the use of Expedia in our company because they were almost never able to produce a decent invoice (in the name of the company, listing the name of the employee who had the room). Expedia said the hotel has to provide the invoice. The hotel said Expedia has to provide the invoice because we had contract with Expedia.
Never such a problem with booking, because with booking the contract always has been directly with the hotel.
Oh - forgot about that problem and wild goose chase the one time I foolishly tried to save my employer money on a hotel booking. Learned that lesson, never booking outside of miserable Concur for work travel again (should I ever travel for work again).
Personal travel, on the other hand… still an Expedia fan.
Meh. They are just terrible. We once booked a hotel with a children's bed, which was advertised as an option on Booking.com . When we go there, no bed, and they could provide one. After much discussion, they allowed us to cancel the room and they would refund the 125 Euro.
Except the refund never came. So, we contacted booking.com and have been passed between support personnel for months. At some point they wanted months of our bank transcripts (which I rejected because of privacy issues, I don't trust such a company to securely handle/erase them). After five months, we just accepted the loss.
(Customer service can be good. E.g. recently Apple double charged Apple Care. I had someone on the phone within minutes and I got a personal contact within their financial department that I could message or leave voice mails for. They were very helpful in the whole process of getting the money back.)
Not to say you’re lying but I find this extremely unlikely. Speaking as somebody who works in fintech but despises booking.com.
The reason they wanted your bank statements is legitimate: you’re claiming you didn’t receive money they are convinced they refunded.
Did you yourself look at your bank statements? A refund doesn’t always show up as a refund, it sometimes shows up as a cancelled charge. A bank might not notify you of that. I have even used a bank which straight up would show a mathematically incorrect calculation in its app when this type of refund came through, and the only way to get to the bottom of it was by trawling through the statements.
Did you yourself look at your bank statements? A refund doesn’t always show up as a refund, it sometimes shows up as a cancelled charge. A bank might not notify you of that.
Yes. My wife keeps a meticulous administration, the 125 Euro showing up again would be noticed immediately. My impression was that Booking.com wasn't going to refund the money, but was pressuring the hotel to do the refund, and they either transferred it to an incorrect account or didn't transfer it all and was feeding Booking.com false information.
However, you can't be the middle man when it suits you (get a certain percentage for every reservation), but not be the middle man when it doesn't suit you. The proper approach would be for Booking.com to refund the money and then settle things with the hotel. But they are clearly not very customer-oriented.
Yeah, these kinds of "customer" "service"'s job is to dick around with you until you give up. Same story with the plentiful cases of AirBnB "customer" "service" just offering partial refund, etc, etc.
While maybe not worth 4.6, it is sadly the best of the big apps at least on Android. AirBnb is nigh useless with the dysfunctional map view, and Hotels.com is just pain to use.
Book direct and support your local accommodation providers.
Most providers will match any rate you see on these aggregator sites because they still are getting more money then if you booked through the site after they take out their fee.
Most but not all. I once had a mechanic try to not match their AutoGuru advertised rate that we agreed to over the phone, because "I don't remember having that conversation".
We see Booking.com's online travel agent ("OTA") model as fundamentally predatory/parasitic to hospitality operators. Our business is designed to cut-out of the likes of Booking.com and other middlemen--let the operators own the guest data and build direct relationship with their guests.
They're not firing thousands of engineers. They're transferring most of their thousands of call centre workers to a different company. Are you hiring lots of call center workers?
Q. to all you off the cuff commenters: did you even realise that they had thousands of call centre workers?
I'm putting out this message to Booking.com engineers/PMs/etc. who have wisened up to their employer's shenanigans. We aren't in the call center business so don't have any openings there (and yes, was aware of their call center ops, have called myself in the past.)
Non-compete clauses aren't always enforceable; they have to be "reasonable". That means that the employer must be imposing the clause in furtherance of a "legitimate business interest". You can't use these clauses as simply a way to bully disgruntled staff.
In Germany this isn't a legal move. One of my former employees (global telco everyone knows) tried to do the same, namely moving the contracts of the employees to an other company. 200 of them started a class action and won easily. The company had to terminate their contracts (which means the employees are eligible for unemployment benefits, etc.) and had to pay a good severance. Something like (years of employment) * 2 monthly salaries. Some of the employees took the money and went into early retirement.
I did not say, that is illegal to fire people in Germany. Nonetheless as an employer you have to obey the laws making firing cumbersome. Laws, not made by slave drivers...
In the US this would probably be constructive dismissal, so similar to what would happen in Germany. And referring to slavery when talking about the current US laws seems somewhat irrelevant
It's not illegal to fire people in Germany. But just like most of Europe they need to provide some "just cause [1]", unlike in the US where there are a lot more "at-will [2]" employment contracts.
Left wing economist believe this is a great feature that makes lives much better for employees. Right wing economists believes this a bad feature that only protects incumbent employees and makes employers less inclined to hire in the first place or waste resources on workarounds like temp-agencies. Neither standpoints can be conclusively proven, so is mostly a matter of ideology.
I cannot imagine a lawsuit could be cheaper - if they lose (and might very well) they'll be forced to pay the due severance and fees and penalties. But until then...
Because when you are laying people off and giving them a severance, you are taking more care of them than you would be if you were firing them. That's the entire basis of this comment thread.
Most of the employees in this announcement are in Europe, where there is no "firing" (i.e. at-will employment aka employer abuse).
There's only laying off with a severance and firing for cause, where firing for cause is by design <<super>> hard to do. And it's definitely not something that can be done to masses of people at once without all the government authorities coming to pay the offending company a visit ASAP.
> That's the entire basis of this comment thread.
Not if you figure out the entire context of this event.
The thing is that in many countries of Europe (an maybe somewhere else too) we consider that a company is not only a way for the owners to make money, but they have a social value and responsibility.
Therefore you cannot just fire 200 people to hire another 200 cheaper, because that's a way to increase only company's profit but not society benefit. And if you fire them, you need to compensate them properly. Of course companies try to go around these regulations, it's up to each Government how to enforce laws to prevent it.
So it sounds like in Germany, you can fire people to hire another 200 cheaper, you just have to compensate them for that firing. Just like in the US if you fire someone without cause, they get unemployment payments funded by their previous employers unemployment insurance (which goes up the more people they fire).
And this isn't even relevant to what is happening with Booking.com. No one is being explicitly fired, they are being moved to a new company with different job requirements. Which as far as I understand, is constrictive dismissal, so the right thing in this case is for Booking.com to give all their employees the option of being laid off instead.
Constructive dismissal laws vary by state- but generally, if the compensation and job duties remain substantially the same, it won't be constructive dismissal in the US. The post alludes to the possibility that the new company will make changes after 6 months... if they substantially reduce compensation at that time or substantially change the nature of the job, their us employees would probably qualify for unemployment.
Notably, the Reddit poster is from France, so this sin't a "US vs Europe" thing as some other comentors are trying to make it out.
That is not legal in Germany, because that requires a new contract, which you can refuse to accept and have to be compensated for.
Meaning, it does happen, but it requires the workers and union to accept it actually takes place, the company cannot just decide on their own that they will do it and that is it.
It is not illegal, it comes with strings attached because in general, in the EU the employee is seen as being the weak side of a contract, and is protected (to a point) against arbitrariness from the strong side.
The ruling was they had to be fired. They tried to convert them to outsourced employees workibg for anoyher company, that's just olain exploitation since they do this to psy you less and save costs.
The Netherlands is complying with a European Directive: 2001/23/EC. In the UK, that directive is embodied in the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) 2006 (TUPE) regulations.
Basically, the directive prevents businesses sidestepping laws and contracts that protect employees' rights by transferring those employees to another organisation. Seems reasonable to me (if you share my view that employees have rights).
It's weird to see all those negative anecdotes about Booking.com. As a counter anecdote, I've used them several times and they always seem to have much cheaper prices then the competition. I was also able to cancel my booking once without issue after talking to customer support. PS: Not in any way affiliated with them other than being a satisfied customer.
It's not weird at all, most forum threads involving huge companies attract largely negative comments (Google, Amazon, even Apple). By and large I'm happy with the services of these companies, but if you go by HN I can get my gmail shutdown with no reason or recourse and half the stuff I bought from Amazon is probably fake.
It's not just huge companies, it makes sense that reviews for anything usually skew negative. Because if someone orders a product/service that worked out great, not many people take the time to write a "thank you letter." But if something was amiss, the user will have no problem venting their (warranted) frustration. I would be livid if Gmail locked me out of my account for no reason, or I received a fake product from an Amazon seller, and would certainly let people know.
However, on the same note, I hate when I see someone blasting/suing Walmart or similar for what one cashier did to them. No amount of corporate training can prepare someone for a bad day.
I've used them - and will in the future - because my wife likes being able to take a bath, not a shower (long hair is hard to keep dry in a shower, but in a bath she just puts it in a ponytail), and curiously enough booking.com is the only site I've ever found that let you use that as a search criterion.
I always use booking.com to find hotels and then just book directly at the hotel. Normally, I would not do such a thing, but considering booking.com's shady practices I do not feel bad.
Just skimming through the comments, there is some negative sentiment about Booking.com. So I came to say, that over the years, I've used Booking.com numerous times, without any single problem. Yes, there are dark patterns (13 people are looking at this offer right now, etc.), but free cancellation was always free for me, reviews matched my experience, information matched the reality.
Sorry to hear about the layoffs, but customer experience has been great for me.
Same for me. The website has some dark patterns that really do suck, but their prices often beats the hotel directly and many hotels even refer you to booking.com
I'm not a happy user, but also not a sad or angry one. I do consider their service trustworthy, though their salesmen ship is a bit slimy
Have to agree. I've had an account for years and booked hundreds of properties all over Europe (hotels, self-catering apartments, houses), often travelling with a pet too. Never had an issue with free cancellation; places I've stayed at matched the photos and reviews; prices are generally competitive. Yes the UI has some dark patterns but on the flip-side it's also pretty good at what it does (i.e. making it very easy to quickly find and filter accommodation). For getting things done, I much prefer booking's UI to e.g. Airbnb's.
Booking.com is the _lesser_ evil imho. For one it shows total price 99% of the time right there on the search page where alternatives like Agoda show total at the checkout which is heavily inflated.
Their loyalty program (Genius) is automatic and simple too where's competitors resort to various coupon and other complex "discounts".
The customer experience has been great but consistently decreasing over the years.
Last time I used them I think they pivoted into fighting with AirBNB so they took on smaller and smaller "venues" up to people (illegally) renting an apartment. The guy straight up threatened me in writing on Booking when I decided to cancel seeing how different the conditions were compared to the pictures.
The reality is, we need a functioning hotel aggregator, and AirBnB needs a competitor. For me, booking.com for European travel has been overwhelming positive in experience, happy with the increasing Genius offerings. I don't use them for apartments however, I don't feel I trust them for that and prefer AirBnB. I also hope they stick around and maybe find a way to make all the cash they feel they can make without ruining what should be a very mutually-beneficial experience between hoteliers and customers.
The business revolves around bedbanks contracting hotels and selling them to retailers and aggregators. There are exchanges, there are hybrid models and what not. That's why "2 rooms left" kind if messages are almost always total BS because every hotel can have more than one bedbank contract or the contract can be flexible and you can't know exactly how many rooms are left but you can query if the number of room you want to book is doable.
At the end of the day, what you have is multiple networks that somewhat overlap and provide API for finding and booking and Web interfaces for the high street retailers etc.
Making an aggregator means, you getting an access to these API and therefore there are many aggregators out there. The problem is, the margins are really tight at that point and you can hardly do anything about it. The money used to be in the high street retail where you can have fat margins and sell extra services like city tours, paragliding - that also have fat margins.
The industry have seen quite a bit of squeeze both because of AirBnB and the aggregators.
A good way to make a lot of money is to contract all the hotels in an area and sell the company to a bedbank like Hotelbeds. Now hotels are opening every day, things change every day so there's quite bit of people on the ground chasing hotels making deals and getting paid handsomely for it.
I travel a lot and find that my area rarely has the majority of its hotels listed on sites such as booking.com. What would I have to do, specifically, to get these hotels listed and get paid for it?
Right, so you can create a startup that contracts these hotels and sell your contacts to bedbanks like Hotelbeds I guess? I haven't been in touch with the industry since a while, so I can't give you too many specifics advice.
A few years back, I remember a startup building a portfolio of Mediterranean(If I recall correctly?) hotels and end up selling the company to a bedbank for 30 Million USD.
If you are not looking into making this into a full blown business, I guess you can take a cut as an agent by hooking up the hotels with the representatives of the bedbanks. Look up for people titled "Market manager" and see if you can arrange a deal with them. Market managers are people responsible of adding new hotels to the portfolio of a company and manage the relationship with these hotels, they usually make good money from commissions. It also often involves things like resolving errors with the booking software, teaching the staff how to use the interface etc.
I live in Japan and want to give it a shot. Can you give me the step-by-step? Am I supposed to just contact anyone in the hotel industry with a "market manager" title on LinkedIn and tell them I can contact hotels for them?
I can't give you a step-by-step as this(collaborating with market managers) is not an actual profession that everyone does but a possibility that you can explore if you like to give it a try.
I guess you can message people from linkedIn and see how they feel about it and maybe they can give you more ideas. Maybe you can consider to get in the industry and become a market manager?
Also positive experiences with Booking since 2005 :)
What AirBnB gets horribly wrong is hiding exact location of property. In some cases, 200-300m make all the difference, e.g. directly on the sea coast or 10min up the hill, which can happen when the road goes around. Or is it directly next to a noisy club or in a quiet street behind. Or for skiing, whether you’re directly on the track or not. Probably all my searches on Booking start with basic parameters and then immediatelly switching to map.
Also, even for locations I go often and know very well, and can easily find contacts of accomodations I’m interested in, I still choose Booking because it beats calling tens of different phones when single search shows what’s available for specific dates.
>
What AirBnB gets horribly wrong is hiding exact location of property.
Without hiding the exact location of the property, they'll have other problems, like having the illegal part of their rental stock get discovered and shut down.
I've actually used booking.com recently to book an apartment that was also listed on Airbnb, and booking had a cheaper price (and better cancellation policy).
So sometimes worth it to see if the Airbnb listing is on other sites as well.
Thank you for your valuable contribution to this thread about employment practices. I'm sure the CEO who fired people over pre-recorded video appreciates your praise!
On a more serious note, yes, the layoffs are bad and I am sorry to hear about it, but when I see people in comments posting about their negative experience with the service, I feel like it's relevant to balance it with my overwhelmingly positive experience with the service.
The only problem I've had with booking.com was when I ended up in a place that would have been bad for an AirBnb. It seems to be a similar problem to Amazon. I had the impression that I could expect the places on there to all be at least professional. It seems I'm not alone as everyone I've told about it has been surprised that such a place was on booking.com. It would have been expected from AirBnb.
From the perspective of someone on the front desk side of things, I always got a sinking feeling whenever I saw a reservation come through Booking.com. They must do 0 CC validation, because their customers were the only ones I ever had payment issues with, and it happened regularly.
The most annoying dark pattern for me was not being able to give 0 stars for something and then averaging across completely dissimilar topics so that it was impossible for most hotels to score less than about 2 out of 5.
So the location was great, 5 out of 5 but that doesn't make up for the terrible service and the noise 0 out of 5.
Another thing that got me was the window dressing. They show the nicest room of the hotel on the site but the room you get when you arrive is nasty. Booking.com were famous for this kind of stuff and probably helped AirBnB get to where they are.
One of the most unpleasant companies that I ever interacted with.
It baffles me how hard it is to avoid them when booking hotel rooms online.
The first time when I tried to avoid them (because I was so mad at them for screwing me over), I booked the same room on another website that I found by searching, only to get a confirmation email from booking.com...
Apparently booking sites have the worst rooms reserved for their platforms. So its worth just booking directly through a hotel's website instead of using an aggregator.
No, the hotel staff just know which hotel guests are worth more.
Reservations for guests that stay with the hotel brand frequently are designated with various tiers in the rewards programs. There are arrival reports that detail how much they stay at specific hotels and what their preferences are. It is also trivial to sort through people coming via travel agents such as Priceline, booking.com, or Expedia, which means the hotel has to pay commission, which makes those guests worth less than those who reserve directly.
I find this service good for one thing: if a hotel assigns you a crappy room (loud neighbors, loud construction site outside, similar drawbacks), they'll upgrade it with zero issues. I have never had an issue with getting room replacement in such cases and never had to say anything but stating the issue.
Some hotels seem to be terrified of getting bad reviews on this site.
290 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] threadI rarely use booking.com, and now I'm sure I never will.
Thia is actually quite annoying, because the one time I've used their customer services they were really good. I needed to cancel half of a reservation (booked for 2 nights, needed to leave early), and the hotel staff said they couldn't do that as I'd booked through a third party. I called Booking.com and they made it happen. Hopefully whoever they outsource to can continue the good work.
If their service declines I hope a new service gets created that replicates what they do, but I worry that if someone was to build a company like this nowadays they’d just not hire phone support staff.
It’s hard to imagine the same level of service can be provided by call centers tending to multiple brands/products at the same time.
I was thinking or re-investing since the pandemic looked like slowing down and travel stock migth take over but that move tells me unequivocally not to bother.
I've never seen this go well. My most recent experience is one of many where "improvements" were terrible for me as a customer.
Amerigas, a national propane company, did the same thing the year before last. When I needed someone, I'd call the local office and talk to someone who knew the area and the business and would get whatever question or issue resolved almost immediately. When they "improved" customer service by firing all of these local people and consolidated them into a (not offshore, at least) customer service center, it was a total nightmare.
We were in the middle of a backyard renovation that required burying the propane line for our grill and stove. I called the local office and scheduled everything a couple months in advance. When the appointment time came, I received a notification that it was going to be delayed by a week, which would also hold up my project at a cost of $1000/day to pay for an idle crew and their equipment. Unfortunately, between the time I made the appointment and the time I called to see if it could be moved back, the customer service "upgrade" happened.
Every rep was super friendly, but no one had any knowledge of the business and every call required about 40 minutes of hold time just to speak with someone, 10 minutes of conversation, and then another 40 minutes of hold time to speak with the supervisor who was more knowledgable. Even the supservisors didn't have answers and would promise to call back by the end of the day. Of course, out of the 5-6 conversations we had with that promise, exactly zero resulted in a callback. When the work was finally done, it was done without a permit, which could only be pulled by the gas company, so the project was on hold again until that was resolved.
In the end, I had to find a customer service VP on LinkedIn and send them a very polite note about the "unpermitted gas line work" done on my property. That resulted in the issue being resolved the very next day. Before the upgrade, I could have spoken directly with the local rep, who would then just speak to the local tech, and resolve things almost immediately every time.
Run. Run far away and as fast as you can from this kind of move when you see it.
Outsourcing moves like this are a signal that the leadership views operations as a cost center of script-following monkeys. It won't blow them up, but it will consign a part of their organization to mediocrity, open to competitive attack.
Contrast that with the organizations I've seen who unlock the real value of operations: partners on the front line who feel the trends in their aggregate customer interactions, who are continuously, intricately involved in instrumenting operational data gathering based upon their gut feeling of those trends to drive rationalized product improvements. Software and data analytics makes it all possible, at a scale and granularity never before possible.
I haven't found any alternative yet.
The third party takes a cut of the cost. The hotel wants that cut badly, so just call them up, say you found a cheaper price at the third party and see what they do. They will likely give you a better offer and they themselves will have a better profit as well in the proces.
And with Covid hitting in early 2020 it was even easier to cancel everything on one site with just a few clicks.
Lesson learned: never use any third party service when you can book the place directly. Also last minute cancellations probably just don’t exist
Draw your own conclusions here.
I’m not sure sales tax excluded from prices is a matter of vigilance if it’s a nearly-universal national norm. It’s a bit like someone from the US complaining about being charged for bottled water at a restaurant in Spain after assuming they’d receive free tap water.
To me personally it's weird. I come to shop with $5 but I don't know what I can actually buy...
The obvious exception is for marketplaces that sell to other markets. For instance, the prices on Amazon.de (Germany) change if a Swiss shipping address is entered due to the different VAT rate.
I hate to stereotype but I've found Germans in my experience to take particular offense to this practice. I'm married to someone from the UK and British people complain about this as well but probably only 1/10 as much. I feel like if I asked most Germans their least favorite thing about the US this is would be the MOST common response. I don't get it.
Are there "service charges" too? :)
A few percent higher prices aren't as much of a deal when paying with credit card, the transaction works exactly the same, but when paying cash, it might look very different (up to "don't actually have enough with me. oops.")
Either this or the Imperial units.
You may be fine with it if you live there and have learned to instinctively add 9% - but to a foreign traveler, one doesn't even know what percent they should add! _Of course_ it's annoying.
P.S. I am not German.
edited to add: It's just like the insane tipping culture in US. If you don't tip, somehow _you_ are the monster. It's not a problem that restaurants don't pay a living wage, it's not a problem that they don't even have to pay the minimum legal wage (!!!) - no, the problem is not with America. It's with the monsters that don't tip, because how else are those poor servers going to survive? Basically, when you look at the price in a US menu, you have to remember that the real price is at least 130% of that. And somehow, americans seem to be fine with it, and consider that it's the foreigners that are the oddballs here.
Do note, I don't have a problem with tipping, and I do tip even in my country, quite generously so sometimes (e.g. 50% at barbershops because I feel their prices are just too low, and also the person providing the service is actually doing most of the work too). But I don't like being forced to do it. It's one thing to tip as a sign of "thank you, good job!"; and it's a completely different feeling to tip as "here, this will give you something to eat this month"
That's kinda funny to hear, as these hilarious comedy clips have been some of the most popular on YouTube the last months:
German Learns about U.S. Sales Tax - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CYokP6YIKw
German learns about Tipping in the U.S. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEQhA-JJlH0
Both are worth a watch, just 1 min each.
The "only x room left with these conditions" false claim is used also in the EU.
As it is a lie, it should not be allowed.
When you go to the hotel website instead, you see plenty of rooms left and sometimes with a nice offer.
Edit: It might have gotten better since, but I still remember all those sad/defeated/angry faces of people who had booked trough Booking.com that I had to send away / find alternative hotels for because we were full. Back then when.
Beware, Marion had a higher price after I visited trivago
Source: American expat in Europe.
Well, I don't know what to tell you. For instance, in the US you have 24 hours to cancel a flight booking for any reason if booked more than 7 days out. In Europe, you might get a 4 hour window if you're lucky, but often times not (especially with the vicious European LCCs).
Quality of life is highest in most respects there, but only really so long as you're happy to go along with things and not rock the boat. Get paid well, enjoy the contryside, but know your place were the vibes I got ha.
For the first 6 months, the legal assumption is that any defect was present at purchase which means - in practice - you can return pretty much any defective item no questions asked.
What did you want to return and could not?
Most instances were in Switzerland as I mentioned, although a few were in the EU. Some weren't defective items but rather unneeded items. Returns based on changing one's mind, even if the item is in unused condition and remains re-sellable, seems to not be a "thing" in at least several European countries whereas American consumers typically expect these consumer protections not by law but by convention.
Another electronic device was defective, and even after selecting this in the online purchase return form I was charged a restocking fee despite returning the item within a few weeks of purchase. Not budging on this and refunding the fee would be unheard of for any serious US retailer.
As far as conventions go, I check some larger retailers from Europe, like Zalando, and they offer a 100 day return policy [1] by convention.
Maybe Switzerland is the outlier here?
[1] https://en.zalando.de/faq/Returns-and-Refunds/About-our-100-...
In practice some stores do accept returns if you have a receipt, but personally I have never done that, didn't know it was even an option before an expat was asking about this online. The default is to sell forward in online second hand marketplaces. Especially gifts you receive, those are never returned (as apparently happens in the US said that expat).
By contrast, in the US it all depends on store policy and, apparently, luck. I had some pretty bad customer experiences in the US, and there was nothing I could do then.
For example, this whole Saga on GamersNexus (check other videos) is a good indicator that the US system may not be perfect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fnXsmXzphI
As Steve says in the video, in the US you have no recourse. There's no law. The shop in question didn't feel like being "nice" and the person is out of 500$. For Steve, this amounts to a scam, but the burden of proof is on him. For specifically this reason, the EU has a law that says otherwise.
Back when I was in the US, I could have bought a wetvac from a major chain store, shampoo my carpets, then returned it for a full refund. It would have been a fully functioning item that I gained beneficial use from, but the store would still take the used item back and return all my money.
This comes with a huge caveat. It’s a semi-official store policy, but not a legally binding requirement. If the manager doesn’t like you, then you’re on your own. Granted, the manager doesn’t care that much, because they’re just going to put the used wetvac and sell it to someone else. That person might discover that I broke the unit and they legitimately can’t use it. However, if they don’t have the same magic sprinkles I have (e.g. a title, a midwestern accent, white skin), the store might decide not to give them a refund, even though I’m the one that broke the appliance in the first place.
Since leaving the US, I haven’t had a store try to unload used merchandise on me and I like that I don’t have to put on a performance to get a refund on faulty items, but I’ve encountered other expats who found it a culture shock.
I never, and I mean never, got the genius welcome cocktail they always advertised for. No hotel ever heard of that
However, with flights and flight search websites I do sometimes see close to equal pricing, and in that domain I almost always check the airline website itself and book directly when possible.
Usually booking maximal a week before arrival. So maybe that's why?
Maybe it depends on where exactly, or what kind of hotels, how late you are with your booking, or the booking genius I have, however I had the exact opposite impression.
With flights it's a different thing, but it can happen as well.
On my first trip to the USA (traveling from South Africa), Travelstart managed to somehow inject the word "DOCUMENT" into my name that was on the tickets.
So my name e.g. "JOHN DOE" became "JOHN DOCUMENT DOE". At the customs/border control in Atlanta they noted that my ticket's name didn't correspond to my passport, which was actually a huge problem. Luckily they eventually let me into the country because the TSA agent was super friendly and "vouched" - which is bizarre on its own.
Needless to say, I always order tickets directly from the airliner now.
They should have the power to fine a firm that's found to not actually be checking whether other people are online, whether a hotel is actually empty, etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29472233
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29471213
> incompatible with the law
This is amazing.
A much better -- and honest -- defense would have been to state that it wasn't against the law when written, because the law didn't go into effect until January 2020, and the press release was from December 2019, and they would become in compliance within the six months as agreed to.
They certainly use nefarious UX patterns like “10 people just booked this location!!” But I’ve always found the “free cancellation by” dates to be reliable.
On the other hand, booking hotels directly is an absolute nightmare of interfacing with whatever broken systems the underfunded “IT” departments of said hotel have bolted on. At that point you might as well just call the front desk and wait 20 mins to be transferred to 3 different people.
The only problems we had with booking.com is that they give you no protection whatsoever. One case, the hotel clearly gamed the reviews and posted false info. It was so bad that we had to leave. But we were still charged the full amount, and booking.com just stood aside.
Just recently, my wife booked a hotel in Tel-Aviv. The hotel charged her card twice (booking.com seemed to have passed the card info to the hotel). We cancelled, and still waiting for the refund/release of the funds. Booking.com does nothing to help. We have to bounce between the unhelpful hotel and the slow-as-hell bank/credit card company.
OT: but are there any banks or credit card companies in Germany that actually help you when you're in this situation or need a chargeback? it seems like the low card fees in EU means much worse customer service compared to the US, or is it just my wishful thinking?
In my experience the Sparkasse is pretty decent, but since they're regional institutions YMMV.
> it seems like the low card fees in EU means much worse customer service compared to the US, or is it just my wishful thinking?
We just don't have much credit card usage since SEPA-ELV works pretty well. SEPA Direct Debit stuff you can chargeback at almost all institutions via online banking or self-service ATMs, credit card depends on your institution.
When they don't tell you to book from booking.com directly...
Booking.com has made hotel reservation much easier.
Usually I'm more worried that their places usually just get my credit card number in plain text, write it down in a notebook and some frontdesk person simply uses that CC numbers to charge me on my first day there or so, manually entering it into CC terminal.
So, if booking.com cannot guarantee the very basics, why should I use them as an agent? It makes no sense to me - it's much better to book directly.
> Majorel came into being in January 2019 when Bertelsmann and Saham joined hands to create a leading customer experience organisation. Majorel brings together Arvato CRM Solutions, Phone Group,
Bertelsmann, Arvato, et al. Who ever tried their chance in Germany know these sweatshops. Working for them will impact one's mental wellbeing. Amazon receives all the hate in Germany meanwhile domestic slavers are allowed and doing well.
The only "link" between the two bookings was that we booked rooms in the same hotel for the same nights, the bookings were made within an hour of each other, and we share a surname.
A few days later I checked my credit card statement and I had two charges. My sister hadn't been charged at all, but one of the amounts I was charged corresponded to what she paid.
Booking.com said "talk to the hotel" and the hotel said "talk to booking.com". We ended up getting free breakfasts but I'd have loved to know what really happened there.
I got trapped in a loop there as well, it was pretty wretched. Hotel would only except credit card details sent via plaintext emails (on the phone I couldn't reach anyone at the purported hotel, just a call center, where they couldn't deal with processing), nobody would release me from the obligation to pay, neither booking.com nor the hotel hotline. I just ignored their emails after a certain point, deleted my account, and hope nothing ever comes of it.
This seems very common issue in hotel business. I regularly travel with Amex business travel and our travel agency sends a temporary cc# to the hotel so I don't have to pay for the room.
So that's a temporary cc# which is a little safer, but it's e-mailed in cleartext to the hotel regularly for thousands of guests.
Marriott/Hilton/Hyatt/IHG/Choice/Wyndham/etc collect 5% to 20% of top line revenue from the hotel, and do not want to deal with losses from things like chargebacks and whatnot.
This is actually my biggest worry with facebook. Even though I own their stocks, I’m scared that they are following a path where they maximize engagement versus providing utility. Facebook back in the days was definitely an amazing tool that you’d be crazy not to use. Today, not so much.
Never such a problem with booking, because with booking the contract always has been directly with the hotel.
Personal travel, on the other hand… still an Expedia fan.
Except the refund never came. So, we contacted booking.com and have been passed between support personnel for months. At some point they wanted months of our bank transcripts (which I rejected because of privacy issues, I don't trust such a company to securely handle/erase them). After five months, we just accepted the loss.
(Customer service can be good. E.g. recently Apple double charged Apple Care. I had someone on the phone within minutes and I got a personal contact within their financial department that I could message or leave voice mails for. They were very helpful in the whole process of getting the money back.)
The reason they wanted your bank statements is legitimate: you’re claiming you didn’t receive money they are convinced they refunded.
Did you yourself look at your bank statements? A refund doesn’t always show up as a refund, it sometimes shows up as a cancelled charge. A bank might not notify you of that. I have even used a bank which straight up would show a mathematically incorrect calculation in its app when this type of refund came through, and the only way to get to the bottom of it was by trawling through the statements.
Yes. My wife keeps a meticulous administration, the 125 Euro showing up again would be noticed immediately. My impression was that Booking.com wasn't going to refund the money, but was pressuring the hotel to do the refund, and they either transferred it to an incorrect account or didn't transfer it all and was feeding Booking.com false information.
However, you can't be the middle man when it suits you (get a certain percentage for every reservation), but not be the middle man when it doesn't suit you. The proper approach would be for Booking.com to refund the money and then settle things with the hotel. But they are clearly not very customer-oriented.
Yeah, these kinds of "customer" "service"'s job is to dick around with you until you give up. Same story with the plentiful cases of AirBnB "customer" "service" just offering partial refund, etc, etc.
Most providers will match any rate you see on these aggregator sites because they still are getting more money then if you booked through the site after they take out their fee.
Well the whole point of a hotel is that it isn’t local to you, so this doesn’t make any sense.
We see Booking.com's online travel agent ("OTA") model as fundamentally predatory/parasitic to hospitality operators. Our business is designed to cut-out of the likes of Booking.com and other middlemen--let the operators own the guest data and build direct relationship with their guests.
Q. to all you off the cuff commenters: did you even realise that they had thousands of call centre workers?
Left wing economist believe this is a great feature that makes lives much better for employees. Right wing economists believes this a bad feature that only protects incumbent employees and makes employers less inclined to hire in the first place or waste resources on workarounds like temp-agencies. Neither standpoints can be conclusively proven, so is mostly a matter of ideology.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_cause_(employment_law)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
They're jerks, trying to force them out by moving them to a crap subsidiary without benefits, maybe forced relocation to another country (!), etc.
Firing people means paying severance.
They want to avoid doing that and for obvious reasons in many countries that's illegal.
I guess they figured possible lawsuits are cheaper.
Unfortunely for the Dutch employees that doesn't seem to be the case in Netherlands.
There's only laying off with a severance and firing for cause, where firing for cause is by design <<super>> hard to do. And it's definitely not something that can be done to masses of people at once without all the government authorities coming to pay the offending company a visit ASAP.
> That's the entire basis of this comment thread.
Not if you figure out the entire context of this event.
Therefore you cannot just fire 200 people to hire another 200 cheaper, because that's a way to increase only company's profit but not society benefit. And if you fire them, you need to compensate them properly. Of course companies try to go around these regulations, it's up to each Government how to enforce laws to prevent it.
And this isn't even relevant to what is happening with Booking.com. No one is being explicitly fired, they are being moved to a new company with different job requirements. Which as far as I understand, is constrictive dismissal, so the right thing in this case is for Booking.com to give all their employees the option of being laid off instead.
Notably, the Reddit poster is from France, so this sin't a "US vs Europe" thing as some other comentors are trying to make it out.
Also, looking at https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/social-security/unemploym..., seems unemployment in Germany is similiar, but in some situations less than in the US- though it can also, in some situations, last longer.
Meaning, it does happen, but it requires the workers and union to accept it actually takes place, the company cannot just decide on their own that they will do it and that is it.
They've just pulled the rug from underneath you without it being your fault in any way.
American labor laws are inhuman.
This place is a weird mix of Marxism and laissez-faire capitalism.
Maybe if you actually read some stuff, you'd know this.
Basically, the directive prevents businesses sidestepping laws and contracts that protect employees' rights by transferring those employees to another organisation. Seems reasonable to me (if you share my view that employees have rights).
However, on the same note, I hate when I see someone blasting/suing Walmart or similar for what one cashier did to them. No amount of corporate training can prepare someone for a bad day.
Never had to call customer support, though.
Sorry to hear about the layoffs, but customer experience has been great for me.
Why it should be a problem to move some employees to different company? This is happening often...
I'm not a happy user, but also not a sad or angry one. I do consider their service trustworthy, though their salesmen ship is a bit slimy
Their loyalty program (Genius) is automatic and simple too where's competitors resort to various coupon and other complex "discounts".
I surely hope Booking is not going away.
They... Do not have great things to say about their experience working with a lot of the aggregators.
Last time I used them I think they pivoted into fighting with AirBNB so they took on smaller and smaller "venues" up to people (illegally) renting an apartment. The guy straight up threatened me in writing on Booking when I decided to cancel seeing how different the conditions were compared to the pictures.
At the end of the day, what you have is multiple networks that somewhat overlap and provide API for finding and booking and Web interfaces for the high street retailers etc.
Making an aggregator means, you getting an access to these API and therefore there are many aggregators out there. The problem is, the margins are really tight at that point and you can hardly do anything about it. The money used to be in the high street retail where you can have fat margins and sell extra services like city tours, paragliding - that also have fat margins.
The industry have seen quite a bit of squeeze both because of AirBnB and the aggregators.
A good way to make a lot of money is to contract all the hotels in an area and sell the company to a bedbank like Hotelbeds. Now hotels are opening every day, things change every day so there's quite bit of people on the ground chasing hotels making deals and getting paid handsomely for it.
A few years back, I remember a startup building a portfolio of Mediterranean(If I recall correctly?) hotels and end up selling the company to a bedbank for 30 Million USD.
If you are not looking into making this into a full blown business, I guess you can take a cut as an agent by hooking up the hotels with the representatives of the bedbanks. Look up for people titled "Market manager" and see if you can arrange a deal with them. Market managers are people responsible of adding new hotels to the portfolio of a company and manage the relationship with these hotels, they usually make good money from commissions. It also often involves things like resolving errors with the booking software, teaching the staff how to use the interface etc.
I guess you can message people from linkedIn and see how they feel about it and maybe they can give you more ideas. Maybe you can consider to get in the industry and become a market manager?
What AirBnB gets horribly wrong is hiding exact location of property. In some cases, 200-300m make all the difference, e.g. directly on the sea coast or 10min up the hill, which can happen when the road goes around. Or is it directly next to a noisy club or in a quiet street behind. Or for skiing, whether you’re directly on the track or not. Probably all my searches on Booking start with basic parameters and then immediatelly switching to map.
Also, even for locations I go often and know very well, and can easily find contacts of accomodations I’m interested in, I still choose Booking because it beats calling tens of different phones when single search shows what’s available for specific dates.
Without hiding the exact location of the property, they'll have other problems, like having the illegal part of their rental stock get discovered and shut down.
So sometimes worth it to see if the Airbnb listing is on other sites as well.
On a more serious note, yes, the layoffs are bad and I am sorry to hear about it, but when I see people in comments posting about their negative experience with the service, I feel like it's relevant to balance it with my overwhelmingly positive experience with the service.
So the location was great, 5 out of 5 but that doesn't make up for the terrible service and the noise 0 out of 5.
Another thing that got me was the window dressing. They show the nicest room of the hotel on the site but the room you get when you arrive is nasty. Booking.com were famous for this kind of stuff and probably helped AirBnB get to where they are.
It baffles me how hard it is to avoid them when booking hotel rooms online.
The first time when I tried to avoid them (because I was so mad at them for screwing me over), I booked the same room on another website that I found by searching, only to get a confirmation email from booking.com...
Apparently booking sites have the worst rooms reserved for their platforms. So its worth just booking directly through a hotel's website instead of using an aggregator.
Reservations for guests that stay with the hotel brand frequently are designated with various tiers in the rewards programs. There are arrival reports that detail how much they stay at specific hotels and what their preferences are. It is also trivial to sort through people coming via travel agents such as Priceline, booking.com, or Expedia, which means the hotel has to pay commission, which makes those guests worth less than those who reserve directly.
Some hotels seem to be terrified of getting bad reviews on this site.