okay I don’t know who needs to hear this but as someone who has actually worked at hotels:
Stop. Using. Third. Party. Sites.
They do not care. Booking.com, Expedia, Trivago, Travelocity, whatever fucking stupid ass third party site out there – they only cause more problems than they solve. You want a good deal? Hell – you want a straight-up better experience? Call the hotel directly, explain the price that the third party site is showing you, and ask them to match it. 99 times out of 100, they will, because when you book directly with the hotel, the hotel doesn’t have to pay the third party site jack shit. The way third party sites make their money in the first place is by telling hotels charging a rack rate of $200/night “we’ll promote your hotel to guests in the area for $175/night, but you’ll only be charging us $150”. The guest pays Expedia or whoever $175, Expedia pockets $25 as a fee for promoting the hotel and passes on $150 to the hotel. In other words, they can either lose out on $25 by price matching, or lose $50.
Every hotel would prefer you book directly, and will happily price match, so they don’t lose any money to a third party site. More than that, if there are any problems with your booking – wrong days, wrong room type, want to cancel, whatever – you would have to go through the third party site again to do any of that. And waiting on or talking to customer support staff with thick accents at 3AM while your kids are wailing and you just want to go to sleep to fix a problem with your booking that, had you not gone through a third party site, the front desk agent standing in front of you could fix right now, is not fun.
Please stop using third party sites. For the love of God and all that is holy, use them to get discounts but do not book with them.
Like, yes, this wouldn’t have done anything about the bedbug problem this hostel had, but the point remains that any issue is much easier to deal with when you don’t have to play a game of telephone with a middleman corporation that does not give a shit about you as a guest.
Now apply this to literally everything else. There’s a tech company inserting itself into every industry that worked fine without them, extracting money from both sides.
My local pizza place is 40% more expensive on takeaway apps, or i can just phone them directly.
I don’t get why it’s not common for people to cut out the middleman with these services that just connect a provider with a seeker. Then the seekers can stick with a reliable provider when they find one and the provider can take the full amount rather than giving away a cut (or, more accurately, accepting whatever the middleman thinks is the least they can give without driving the provider away). By the time they come in contact, the middleman has already added all of the value they can to that interaction.
CoNveNiEnCe!!!1!1!1!!
First party sites are how my credit card gets leaked every single time. The incompetence is thorough at every level.
My personal trick is even in my own country to get new travel credit cards regularly. The first one I got was scammed on my first booking. I alerted the hotel and they said it couldn’t possibly be them. They’re the only company that ever got those details it can only be them.
I’m not saying you can’t do that, but booking.com or Expedia could just as easily be hacked. They might invest more in security, but they also have a much larger attack surface. Furthermore, when you use a third party site, your credit card details usually won’t be passed on to the hotel directly, that’s true – but then, when you arrive, third party reservations (which only have a virtual card on file from the third party site) usually need you to provide a credit card for incidentals. So one way or another your card details will end up in the hotels system.
Travel credit cards are always a good idea, or pay in cash, just be prepared to have to leave a deposit with the front desk for damages (that you’ll get back if you don’t trash the place) if you choose to pay with cash. Dealing with the hotel directly, though, will almost always drastically reduce your headaches. Need a refund? Just talk to the front desk or management. Need to change your stay dates? Call the front desk directly. No waiting in a queue for an available operator in a call center in India, no “well the hotel has to approve of it before we can […]”, no bullshit.
I am legitimately trying to save you the headaches I watched probably hundreds of different people go through for five years on night audit, and almost every time it was a problem I couldn’t solve, it was because it was a problem created by a third party site.
I own a tiny bed and breakfast. We don’t even use OTAs like Booking.
We probably lose business by not doing it. But fuck them.
You’re doing god’s work.
I search on stuff like google maps and book directly on their website when I see it pop up on my search engine
Happened to me a few months ago, I rented a room and inspected the mattress as I always do.
Tons of bedbug stains on the corners. I asked for a refund and they refused, so I requested a charge back with the pics I took.
charge back? With your cc?
That’s right.
I’ll probably do the same.
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Misleading title. Guy never had bedbugs, just saw them
Next time you see bed bugs, go ahead and sleep in the bed, that way you have something to complain about.
“Don’t worry about those bedbugs you see on your bed and pillows, it’s not like they’ve bitten you”
Also, the title says nothing about having bedbugs, it just says it was a nightmare.
Tbf, reading the headline I also assumed the author accidentally took them home. I’m pretty sure this ambiguity is on purpose, and should be frowned upon.
Shouldn’t making assumptions about an article before reading it be frowned upon too?
You do have a point there. Media literacy should get a better focus during education.
However I don’t think its a fair comparison. The general public cannot currently be expected to have good media literacy, as long as there is no proper public education. I’m not aware of any public schools properly teaching media literacy during the general education (I mean before college), so a good chunk of the population, if not the majority, will never even stop to consider things like what kinda assumptions they made about an article. (Just like I did before this discussion)
It is something you can expect from someone who studied journalism though.
So if the goal of the journalist was good journalism, they should plan ahead and use clear language without any room for assumptions. If they use headlines like this it just seems like clickbait to me.
What ambiguity? “Booking.com ignored me after my bedbug nightmare” is a fine headline. Seeing bedbugs on your pillow when you walk in, not getting a clean replacement room, missing out on work, and having to pay for this experience is a nightmare.
The ambiguity of what exactly is meant by ‘nightmare’. It intentionally leaves it up to the readers interpretation what could be meant, and because of the harshness of the used word, the reader immediately thinks of the worst possible outcome - an infestation of your own home.
That’s on you for assuming, it’s not a long article and it’s not unclear how it all played out. Had the author not bought new clothes and washed the rest that would have been the outcome.
The thing I’m trying to get at: a good title shouldn’t leave room for assumptions, and I’m pretty sure this kinda stuff is being done just to make you click, not to provide good journalism.
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You use the word “AI” the same way the right uses “woke”.
See quotes… that means someone saying something. Than a reason afterwards. I don’t think ai is that smart.
How does that matter? He still had to change plans. Couldn’t sleep in a room. Had expenses.
Nice try, bedbug.
