this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2026
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Think more Expedia and booking.com, sites that thr hotels have no say over.
I worked Expedia for a while, and there is a complete disconnect between them and hotels. Hotels offer spare availability, we sell it, but customer shows up and the room is gone. Our service showed it but maybe the hotel had already sold it and we were out of date, maybe the room definition wasn't correct. So the hotel says they can't do anything, call Expedia. Expedia doesn't want to give back money so they fuck around with horrible customer service. The customer blames the hotel.
It's why I never recommend third party booking sites anymore. Book directly with the hotel. Get the loyalty program with the hotel. Yes maybe Expedia saves you 20 bucks a night, but your experience will be guaranteed with the hotel. Expedia can't make those promises.
I really feel like the hotel industry is trying to gaslight me when it comes to room booking. I mean, you have a booking system with an API and can make a quick check before finalizing a purchase so even if two people book within seconds of eachother it should be fine.
Nope, they're making woopsies and overbooking rooms and then the receptionist looks at you like you're the idiot for showing up to check into the room you succefully booked. There's no technical reason for this shit to happen so often.
I feel you and that's where I worked actually for my short time there. In reality, the hotel and third party systems are both ancient. Sure they get rewritten, and things get upgraded, but it moves at a glacial pace because anytime an update happens everyone needs to sign off on it. Even the "API", last I worked there, was still SOAP if I remember correctly, and while we did our best to make sure what you were booking was correct, we were beholden to the ancient infrastructure below. So it's not malice, but it is rather hundreds of small tiny issues that propagate and bubble, each of which usually require everyone agreeing on the implementation change, and all result in the customer being pissed at the front desk.
Long story short, when you add a middleman there's an entire layer of complexity added, and so I recommend skipping that added complexity and booking with the hotel.
Hotels contract with Expedia. They can choose not to.
Correct, as I said I worked there. However not going through them also closes you off to massive amounts of business. The alternative is that those rooms go empty and nobody stays there costing the hotels massive amounts of money. Some money is better than none.
Then they are making the business decision to accept more business thry Expedia, etc, at the cost of being misrepresented and having to deal with the fallout. Their choice.
That would be the point of the article, yes.
^= this guy doesn't understand how capital captures the market
In a perfect world, you are correct. But our world is far from perfect.
my boss always does this now, she learned her lesson 'the hard way' about third-party sites years ago.
Some hotel make discount specially if you're booking directly. Expedia and such are just useful as browser. If I can't book directly, I avoid the hotel
And some do parity checks to be sure they are priced similarly across all 3rd parties. But apparently booking has an outsized influence on what discounts you can apply compared to what you advertise through booking.
I feel like everyone thinks those sites are really great until they get burned badly.