This is more likely to be the hotel's fault than Booking's. You'd likely have the same issue with any third party aggregator. Many hotels (much like airlines) regularly overbook as a business decision, and third parties don't really have any visibility into this kind of thing. It's less likely (but not impossible) for this to happen to you if you book direct, and it's helpful to inform the hotel if you're going to be arriving late.

Plenty of reasons to dislike Booking, but this particular one is more of a systematic issue.

We (hotel owners/employees) hate booking dot com and their guests.

Remember that if you book with booking dot com, you are their guest. Not ours.

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At the end of the month, hotel has 6 days to reconicle all the reservations. If we miss it they will charge us commission for the guest who did no shows, cancelled or CC declined. You can only dispute that twice.

They made UI so bad. If the guest card fails, marking CC invalid is not enough. They will still charge us commission. We also have to mark that we are charging 0 for no shows.

75% of the our no-shows are booking dot com guest.

Booking dot com guest are the worst too. They pay 2 star rate, and expect 5 star hotel service.

"Booking dot com and customers too bad but I still allow them out of generosity of my heart."

The same way a mobile developer might say App Store and Google Play are bad, but have to distribute through them.

Booking and Expedia dominate the space, not just their own brands but Agoda, Kayak, Priceline, Hotels dot com, Travelocity, many others.

Yes, and imagine a mobile developer openly saying Android customers are cheap and leave bad comments.

Do you feel that way about all the aggregators (and their guests) or is Booking.com especially bad?

Just curious - I used Expedia recently to book a hotel/car package for a much better rate than I was able to get anywhere else, and it all worked out. I did feel like I was put in a pretty unimpressive room though. Not sure if the hotel was just a bit less nice than I expected or if the hotel figured “let’s put the cheapo from Expedia in the shabbiest room”.

> We (hotel owners/employees) hate booking dot com and their guests. Remember that if you book with booking dot com, you are their guest. Not ours.

You are completely unfit for your line of work.

You have a duty treat all guests well and if you don't want them to book through booking.com you are free to remove your listing. They are not forcing you to do any business with them.

If you can't attract enough guests by yourself without using booking.com, that means you have failed in the most important part of your business.

Genuinely curious, if that's the case, why do you keep using it then? Is it simply that too many customers come through it and you have no choice?

It's the best aggregator out at the moment. I call hotels before booking and ask for the same rate or similar perk. Most are happy to oblige and avoid booking.com fees.

If I go to your web site, will I be able to book the same room for the same price as on booking.com, with the same cancellation conditions, in the same or lower number of steps/fields to fill out?

Yes, I am also surprised about the original author characterizing any message as helpful. I am pretty sure the "x rooms left" and similar messages can never be really trusted.

First of all hotels juggle between portals and selling locally. So they don't give all their rooms to a single portal and wait until they are sold. They add a couple of rooms to every portal and more once they are sold out. It has also happened to me (with booking.com) that a hotel had overbooked. Probably not intentionally, but they made a mistake in their juggling. Not a problem for me, they sent me to a more expensive room in a hotel 3 minutes away. So the numbers on booking.com cannot be reliable even without their direct fault.

Additionally I have the strong feeling booking.com are crooks. I would not trust their numbers and messages even if they got perfect information from the hotels. I have no proof for that, but unethical practices reported above and the questionable work conditions you hear about them seem to be in line with my suspicion.

> Not sure if this is common knowledge, but I learned booking.com does not necessarily integrate with hotel backends in the way you might expect given their name. Turns out they (at least sometimes?) just lie to you in the UI.

In 99% of cases this is the fault of the hotel. In the contract with booking.com you have to honour the reservations, wether you have a system that integrates with them or not. That is the whole idea! Booking.com integrates very well with backend systems, but the hotel can still screw up, and they are responsible.

Carlton City Hotel Singapore, I arrived there in the middle of the night with a printout from booking.com of my (already-paid-for) reservation.

The staff said they don't have my reservation, told them to check booking.com, they replied they do not have access to booking.com, a third party manages that for them which was unavailable at night. In that moment I realized I was putting way too much trust in that website. I was able to pay for a new reservation and later got the booking.com payment refunded. Luckily the hotel was not fully booked...

> they replied they do not have access to booking.com, a third party manages that for them which was unavailable at night.

I guess that's primarily the hotel's fault. They should not give rooms to weird third parties. But with the market shares of the big booking sites that would cause them significant loss of bookings.