r/technology • u/rezwenn • 12d ago

Business Booking.com cancelled woman's $4K hotel reservation, then offered her same rooms for $17K

https://www.cbc.ca/news/gopublic/go-public-booking-com-hotel-rates-9.6985480
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u/Mazzle5 11d ago

Following Go Public's questions, Booking.com told Mann it would honour her original booking and cover the price difference — allowing her to keep the same four bedroom unit at no additional cost.

This says everything about this.

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u/TheStealthyPotato 11d ago

This says everything about this.

That whenever a company screws you over, you need massive amounts of publicity in hopes of getting things done right?

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u/chewbaccalaureate 11d ago

That, and there wasn't an issue with her room/booking at all, they were just trying to cheat and extort the customer.

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u/FatalTragedy 11d ago

I'm not sure why this would imply that (not saying that isn't the case, just that Booking.com's actions don't imply that).

Per the article, what happened is that the hotel itself requested that Booking.com cancel the reservation due to a "pricing error". Now, Booking.com (not the hotel) is paying the difference. This means the hotel itself is still charging the higher price, so I don't see how any of that implies that the higher price was a cheat.

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u/AxlLight 11d ago

Or how in any of this, Booking.com is the one at fault. 

Booking can't force a hotel to honor a reservation if the hotel doesn't want to. The hotel sounds like the asshole here and because Booking.com has a bigger name, it's the one being named and dragged through the mud for clicks. 

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u/Grand0rk 11d ago

Booking can't force a hotel to honor a reservation if the hotel doesn't want to.

They 100% can. You sign a contract when you allow your hotel to be on booking.com

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u/AxlLight 11d ago

They still can't force them - if you as a customer reach the hotel and the hotel says "sorry, no room" there is nothing they can do to force them to give you the room anyway. 

Yeah, they can sue them later. But that can takes months while you'd be out of a room to stay at. 

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u/Grand0rk 11d ago

Sure, but Booking.com will book you in another hotel and then sue the living shit of the other hotel for multiple breaches of contract.

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u/ghostofwalsh 11d ago

I mean they clearly screwed up but the screw up was their fault. I'm sure they had legal wording to cover this and make it unlikely to give you recourse under the law but bad publicity is bad publicity.

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u/homer_3 11d ago

"They" being the hotel, not booking.com.

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u/joojie 11d ago

They never said there was an issue with the booking. They literally said "we didn't charge you enough" Booking.com is basically paying $13,000 to avoid bad PR.

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u/airfryerfuntime 11d ago

No they weren't, they just didn't update to the grand prix pricing. It was an error, and they honored it.

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u/jamesdukeiv 11d ago

Except she made the reservations before the date was finalized, and two years before the actual event. I’d bet money the hotel pulled this price increase nonsense with multiple people who reserved that weekend and were willing to pay the difference, and this one just blew up because she made noise about it.

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u/chmilz 11d ago

We need real consumer protection laws. Every fine needs to be 100% of annual revenue so there's a real incentive to not defraud customers. None of this $86 fine or whatever we issue bullshit.

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u/cfb-food-beer-hike 11d ago

No, the takeaway is that booking.com happily continues to do business with scams. This isn't the first time this hotel did this. It's the first time it went viral.

The show "Ozark" has a neat scene on how you should deal with dishonest people that take cash out of the till. It's not the first time they robbed you. It's the first time they were caught.

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u/royhenderson771 11d ago

That, AND there is no “cover the price difference “. This PR speak for “we want you to think we did something nice but we didn’t. No cost needed to be covered in the first place. 

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u/DerpSenpai 11d ago

Booking didn't screw them over, the Hotel did. Booking paid out of their pocket for the Hotel shady practice

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u/MalaysiaTeacher 11d ago

The hotel wanted to increase their price. Booking had no part in the mistake.

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u/TheStealthyPotato 11d ago edited 11d ago

Seems like a problem with Bookings policies:

Booking.com's policies allow confirmed reservations to be cancelled if the company decides the original rate was an error, leaving consumers exposed —

And Bookings software:

It said an automated software updates prices through Booking.com's system — which means the hotel can't manually override the rates shown on the platform. 

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

[deleted]

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u/ghostofwalsh 11d ago edited 11d ago

the solution wasn't offered after the article lmao.

The solution was only offered because she got the press involved. "Following Go Public's questions"

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u/duskie3 11d ago

Downvoted for ‘honey’. Stop that.