Hotel booking website?

[keestha]

Booking through one of those systems is less sure than booking at the hotel itself. Whoever handles the booking system of the hotel, has to be very careful: If the hotel has no more availability for a certain period, the hotel has to be taken out of Agoda or whatever for that period. Often people forget to do this, the customer makes a booking, maybe pays, and gets a nice confirmed booking which he prints out, but once at the hotel he will be told the place is overbooked.

[madmitch]

Booking through one of those systems is less sure than booking at the hotel itself. Whoever handles the booking system of the hotel, has to be very careful: If the hotel has no more availability for a certain period, the hotel has to be taken out of Agoda or whatever for that period. Often people forget to do this, the customer makes a booking, maybe pays, and gets a nice confirmed booking which he prints out, but once at the hotel he will be told the place is overbooked.

This may have been the case ten years ago but is certainly not the case now.

All large hotels and many smaller establishments use what's called a channel manager. This links all the websites that a hotel uses, including its own, and updates every website every time a booking comes in from whatever source. This is often linked to front desk software which may allocate rooms and also ensures that walk-ins are included in the system.

There can be a short delay in the channel manager updating all its different websites, therefore it's possible that the last room of a certain type could be booked twice, in which case I would guess that most hotels would prioritise the booking from its own website. But these cases are quite rare.

NB channel managers also control pricing, hence the reason that you see the same price across most websites and enable all these sites to offer a best price guarantee.

[Razzler1973]

I like getting 'points' back for the review, as someone mentioned but not sure there's much difference between them

Unfortunately, 500 points for each review appears to have recently stopped. It's a shame as I usually submitted reviews for this very reason.

That is a big shame as I probably won't make the effort to leave a review now