European hotel owners are angry over the "best price" clause at the online booking giant they say had kept them from offering rooms for less on their own websites.
The biggest alternative is Chinese Trip.com. Booking.com, despite its flaws, is still one of the European-based big companies that are successful globally
It’s not okay but the competition when it comes to hotel comes from a country hosting world’s biggest internment camps in Xinjiang, which, I would say, is worse than taking a cut off hotel bookings in a country that does bad things. Gotogate only sells flights as far as I know, not hotels
It’s not okay but the competition when it comes to hotel comes from a country hosting world’s biggest internment camps in Xinjiang, which, I would say, is worse than taking a cut off hotel bookings in a country that does bad things.
You’ve got that mixed up. Trip.com pays taxes to China, which is bad, but on the other hand Booking.com actively incentivises ethnic cleansing with its Israeli settlement listings. Benefiting people who are also doing bad things isn’t quite as bad as actively helping alone the bad thing. If Trip.com somehow helps the Uighur genocide I’ll change my position, but I don’t think that’s a thing.
That platform should be open source/free/public. There’s no reason they need over 24 000 employees to manage what is basically a listings website. They only succeed by meddling with transactions between two other parties, and their actual role is extremely limited. I just need to find the place and see price and availability, and the hotels just need to be shown to customers, that’s it that’s the need, everything else is just tech bro nonsense to squeeze as much as possible out of both customers and hotels. I’m glad they’re a big European company but they shouldn’t exist at all (same with Uber and all these other platforms).
Well if the hotels would provide their prices transparently, booking.com would die quickly.
The value booking.com adds, in my opinion, is to force hotels to actually provide information in machine readble format to booking.com who then have a decent interface across all hotels.
Agreed, their site offers much more than just a simple listing. It is so tedious to have to navigate multiple different websites, trying to find the relevant information. Having a single, straightforward, centralised source showing availability, options and prices was amazing when they first started. Hotels have improved their online presence a lot in the last 20 years, but being able to filter consistently for detailed parameters is still valuable, as are their reviews.
I just wish they had stuck with their core business; I don’t want to be offered insurance or car rental or any of the rest of it :/
The biggest alternative is Chinese Trip.com. Booking.com, despite its flaws, is still one of the European-based big companies that are successful globally
I have been using Opodo for a while, they are European and work well enough for most of my needs
First I’m not sure why it’s okay if it’s a European company profiteering from ethnic cleansing, second Gotogate exists and is Swedish.
It’s not okay but the competition when it comes to hotel comes from a country hosting world’s biggest internment camps in Xinjiang, which, I would say, is worse than taking a cut off hotel bookings in a country that does bad things. Gotogate only sells flights as far as I know, not hotels
You’ve got that mixed up. Trip.com pays taxes to China, which is bad, but on the other hand Booking.com actively incentivises ethnic cleansing with its Israeli settlement listings. Benefiting people who are also doing bad things isn’t quite as bad as actively helping alone the bad thing. If Trip.com somehow helps the Uighur genocide I’ll change my position, but I don’t think that’s a thing.
Tried to check out the hotel offering and it redirected me to booking
“Stays” on Gotogate redirect you to Booking.com. Similarly, most listing from HomeToGo are just cross-links from Booking
Booking.com is owned by American Booking Holdings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booking_Holdings
That platform should be open source/free/public. There’s no reason they need over 24 000 employees to manage what is basically a listings website. They only succeed by meddling with transactions between two other parties, and their actual role is extremely limited. I just need to find the place and see price and availability, and the hotels just need to be shown to customers, that’s it that’s the need, everything else is just tech bro nonsense to squeeze as much as possible out of both customers and hotels. I’m glad they’re a big European company but they shouldn’t exist at all (same with Uber and all these other platforms).
Well if the hotels would provide their prices transparently, booking.com would die quickly. The value booking.com adds, in my opinion, is to force hotels to actually provide information in machine readble format to booking.com who then have a decent interface across all hotels.
Sure there’s value there but does booking really need 24k employees and billions in revenue to make that happen?
Agreed, their site offers much more than just a simple listing. It is so tedious to have to navigate multiple different websites, trying to find the relevant information. Having a single, straightforward, centralised source showing availability, options and prices was amazing when they first started. Hotels have improved their online presence a lot in the last 20 years, but being able to filter consistently for detailed parameters is still valuable, as are their reviews.
I just wish they had stuck with their core business; I don’t want to be offered insurance or car rental or any of the rest of it :/
There is agoda.com which I used in Asia a lot but seems to work here in Europe. (I won’t be booking anything in the US, so haven’t checked.)
They’re mostly based in Thailand but registered in Singapore. Neither is a shining beacon, but I’ve not heard of concentration camps.
Agoda is owned by Booking.com
Oh, joy.
Yeah, they just buy everything noteworthy and competition is done.