Not a surprise at all. In the UK I used to take calls for activehotels.com, a booking.com subsidiary, and this company had a deal with yell.com (formerly the Yellow Pages, a prestigious phone book in the days before the internet) where they replaced all the hotel phone numbers with their booking line. We’d get people calling saying they’d just left the hotel and forgot their wallet, but we weren’t allowed to give them the hotel number.
They don’t care about customers, be they hotel guests or the hotels themselves.
I usually look at Priceline to get a feel for all hotels somewhere. This is especially useful if you’re not tied to a certain brand, or somewhere with a lot of independent hotels. I wouldn’t mind booking directly, but I have actually had Priceline give a better rate. I’ve also called the hotel directly to double-check their pet policy, ask if they’d match the rate while I’m on the phone with them, and they refuse. So I book with Priceline.
The benefit for them is that once your public phone number is no more un your control, they can ransom you any amount of money in perpetuity
Once an agency that pretended to be Google wanted to sell this feature to us “in this way you will know how many people will call you from seeing your Google maps profile, it’s great and it’s mandatory” - yeah but then once I stop paying the subscription I lose all the incoming phone calls
Not a surprise at all. In the UK I used to take calls for activehotels.com, a booking.com subsidiary, and this company had a deal with yell.com (formerly the Yellow Pages, a prestigious phone book in the days before the internet) where they replaced all the hotel phone numbers with their booking line. We’d get people calling saying they’d just left the hotel and forgot their wallet, but we weren’t allowed to give them the hotel number.
They don’t care about customers, be they hotel guests or the hotels themselves.
Was there any benefit to the company you worked for?
Asking because the whole “book directly” advice has existed for 10 years and if we just followed it, sites like booking.com would die out.
And yet it still stands.
I usually look at Priceline to get a feel for all hotels somewhere. This is especially useful if you’re not tied to a certain brand, or somewhere with a lot of independent hotels. I wouldn’t mind booking directly, but I have actually had Priceline give a better rate. I’ve also called the hotel directly to double-check their pet policy, ask if they’d match the rate while I’m on the phone with them, and they refuse. So I book with Priceline.
The benefit for them is that once your public phone number is no more un your control, they can ransom you any amount of money in perpetuity
Once an agency that pretended to be Google wanted to sell this feature to us “in this way you will know how many people will call you from seeing your Google maps profile, it’s great and it’s mandatory” - yeah but then once I stop paying the subscription I lose all the incoming phone calls