[mandarg]

What are some alternative sites that send you guests? I have used hotels.com sometimes (has dark patterns too, but fewer of them). I would definitely prefer using something that was more...sensible.

I would naïvely think that booking directly with hotels would be cheapest, but I have definitely seen deals on these aggregators that were unavailable on the same hotel's own site – which is the only reason I even think about using them.

[amag]

Oh, don't get me started on hotels.com. It's seems to be quite common for hotels.com to sell you the room with breakfast (in countries where breakfast typically is included) but when you get the confirmation, there's no mention of any breakfast and the booking code is for a room without breakfast. So when you arrive at the hotel and they say: "Nope, breakfast is not included" you have nothing to prove that you booked with breakfast, in fact, to the hotel your reservation is the very definition of a no-breakfast reservation.

This happened to me and we had to run through a lot of hoops to eventually get hotels.com to reimburse us. It helped that we had called them for parts of our reservation because all calls are recorded and the operator clearly stated that breakfast was included.

The same thing happened to my father who was a bit more alert and noted the missing breakfast from the confirmation. He then had to call them something like five times for a confirmation that actually said breakfast was included. Each time they sent him a new reservation but it wasn't until the last call it did say breakfast was included.

[desas]

The aggregators I looked into working with (5+ years ago) required that you offer rate parity. You had to guarantee that for a given room+date+conditions you would give the lowest price to them as you would anywhere else.

The way around it was to offer more flexibility for direct bookings or throw in breakfast.