[jzwinck]

A family member of mine had something similar happen when using booking.com. She showed up at the hotel and they had sold her booked room to someone else. It was late and a bit of a nightmare to find another place to stay.

Overbooking airplanes means someone might be stuck sitting in the terminal for hours. Overbooking.com means someone might be made to drive around late at night, tired, with nowhere to sleep.

[OnlineGladiator]

> Overbooking airplanes means someone might be stuck sitting in the terminal for hours.

It also might mean you miss getting somewhere in an emergency, like visiting a loved one before surgery. And it also might mean you miss things you couldn't miss, like a job interview.

One of the worst memories of my life started by missing a flight (and it wasn't my fault).

[Breza]

These days, it's thankfully rare that people are forced off a flight. The worst problems I've had have come from having a flight cancelled with all the next flights fully booked. As long as the airline can point to weather, they don't have to put you up in a hotel or pay your cab fare to get to a flight at another nearby airport.

[woah]

What happened?

[arcticbull]

That's a surprise. Hotels definitely do overbook however they'll usually not leave you stranded, they "walk" you to a competitor property that they then pay for. Here's a whole write-up on it [1] from the New York Times. It's been going on forever but you may only have noticed it more recently as occupancy rates are up. I've yet to be "walked" but it does happen. Nothing particularly sketchy going on.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/business/hotels-overbooke...

[glangdale]

I got walked from my hotel near RSA Conference one year (Westin San Francisco Market Street) to the Parc 55. As compensation I got a free day, but since my employer was paying, it wasn't much of a compensation.

It sounds petty but having paid for a room, being exhausted from a Pacific flight and being moved to a hotel twice the walk from the conference (important if you're going to be back and forth all day) was mildly annoying.

I'm not 100% sure - but the one time I was walked I had picked the cheapest available room. You know those bullshitty-looking price differences where you can book on floors 9-11 for X and floors 12-14 for X+5? I suspected I had signalled my place on the hierarchy by picking the cheapest room available. Subsequently, especially while on an expense account (sorry, Intel! :-) ) I always picked the ever-so-slightly more expensive room and have never been walked again, even in the middle of conference season. This may be bogus reasoning, of course.

[pingec]

When we accidentally took a double booking for the same place, booking.com demanded that we arrange and pay for equivalent accommodation for the booking.com guests. That is what we did, I do not know what would have happened had we refused to do so.

[52-6F-62]

Wow that’s messy.

I have trip this coming month through Expedia and the last leg of our bargain basement flight got cancelled. The rep told me there were no flights for days surrounding our original flight date.

I had to sit on hold for a long time but I have to say they were great. United swept our transportation out from under our feet but the rep was able to wrangle a flight with fewer stops that arrives earlier without us having to pay the difference. We had those locked-in cheap tickets that charge you a couple hundred just to upgrade your ticket before the price difference is even considered.

Needless to say we were greatly relieved...

[Jedd]

> Wow that’s messy.

How so?

It sounds like a very reasonable policy -- the person responsible for making the mistake needs to rectify it.

No one's out of pocket -- the double booking was never going to make double revenue, after all. The time / inconvenience imposition is on the responsible party, who also likely has more service industry & local knowledge than the customer.

This policy makes me feel more positively towards booking.com.

As per TFA, AirBNB does that hand-wavey thing where they assert some problems are beyond their competence to solve -- the kinds of problems other sectors and organisations have already got policies and procedures in place to deal with.

[aptwebapps]

Expedia did that? That's great. I've always avoided them and their competitors and bought directly from the airlines because I was afraid if something went wrong I would get better service that way.

[52-6F-62]

Yeah I thought I was in for a battle. I’m not sure if it’s their larger policy or just a good rep. Can’t claim it’s a pattern as it’s only happened to me once.

She explained to me pretty thoroughly that the ticket change required higher approval to switch ticket classes and she seemed to do a bunch of back and forth with United. In all I was probably on the phone for 2 hours but on hold for 110 minutes of that while I was working.

I had no idea what would happen. I expected Expedia to punt me off to United to sort it out. But no, almost totally painless to my and my partner’s great relief.

Mind you I wonder if the order made a difference as we booked the flight, a vacation rental, and a car all at once through them and paid up front so the onus was sort of on them to make sure we could even check into our rental on time. And we’re heading to Kona so there’s not really an alternative mode of transportation available...

[couchand]

I recently made a rental car reservation through Expedia and hadn't noticed it was nonrefundable. When my plans had to change, I called them up and they took care of dealing with the rental car company and getting me a refund anyway. Pleasantly surprised how easy they made it for me.

[grapehut]

Yeah, that's what happened to me. I booked through expedia, and missed a flight (no fault of my own). The airline outright refused to deal with me, saying I needed to contact expedia to contact them. Half a day later, I still hadn't been able to hear anything useful from expedia and getting desperate ended up booking a new flight out of pocket (and never got compensation either).

I've since sworn to only ever book the flight directly from the airline.

[useful]

Hotels have horrible inventory management. They don't have the revenue management tools that airlines have. I believe there are whole call centers of 1000s of people at expedia who call hotels to verify room availability and rebook customers.

Another example is Marriot will commonly let the local management control inventory. They commonly use the cheapest room to book to max capacity and upgrade people until they are fully booked. It almost never makes sense to book a more expensive room unless you are booking within 30 days.

[reustle]

> Overbooking.com means someone might be made to drive around late at night, tired, with nowhere to sleep.

I would say most of these cases, the renter wouldn't have a car. I've been stuck in cafes after booking/Airbnb scams