[severino]

Thanks for your explanation, I love to learn more about the businesses I use through their employees.

About room availability, I thought that if Booking or any other third-party says "this hotel has 5 rooms left", it didn't necessarily mean the hotel had actually only 5 rooms available for the dates, but maybe there were only 5 rooms left from the "batch" the hotel put in Booking (my assumption was that, to make the orchestration of reservations between different platforms easier, hotels divided the number of rooms between them, or something like that...)

[fwlr]

I can’t speak to those spooky warnings of “only X left” from OTAs, I assume they’re technically true in some way but heavily massaged to increase anxiety because that improves conversion.

Orchestrating reservations is a lot more streamlined than you’re imagining. All sources have access to the reservation management system and can poll it for availability, while the booking is in progress it simply blocks out the booking with a “pending” booking. When the booking is made, the source adds it to the hotel’s system themselves. I have had customer support with both OTAs on the phone and heard them say “I can see you have this many rooms available…”. So if we have 7 rooms left, Expedia knows we have 7 rooms, Booking.com knows we have 7, and we know we have 7.

The only exception is if we have rooms with potential maintenance issues (air conditioners, TVs, and hot water systems have Heisenbugs too!), we will sometimes reserve one room of that type in case we need to move a guest. In that case, we would have 8 rooms available but Expedia and Booking.com would see 7.

[carlosjobim]

> it didn't necessarily mean the hotel had actually only 5 rooms available for the dates, but maybe there were only 5 rooms left from the "batch" the hotel put in Booking

Booking.com doesn't know about any rooms that are not made available to them by the hotel, so everything is based on that. In my experience, most hotels just have all their rooms available at all times for booking.com - but maybe some of them experiment with availability to sell a bit more themselves.

The "A person just booked..." and "Only 2 rooms left" messages that booking.com uses to annoy customers are actually correct. I've worked on the other side, and seen from the backend that they don't lie.

> (my assumption was that, to make the orchestration of reservations between different platforms easier, hotels divided the number of rooms between them, or something like that...)

No, they use hotel software that integrates and synchronizes instantly with all platforms, their own web site and the front desk.

[severino]

> No, they use hotel software that integrates and synchronizes instantly with all platforms, their own web site and the front desk.

Yes, I think that's feasible. However, I sometimes stay at medium to small size hotels (doing my reservation through Booking or other 3rd parties) but when I get to the place, I can see them managing my stay using Excel files or similar "almost by hand" methods. So I was skeptical that those kind of places had actually a system that can automatically synchronize with all the third party platforms they use in real time.

[carlosjobim]

The absolute best in class of these systems cost $100 per month for a small-medium sized hotel, so it's not expensive at all. Many hotels still refuse to use them because of their own backwardness. Then they screw up and overbook and try to blame booking.com when they don't have a room for them.