[isilofi]

Availability: Often, booking sites like booking.com have reserved bunches of rooms at hotels that you can only book through their site. So the hotel's own website might show "no rooms available", while on booking.com you can still book. Many hotels even have given up on their own website and only offer rooms through booking.com.

Price: The hotel website often is no cheaper than booking.com (I guess thanks to very one-sided contracts), and sometimes only gives you a better price if you join a "club" and give them permission to spam you, sell your data, etc.

Payments: booking.com is shady, but less shady and far less broken than a random hotel website where some credit cards might not be working, your CC data turns up in some data dump "found" somewhere, or payment is held by the CC company because you are the first person in months to directly pay to that hotel's website.

Language: booking.com offers an interface and descriptions at least in English. Many hotel websites are only in the local language plus maybe some awkward machine translation that leaves lots of important points to guesswork, especially in the payment flow.

Convenience: booking.com at least offers some kind of searchable database of hotels so I can easily compare them. The hotels themselves make this rather impossible.

I do make a point to try to book via a hotels website after having found it on booking.com. However, in more than half of the cases, for the aforementioned reasons, I end up going through booking.com after all. So while lazy users might be a large part of the reason for the existence of booking middlemen, the hotels do have to bear their fair share of blame here.

[alwa]

As far as payments go, I have been surprised, when booking through booking.com (especially in foreign countries) to see my full credit card details printed in plain text on the Booking.com reservation email that the proprietor printed out and referred to when I checked in. This even when I indicate in the reservation that I intend to pay in cash or with contactless on-site.

While it makes sense to take a card to guarantee against a no-show, it’s always felt a little slimy to me that they make it feel like they, rather than a random property someplace far-flung, are the ones who would collect the fee if I didn’t make good on the reservation—and only if I actually didn’t show up.

It looks like they still pre-emptively give out your full credit card details directly to every property in plaintext, but that they might now make a notional effort to record when the property accesses the CVC?

https://partner.booking.com/en-us/help/policies-payments/gue...

[orra]

That sounds shockingly non-PCI compliant.

[ztetranz]

At least it says:

"Never take a screenshot of your guest’s credit card details, and never write them down."

That's a bit like instructions for an eBike.

"This bike is limited to 20 MPH. Do not go to the third option on the settings menu and remove this limitation with a long press of the plus button".

[satvikpendem]

I agree, this is why I book through Booking as well, it's usually cheaper than calling rhe hotel directly. Plus, I get discounts in the Booking app with repeat bookings, just like a hotel chain club.