Nice to see that I am not only one hating booking.com with a passion.
But what really amazes me is the market failure that hotels and other accomodation providers can't come up with a co-op booking site. I am sure there are issues that are difficult to solve from competition point of view, but are they really so difficult to solve that the rent seeking fees of current booking sites are justified?
Yes it is. You are maybe not considering the challenge of putting all those accommodations across the globe in one place. Accommodation providers don’t care about how they fill up their rooms as long as they get filled. Booking, contrary to many other tech companies, is very successful financially with 14.5b of revenues and something like 25+% EBIT. I find hard to believe that a coop is going to be able to build such service worldwide.
Sometimes you see initiatives where the tourist board of a city or a region provides a convenient site for booking a stay. But of course they don't come near the SEO power of Booking.com, so the accommodations also put their rooms there. For the traveler, it is easier to just always use Booking.com.
And people like me and you, who really don't want to book at Booking.com and make an effort to book elsewhere, are often in bad luck, because they own a bunch of other booking sites too.
Comments
Nice to see that I am not only one hating booking.com with a passion.
But what really amazes me is the market failure that hotels and other accomodation providers can't come up with a co-op booking site. I am sure there are issues that are difficult to solve from competition point of view, but are they really so difficult to solve that the rent seeking fees of current booking sites are justified?
Yes it is. You are maybe not considering the challenge of putting all those accommodations across the globe in one place. Accommodation providers don’t care about how they fill up their rooms as long as they get filled. Booking, contrary to many other tech companies, is very successful financially with 14.5b of revenues and something like 25+% EBIT. I find hard to believe that a coop is going to be able to build such service worldwide.
Sometimes you see initiatives where the tourist board of a city or a region provides a convenient site for booking a stay. But of course they don't come near the SEO power of Booking.com, so the accommodations also put their rooms there. For the traveler, it is easier to just always use Booking.com.
And people like me and you, who really don't want to book at Booking.com and make an effort to book elsewhere, are often in bad luck, because they own a bunch of other booking sites too.