What are /r/hotels' favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Every time I've checked my hotel's rate on hotels.com, it's the exact rack rate, no discount at all. It's always the same price I'd offer anyone walking in the door. Our rewards program gets up to every fifth night free, too at the top tier, so.... I see no benefit here to hotels.com. I only check it routinely so I know where I can send people when my own hotel is sold out. I actually thought it was pretty dead on for nightly rates, no discount really, so that's why I've been using it as a reference tool for all the walk-ins I get who apparently can't do a search themselves. I have never seen it offer a lower rate for my own place, and I check it at least 3 times a week at work.

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You'd get the same or better benefits by joining that hotel chain's reward program. But the better reason is, that the hotel cannot help you if anything goes wrong with your ota reservation. You're their customer now, not ours. Need to change the date? Call them. Need to cancel? Call them. Need a refund? Call them. It also puts you last in line for any benefits we give. When assigning rooms for the day, we'll preassign all the best rooms to our rewards program members, ota guests get whatever is left.

depends on who u get checking u in. oh do i only have two rooms left and 2 guests? one booked 3rd party one didnt ? well the one who booked direct through me gets the river view and the 3rd party gets the dungeon. it really screws over our profit their was once where a guest paid hotels.com 480$ we got 320$.

The emails I received about the cancellation from hotels.com gave 4 different possible reasons, all of which were on their end. One reason was they couldn't verify my billing information(it is the debit card I have used countless times with them before with no issue), A second reason was simply stated "Account Status" and when I spoke to their customer service, I probed into what "Account Status" could possibly mean, and they gave a very generic, scripted response, "It could mean any number of things, I apologize for the inconvenience"

Hmm. That is bizarre. I just called to test and got the same thing. I wonder if they're done, like this pandemic has literally put them out of business for good.

I work on the hotel side, and can tell you we definitely don't like the OTA(online travel agents) sites like hotels.com because you have to go through so much to do anything to your reservation.

I think you did the right thing tho in calling the hotel directly. If you haven't already, call back and let the hotel know what's going on so they can note on rez. Eventually hotels.com will either answer phone again (hopefully) and can work with the hotel to retroactively credit you.

I know not the immediate answer you want, but I'm hopeful it will work out for you in the end.