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Booking.com is moving its customer service staff to an outsourcing company

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Re: Booking.com is moving its customer service staff to an outsourcing company

#81

Post by herbst »

culturestate wrote: post #47
dazc wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Booking.com is a great site for finding hotel rooms, provided you use it only for this reason and then go direct to the hotel's own site.

I used to do this, but recently I (somehow) got kicked into the upper tier of Booking.com’s genius program. The 20% discount you get by using B.c in that tier is unbeatable - I’ve actually had hotel front desk staff in multiple countries over the last few months tell me straight-up that they can’t price match that low and I’d be better off just using B.c.

Same here. I often tried to get s better price by just asking, but more than once the booking price was already far better than anything they could offer.

I never, and I mean never, got the genius welcome cocktail they always advertised for. No hotel ever heard of that

Re: Booking.com is moving its customer service staff to an outsourcing company

#83

Post by em500 »

ls15 wrote: post #74

One of the most unpleasant companies that I ever interacted with. It baffles me how hard it is to avoid them when booking hotel rooms online. The first time when I tried to avoid them (because I was so mad at them for screwing me over), I booked the same room on another website that I found by searching, only to get a confirmation email from booking.com...

Most of the online hotel platforms are owned by either Booking Holdings, Expedia Group or AirBnB. So choose your own poison, as the saying goes.

Re: Booking.com is moving its customer service staff to an outsourcing company

#84

Post by NumberCruncher »

3boll wrote: post #73
MikeDelta wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and 20 people looking at this room, booked 10x in the last hour, last one left. When you go to the hotel website instead, you see plenty of rooms left and sometimes with a nice offer.

Agree, but the hotel will not alocate the all the rooms for booking/other platforms, just N rooms at Y$ price.

This is true, but I remember reading an article where the journalist compared the "only X rooms left with these conditions" claim to the system of the given hotel in real time. Well, as it turned out, the hotel had more than X free rooms with those conditions allocated to booking.com...

Re: Booking.com is moving its customer service staff to an outsourcing company

#86

Post by herbst »

richardfey wrote: post #68
blunte wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several commentors have written this advice, but almost always if I check the hotel website directly I see much higher prices than what are offered on booking. hotels.com, or agoda. However, with flights and flight search websites I do sometimes see close to equal pricing, and in that domain I almost always check the airline website itself and book directly when possible.

Not even once I have seen a higher price on the hotel's website. But I travel mostly to Europe so your experience might be different.

I travelled mostly Europe and SEA and ask directly for everything longer than a night or two. Yes, listed prices on websites are almost always higher, and no I couldn't get a better price than with booking in the majority of cases.

Usually booking maximal a week before arrival. So maybe that's why?

Maybe it depends on where exactly, or what kind of hotels, how late you are with your booking, or the booking genius I have, however I had the exact opposite impression.

Re: Booking.com is moving its customer service staff to an outsourcing company

#87

Post by nolok »

Disregarding how horrible it is to do that this way, ...

The employee says he's french, so either he didn't have a french work contract, or what he is saying is untrue.

While you can transfer an employee from one company to another, it must protect every employee advantage, his history, etc ... So he has the same severance as on his original contract, with the original timeline (his time of employment isn't reset to now). I'm French, I own several companies, I have done it several times.

If he was on some sort of a self employed organisation working for a non french company, then he should have added that clarification and not having those rules in the way is the whole point of hiring more expensive freelance instead of employees.

Re: Booking.com is moving its customer service staff to an outsourcing company

#88

Post by [deleted] »

charcircuit wrote: post #80
NumberCruncher wrote: post #57

In Germany this isn't a legal move. One of my former employees (global telco everyone knows) tried to do the same, namely moving the contracts of the employees to an other company. 200 of them started a class action and won easily. The company had to terminate their contracts (which means the employees are eligible for unemployment benefits, etc.) and had to pay a good severance. Something like (years of employment)…

Why is it illegal to fire people in Germany?

[deleted]

Re: Booking.com is moving its customer service staff to an outsourcing company

#89

Post by greenSunglass »

zuhayeer wrote: post #75

Timely and relevant: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1492046480328523777?s=20... Apparently booking sites have the worst rooms reserved for their platforms. So its worth just booking directly through a hotel's website instead of using an aggregator.

If true, I'm wondering how those are assigned. Do they have rooms reserved for from those aggregators?

Re: Booking.com is moving its customer service staff to an outsourcing company

#90

Post by oblio »

ornornor wrote: post #72
dessant wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a Booking.com employee that was part of the Consumer Psychology Team coming forward and arguing that what they've been doing is not illegal in the EU, after they were forced to change course because what they've been doing was incompatible with the law. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29472233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29471213

> not illegal > incompatible with the law This is amazing.

I can't find the second quote :-(
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