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It's happened to me a few times when I've wanted to book a room the same day. I've researched the prices on various hotels before visiting a hotel. At the front desk I present how many days I want to stay and get a quote - and the quote is higher than the ones on Booking.com and Hotels.com - even though the hotels set the prices there themselves.

I think this is normal but then I ask for the lower rate at Booking.com - for the same room and days - but the front desk then refuse and ask me to book through the websites instead.

When doing this it has happened that the staff were surprised that I actually did it (and I do it in the matter of seconds with pre-saved credit cards).

Why are some hotels doing this?

I can come of with a few valid reasons:

• The front desk staff isn't allowed to give discounts.


• The hotel wants more sales and reviews on the websites.


• The websites might take some legal responsibility and handle customer service.


• The staff might expect one to accept the higher rate to not have to struggle with the websites (if one is new to them).

I'd expect this to happen to chain hotels where , as you guessed, front desk has zero price matching powers. And the chain already allocated those rooms to booking.com -- it's even possible you can't get a room from the front desk even though booking.com has them. Insanity or not, this industry is very inflexible. Also, I'd think the main reason is bookkeeping // accounting // card handling -- consider how easy it is for them when dealing with booking.com, it's essentially "here's a bank wire for all the rooms we sold this month" (possibly it's not for the single property but per corporate parent!) versus "here is a credit card which might or might not be stolen for my single night stay".

The same way why you like shopping online and not dragging yourself all the way to a few stores to get the few things you want. It's more convenient.

Business owners are focusing on developing their customer relations online, and not on-site. In the early time, you actually could ask for a discount, they will ask you to wait and then they call some sort of a manager, who comes with a big smile and use some human-to-human marketing techniques, then gives you a little discount and makes you go to your room feeling like a king.

All of this has shifted to online resources, where booking.com or other online merchants will do the job for them, and little by little the actual businesses started to lose the technique of making offers..

You were the "customer" to the hotel, now the hotel itself is a customer to the booking.com and other online merchants. They are paying fees to use their services, these fees are paid so booking.com can do these things for them.

Aren't the fully automated hotels available now? you book, check-in and check-out online with no human interactions! Just wait for it and most of them will be the same. What you have been through is just the end of a transition period where the left-over humans who are supposed to do the job lost it to the digital ones.