You hit the nail on the head with your closing comment - if I get bad service using a Priceline-secured hotel, I blame the hotel. All I'll remember years later is how poorly the service was at the hotel When I pay full purchase, all I'll remember is poor service from the hotel. Bottom-line, I won't stay at the hotel given any other reasonable choice. I don't mind the hotel having a policy of reassigning rooms, upgrades, etc. based upon paid price - if you pay more you expect more. But to intentionally deliver poor service to someone that paid less is incredibly poor business. If the hotel doesn't think much of Priceline-like business, they should opt out of the program.

TITLE: How to get people to stop talking URL: http://blog.dreamprojections.com/archive/2005/03/12/675.aspx IP: 67.19.7.146 BLOG NAME: blog.dreampro DATE: 03/12/2005 08:34:13 AM ...

I used travelocity to book a room at the Palm Springs Hampton Inn, around 2 months before my visit there. When I arrived: the bed configuration was different, the air conditioner was broken, and it was a smoking room (I had specified non-smoking). When I asked the staff why my room had been changed they told me that they gave priority to people who booked directly with them, and that since I had used Travelocity I had a lower priority. My smoke allergy gave me respiratory trouble for the next week. They lost a customer for life, and I've told many people about this.

Amazing! You need to find out what hotel supports comments such as these. Not only did he alienate his paying customers but also his channel sales partners being expedia and the like. the power of the web is not going away and the role of the aggregator will always beat out going direct. simple economics and efficiency of scale.

My experience was different. Hotels.com refunded $200 immediately when I told them of a bad experience in a Paris hotel (when the hotel itself refused to do anything.) They say its worth it to them to weed out the bad players.

A lot of hotel managers don't quite have a grip on the way the internet works, or how it can work, but on the other side of this, I've seen more than a few problems come from the online reservations sites. (I used to manage all the online programs for two different hotels, BTW) At both hotels we always treated all guests very well, preference (if any) was usually given to repeat guests and non-problematic guests rather than who paid the most for their room. The online channels would frequently send reservations for the wrong date, wrong room type, wrong price, and even send people to our hotel after we had called, emailed, and faxed them to say we were sold out for certain dates. They would also promise things our hotel didn't have, and wouldn't update our listing to correct important details like *no pets allowed* To many guests, I'm sure it seemed that our hotel was to blame. To my experience, the majority of 3rd party sites also have awful customer service once the initial sale is made, and are often quite strict on their refund policy. I know their hold times are often over an hour to correct problems. Nothing against online reservations though, for the 2 chians I worked for, the easiest way to go online is through the franchise's official website, and most if not all will give the lowest internet rate there. The only way to get a lower rate is to use a *blind* reservation site like ... Priceline, I think? The ones where you don't know what hotel, but you know the price, until after you pay? Those type of sites will usually be the lowest rate you can find, because they don't undermine price integrity. Of course you give up some of your choice in the process.