Rooms At Full Hotels Available Online

from the how-dare-they! dept

You have to love the local investigative reporters who turn up stories like this one. A local reporter in upstate NY was shocked to find out that hotels that claim over the phone that they're out of rooms still had rooms available by booking online. I don't know too much about how the various online booking systems work, but it sounds like the hotels end up giving up inventory management of some block of rooms to online sites - so that they, personally, have no say in who gets the room. This prevents double booking of the same room. All this really means is that the hotel's own booking system and the online booking systems aren't as integrated as they should be (which really shouldn't be a surprise). Without real-time information between the actual hotel and all the various online sites, this is always going to be an issue.

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