Thia is actually quite annoying, because the one time I've used their customer services they were really good. I needed to cancel half of a reservation (booked for 2 nights, needed to leave early), and the hotel staff said they couldn't do that as I'd booked through a third party. I called Booking.com and they made it happen. Hopefully whoever they outsource to can continue the good work.
It’s hard to imagine the same level of service can be provided by call centers tending to multiple brands/products at the same time.
I was thinking or re-investing since the pandemic looked like slowing down and travel stock migth take over but that move tells me unequivocally not to bother.
Run. Run far away and as fast as you can from this kind of move when you see it.
Outsourcing moves like this are a signal that the leadership views operations as a cost center of script-following monkeys. It won't blow them up, but it will consign a part of their organization to mediocrity, open to competitive attack.
Contrast that with the organizations I've seen who unlock the real value of operations: partners on the front line who feel the trends in their aggregate customer interactions, who are continuously, intricately involved in instrumenting operational data gathering based upon their gut feeling of those trends to drive rationalized product improvements. Software and data analytics makes it all possible, at a scale and granularity never before possible.
If their service declines I hope a new service gets created that replicates what they do, but I worry that if someone was to build a company like this nowadays they’d just not hire phone support staff.
I've never seen this go well. My most recent experience is one of many where "improvements" were terrible for me as a customer.
Amerigas, a national propane company, did the same thing the year before last. When I needed someone, I'd call the local office and talk to someone who knew the area and the business and would get whatever question or issue resolved almost immediately. When they "improved" customer service by firing all of these local people and consolidated them into a (not offshore, at least) customer service center, it was a total nightmare.
We were in the middle of a backyard renovation that required burying the propane line for our grill and stove. I called the local office and scheduled everything a couple months in advance. When the appointment time came, I received a notification that it was going to be delayed by a week, which would also hold up my project at a cost of $1000/day to pay for an idle crew and their equipment. Unfortunately, between the time I made the appointment and the time I called to see if it could be moved back, the customer service "upgrade" happened.
Every rep was super friendly, but no one had any knowledge of the business and every call required about 40 minutes of hold time just to speak with someone, 10 minutes of conversation, and then another 40 minutes of hold time to speak with the supervisor who was more knowledgable. Even the supservisors didn't have answers and would promise to call back by the end of the day. Of course, out of the 5-6 conversations we had with that promise, exactly zero resulted in a callback. When the work was finally done, it was done without a permit, which could only be pulled by the gas company, so the project was on hold again until that was resolved.
In the end, I had to find a customer service VP on LinkedIn and send them a very polite note about the "unpermitted gas line work" done on my property. That resulted in the issue being resolved the very next day. Before the upgrade, I could have spoken directly with the local rep, who would then just speak to the local tech, and resolve things almost immediately every time.
This place is a weird mix of Marxism and laissez-faire capitalism.
Basically, the directive prevents businesses sidestepping laws and contracts that protect employees' rights by transferring those employees to another organisation. Seems reasonable to me (if you share my view that employees have rights).
Maybe if you actually read some stuff, you'd know this.
Therefore you cannot just fire 200 people to hire another 200 cheaper, because that's a way to increase only company's profit but not society benefit. And if you fire them, you need to compensate them properly. Of course companies try to go around these regulations, it's up to each Government how to enforce laws to prevent it.
They're jerks, trying to force them out by moving them to a crap subsidiary without benefits, maybe forced relocation to another country (!), etc.
Firing people means paying severance.
They want to avoid doing that and for obvious reasons in many countries that's illegal.
I guess they figured possible lawsuits are cheaper.
American labor laws are inhuman.
Left wing economist believe this is a great feature that makes lives much better for employees. Right wing economists believes this a bad feature that only protects incumbent employees and makes employers less inclined to hire in the first place or waste resources on workarounds like temp-agencies. Neither standpoints can be conclusively proven, so is mostly a matter of ideology.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_cause_(employment_law)
However, on the same note, I hate when I see someone blasting/suing Walmart or similar for what one cashier did to them. No amount of corporate training can prepare someone for a bad day.
Never had to call customer support, though.
I will still never understand why companies do this. Your quite literal last line of defense (and sometimes first) with a customer is people that aren't directly accountable other than a corporate contract? Never made sense to me.
Also, the fact that they are generally the lowest paid is also bizzare.
Literally cost. That's it. An example from my own experience:
UK Cost center, salaries started at £18k.
They moved this operation to the Philipines. Starting salaries of PHP350k - the equivalent of just under £5k.
Cutting the cost of salaries is much more easily quantified than the cost of a damaging customer service.
Of course that time is not really quantified officially, it's just a salary.
Specialization and economies of scale. Best Buy's core competence isn't phone customer service. A phone customer service can specialize and develop tools and processes that Best Buy couldn't. They can also serve multiple companies with a smaller workforce due to increased utilisation rate (a bit similar to why cloud hosting has become so popular).
> Also, the fact that they are generally the lowest paid is also bizzare.
It doesn't require skills or training, almost anyone who can talk is qualified to do phone customer service. I had many friends in high school whose first job was phone customer service.
So then outsourced CS should be better than in-house. But it doesn't seem to work like that.
> almost anyone who can talk is qualified to do phone customer service
That's not consistent with my own experience; for example, many third-world telephone CS outfits employ staff with accents so thick that I can't understand them. I mean they may be able to talk in some language; but they're not that good at talking English. Outsourced CS reps are much more likely to just hang up on the caller if it looks like it might be a difficult call.
Also, "qualified" is doing quite a lot of work there. Anyone that can talk (the customer's language) is qualified to pick up the phone and follow a script. But good customer service means reps that know the product, and don't need a script.
Regardless of the volume, it was very shocking to me how many situations that ended up being escalated to even the executive level were caused simply by the interaction with the phone customer care channel. These situations "cost" the company quite a bit in highly paid people time to solve. Granted that cost is never quantified, but it is real.
You also see this pattern replicated in the ISP industry quite heavily.
A general-purpose call centre operator who supports 20 different firms knows how to set up phone systems and churn bodies, but they will, by nature, be unable to optimize around your specific customer needs and internal platforms. The customer-service experience will inherently be worse-- worse answers, more escalations required to get to an outcome, and potentially some resolutions simply not available to a siloed third party.
On the other hand, I suspect that's part of the way they've priced customer service. Getting customers ravingly satisfied with their experience isn't the goal, it's "just enough so they don't litigate or start leaving negative external press." The fact you moved down from "first-choice default go-to store" to "I'll also check Newegg and Amazon before my next purchase" doesn't really show up in this quarter's financials.
Sorry to hear about the layoffs, but customer experience has been great for me.
Their loyalty program (Genius) is automatic and simple too where's competitors resort to various coupon and other complex "discounts".
I surely hope Booking is not going away.
What AirBnB gets horribly wrong is hiding exact location of property. In some cases, 200-300m make all the difference, e.g. directly on the sea coast or 10min up the hill, which can happen when the road goes around. Or is it directly next to a noisy club or in a quiet street behind. Or for skiing, whether you’re directly on the track or not. Probably all my searches on Booking start with basic parameters and then immediatelly switching to map.
Also, even for locations I go often and know very well, and can easily find contacts of accomodations I’m interested in, I still choose Booking because it beats calling tens of different phones when single search shows what’s available for specific dates.
At the end of the day, what you have is multiple networks that somewhat overlap and provide API for finding and booking and Web interfaces for the high street retailers etc.
Making an aggregator means, you getting an access to these API and therefore there are many aggregators out there. The problem is, the margins are really tight at that point and you can hardly do anything about it. The money used to be in the high street retail where you can have fat margins and sell extra services like city tours, paragliding - that also have fat margins.
The industry have seen quite a bit of squeeze both because of AirBnB and the aggregators.
A good way to make a lot of money is to contract all the hotels in an area and sell the company to a bedbank like Hotelbeds. Now hotels are opening every day, things change every day so there's quite bit of people on the ground chasing hotels making deals and getting paid handsomely for it.
So sometimes worth it to see if the Airbnb listing is on other sites as well.
I'm not a happy user, but also not a sad or angry one. I do consider their service trustworthy, though their salesmen ship is a bit slimy
Last time I used them I think they pivoted into fighting with AirBNB so they took on smaller and smaller "venues" up to people (illegally) renting an apartment. The guy straight up threatened me in writing on Booking when I decided to cancel seeing how different the conditions were compared to the pictures.
Why it should be a problem to move some employees to different company? This is happening often...
On a more serious note, yes, the layoffs are bad and I am sorry to hear about it, but when I see people in comments posting about their negative experience with the service, I feel like it's relevant to balance it with my overwhelmingly positive experience with the service.
I rarely use booking.com, and now I'm sure I never will.
People / Customers are not at the center of the company any more, but behind a wall. Incentives get shifted, and core business becomes a service.
Not a good news.
Went from having a dedicated human to talk to knowing me, and being aware of what kind of team people were running to having generic folks on the phone crawling linkedin profiles for me.
Who do you think was having a better success rate at finding the right candidate?
In companies where there are many roles open, someone needs to be aware of what kind of team would fit the profile to ensure success.
A couple years later, half the teams were using under the radar private hiring firms to help find talents.
A loss on all sides.
Outsourced teams will never care about their work as much as an internal team does and because of that everything else suffers.
Such a shame.
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.
Most likely he is employeed in Amsterdam, where Dutch law applies. There’s local contract (for sales) but CS are concentrated in Amsterdam.
Also the move would definitely be illegal in the Netherlands too.
Or someone ignored the contract? This is like that Top Gear clip. “You can’t do that, there’s a contract!”
This is actually my biggest worry with facebook. Even though I own their stocks, I’m scared that they are following a path where they maximize engagement versus providing utility. Facebook back in the days was definitely an amazing tool that you’d be crazy not to use. Today, not so much.
So the location was great, 5 out of 5 but that doesn't make up for the terrible service and the noise 0 out of 5.
Another thing that got me was the window dressing. They show the nicest room of the hotel on the site but the room you get when you arrive is nasty. Booking.com were famous for this kind of stuff and probably helped AirBnB get to where they are.
That said, this post seems to pertain to the Booking.com business (which is still a somewhat independent division, as are all the properties/brands in the group), rather than the entire Booking Holdings corporation.
When travelling SEA for cheap I ended up in hotels that were lying about the rooms more than once. A room without windows, described as balcony room for 2 weeks and shit like that.
Shady hotel owners don't care, and discussions can go on forever. However simply calling booking and have them call the hotel for me fixed the issue any time within a few minutes.
I guess in grandparent poster's case, the hotel owners were afraid of booking.com and caved into their demands, while in your case, the owners knew booking.com and you can't do anything.
> Majorel came into being in January 2019 when Bertelsmann and Saham joined hands to create a leading customer experience organisation. Majorel brings together Arvato CRM Solutions, Phone Group,
Bertelsmann, Arvato, et al. Who ever tried their chance in Germany know these sweatshops. Working for them will impact one's mental wellbeing. Amazon receives all the hate in Germany meanwhile domestic slavers are allowed and doing well.
Except the refund never came. So, we contacted booking.com and have been passed between support personnel for months. At some point they wanted months of our bank transcripts (which I rejected because of privacy issues, I don't trust such a company to securely handle/erase them). After five months, we just accepted the loss.
(Customer service can be good. E.g. recently Apple double charged Apple Care. I had someone on the phone within minutes and I got a personal contact within their financial department that I could message or leave voice mails for. They were very helpful in the whole process of getting the money back.)
The reason they wanted your bank statements is legitimate: you’re claiming you didn’t receive money they are convinced they refunded.
Did you yourself look at your bank statements? A refund doesn’t always show up as a refund, it sometimes shows up as a cancelled charge. A bank might not notify you of that. I have even used a bank which straight up would show a mathematically incorrect calculation in its app when this type of refund came through, and the only way to get to the bottom of it was by trawling through the statements.
Yes. My wife keeps a meticulous administration, the 125 Euro showing up again would be noticed immediately. My impression was that Booking.com wasn't going to refund the money, but was pressuring the hotel to do the refund, and they either transferred it to an incorrect account or didn't transfer it all and was feeding Booking.com false information.
However, you can't be the middle man when it suits you (get a certain percentage for every reservation), but not be the middle man when it doesn't suit you. The proper approach would be for Booking.com to refund the money and then settle things with the hotel. But they are clearly not very customer-oriented.
Yeah, these kinds of "customer" "service"'s job is to dick around with you until you give up. Same story with the plentiful cases of AirBnB "customer" "service" just offering partial refund, etc, etc.
I used to spend 100-150 nights a year on the road and an ungodly amount of money with them.
One time I turned up late at night to a property that didn’t exist that was listed on their website.
They were absolutely useless in helping to resolve and it took months to get the money back. The fake apartment remained listed on their site for a long time too.
Moved all of my spend to Hotels.com and had a much better experience.
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.
Reservations for guests that stay with the hotel brand frequently are designated with various tiers in the rewards programs. There are arrival reports that detail how much they stay at specific hotels and what their preferences are. It is also trivial to sort through people coming via travel agents such as Priceline, booking.com, or Expedia, which means the hotel has to pay commission, which makes those guests worth less than those who reserve directly.
Most providers will match any rate you see on these aggregator sites because they still are getting more money then if you booked through the site after they take out their fee.
Well the whole point of a hotel is that it isn’t local to you, so this doesn’t make any sense.
But it's a good thing for a lot of people from third world countries that Majorel will inevitably hire: what might be a bad salary for this person from France is likely a great deal for the places where this jobs go.
So, from a bystander viewpoint — is this ethically a bad thing? People from poor countries out-competing their counterparts from developed countries? I'm not sure.
The only "link" between the two bookings was that we booked rooms in the same hotel for the same nights, the bookings were made within an hour of each other, and we share a surname.
A few days later I checked my credit card statement and I had two charges. My sister hadn't been charged at all, but one of the amounts I was charged corresponded to what she paid.
Booking.com said "talk to the hotel" and the hotel said "talk to booking.com". We ended up getting free breakfasts but I'd have loved to know what really happened there.
I got trapped in a loop there as well, it was pretty wretched. Hotel would only except credit card details sent via plaintext emails (on the phone I couldn't reach anyone at the purported hotel, just a call center, where they couldn't deal with processing), nobody would release me from the obligation to pay, neither booking.com nor the hotel hotline. I just ignored their emails after a certain point, deleted my account, and hope nothing ever comes of it.
This seems very common issue in hotel business. I regularly travel with Amex business travel and our travel agency sends a temporary cc# to the hotel so I don't have to pay for the room.
So that's a temporary cc# which is a little safer, but it's e-mailed in cleartext to the hotel regularly for thousands of guests.
At least it's more consistent than "star ratings"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score
In summary: 1-6 are demoters (will talk negatively of their experience to others), 7-8 passive (probably won't talk about their experience), 9-10 promoters (will talk positively about their experience).
Mind, it was only 500 tenge for the night, which wasn’t bad for the only hotel in a 200km radius.
It's a bummer how quickly we are descending into fully automated, no F's given customer support culture as a result of the very same technology that many of us have built careers around developing.
heartburn avoidance: read the fine print (the cheapest rate(s) usually don't allow for cancellation/rebooking), and compare similar rates/condition across a couple of sites before clicking 'book'.
We see Booking.com's online travel agent ("OTA") model as fundamentally predatory/parasitic to hospitality operators. Our business is designed to cut-out of the likes of Booking.com and other middlemen--let the operators own the guest data and build direct relationship with their guests.
Q. to all you off the cuff commenters: did you even realise that they had thousands of call centre workers?
Some hotels seem to be terrified of getting bad reviews on this site.
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...
We ended up going to a motel in Thousand Oaks, BUT the customer service is what actually allowed us to deal with the fraudulent booking.
I’m gonna take a wild guess here, but this kind of outsourcing does not generally improve the service..
1. had a hotel cancal on me because I didn't "call ahead" ffs: I don't speak spanish
2. showed up to the "resort" looks like it had been abandoned for months. literally no one there. total ghost town
3. show up in town, try to contact the hotel to get directions. they told me they cancelled because I didn't show up on time despite me messaging them ahead of time that the only tow busses for the town arrive either in the early morning or late at night
4. showed up, price was suspiciously good. Yea the actual hotel was terrible. dangerous part of town and the rooms were one step above prison grade. of course I had already booked and poid so I ate the loss as I took an uber to a better hotel in a good part of the city. It had a 9 rating.
But I won't use them again, and I find quotes like this all too believable:
"... Also, last year Booking have to their employees 2.5 days off to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the company. You might think it's a nice move from them. During that day, only outsourced employees were working. They were just testing if they could carry the work without their employees."
I worked with a few price comparison sites, and they've all been run by somewhere between a handful and maybe 100 people, so I figured that Booking.com would work the same.
I haven't found any alternative yet.
The third party takes a cut of the cost. The hotel wants that cut badly, so just call them up, say you found a cheaper price at the third party and see what they do. They will likely give you a better offer and they themselves will have a better profit as well in the proces.
And with Covid hitting in early 2020 it was even easier to cancel everything on one site with just a few clicks.
Lesson learned: never use any third party service when you can book the place directly. Also last minute cancellations probably just don’t exist
They certainly use nefarious UX patterns like “10 people just booked this location!!” But I’ve always found the “free cancellation by” dates to be reliable.
On the other hand, booking hotels directly is an absolute nightmare of interfacing with whatever broken systems the underfunded “IT” departments of said hotel have bolted on. At that point you might as well just call the front desk and wait 20 mins to be transferred to 3 different people.
When they don't tell you to book from booking.com directly...
Booking.com has made hotel reservation much easier.
The only problems we had with booking.com is that they give you no protection whatsoever. One case, the hotel clearly gamed the reviews and posted false info. It was so bad that we had to leave. But we were still charged the full amount, and booking.com just stood aside.
Just recently, my wife booked a hotel in Tel-Aviv. The hotel charged her card twice (booking.com seemed to have passed the card info to the hotel). We cancelled, and still waiting for the refund/release of the funds. Booking.com does nothing to help. We have to bounce between the unhelpful hotel and the slow-as-hell bank/credit card company.
OT: but are there any banks or credit card companies in Germany that actually help you when you're in this situation or need a chargeback? it seems like the low card fees in EU means much worse customer service compared to the US, or is it just my wishful thinking?
Draw your own conclusions here.
The "only x room left with these conditions" false claim is used also in the EU.
Source: American expat in Europe.
On my first trip to the USA (traveling from South Africa), Travelstart managed to somehow inject the word "DOCUMENT" into my name that was on the tickets.
So my name e.g. "JOHN DOE" became "JOHN DOCUMENT DOE". At the customs/border control in Atlanta they noted that my ticket's name didn't correspond to my passport, which was actually a huge problem. Luckily they eventually let me into the country because the TSA agent was super friendly and "vouched" - which is bizarre on its own.
Needless to say, I always order tickets directly from the airliner now.
They should have the power to fine a firm that's found to not actually be checking whether other people are online, whether a hotel is actually empty, etc.
So, if booking.com cannot guarantee the very basics, why should I use them as an agent? It makes no sense to me - it's much better to book directly.
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.
Usually I'm more worried that their places usually just get my credit card number in plain text, write it down in a notebook and some frontdesk person simply uses that CC numbers to charge me on my first day there or so, manually entering it into CC terminal.
