So, yeah. The title really hits my point home there. Maybe booking online gets you sweet deals at big, expensive hotels and resorts, but booking online at small hotels and motels is the wrong thing to do. You don't believe me, though. I'm always telling people this, and they never believe me.
Prepaid reservations are the worst, but I'll get to them later. I've only had to start dealing with them in the past two months. I'll start with booking online without paying for it at the time the reservation is made (ie. you're paying the motel when you check in instead of paying the website when you book the room). In my ten years of experience, if there's a screw-up with a reservation, it's an Internet booking 9 times out of 10, especially if you book through a third-party website instead of the chain's brand website. The people you're making the reservation with through websites have never set foot on the premises of the motel you're staying at, and there's a good chance they've never even been to the city that you're visiting. All they have is a list of room codes and the number of how many are available. Most properties use a standardized coding system, but there are a few variations that differ from site-to-site. This can lead to confusion, such as asking for a non-smoking room and ending up with a smoking room instead. Pet rooms is an issue, too. Websites advertise us here at the Gary Carter Express Inn as being pet-friendly. By that, we mean we have two rooms out of 37 that we allow pets in. Nobody knows this except for the handful of people who actually work here at the motel. Expedia.com, Hotels.com, even garycarter.com, would book pets into all 37 of our rooms on the same day if the costumers asked. And I'll tell you right now, there's no way in hell (unless it's a service animal) you're taking a pet into our honeymoon suites.
There's also a decent chance that you're paying a higher rate for your online reservation than you would have if you had called us directly and made a reservation with us. These websites have to make money, and they do that by charging us a commission, which increases the rate that you're paying.
Sometimes the third party booking agent will completely screw up and book you a reservation at the wrong motel. People will show up in Lethbridge looking for their reservation, and we won't have any record of it. After some sleuthing, we'll discover that their reservation is at the Gary Carter in Red Deer or Medicine Hat.
Now let me talk about prepaid reservations. I've never had to deal much with these until the new manager here contacted the major travel websites and set up the option for guests to pay the website, and then the website, in turn, would pay us. (Do I even need to explain that the rate you pay the website is higher than what they pay us? That's obvious, right?) My biggest complaint with prepaids, however, is not the websites but the guests. There are three things that they can't seem to understand: 1) they can't show up and cancel the reservation because we're not as nice as they thought we were; 2) they can't make any changes at all to the reservation (change it from one bed to two, for example); and 3) they don't get a receipt from us. The basic answer to all three is "You've already paid for the room." If you want to cancel the room, you have to contact the website or travel agent you booked it through (ie. the company you gave your money to), and you have to do it 24 hours in advance. You can't add more beds, more people, or upgrade to a suite because you've already paid for the single, and the computer makes it physically impossible for me to make any of those changes. And you don't get a receipt from me because you didn't give me any effing money. I suppose I could print you off a blank receipt, but what good is that going to be to anyone?
I'm writing about this today, because I had two prepaid reservations check in within five minutes of each other, and both of them annoyed me. The first was a man in his late 60s or early 70s who walked in and, without telling me that he already had a reservation, asked me what our senior rates were. I quoted him our rates, and then he pulled out the confirmation page from his prepaid reservation and said, "My grandson said this was the best way to do it, but he was wrong. Can you give me the rate you just quoted?" The reservation quoted a rate $10 more expensive than I had quoted him. I would have liked to change the rate to give the guy a break, but he had already paid for the room, and it wasn't us that he had paid for it. I can't refund money that he didn't give to me. The second reservation was for one queen-sized bed for one person. The mother of the guest showed up (he was in his late teens) walked in with him and asked for a room with two beds instead, which costs more money. But again, she had already paid a third-party website for a single room, and the computer would not allow me to change it to a double, so she and her son are sharing a bed tonight.
So, in summary, more mistakes happen when you add a third, uneducated party dealing with hundreds or thousands of properties; prepaying severely limits your options for any last-minute changes; and prepaid guests are stupid.
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