okay I don’t know who needs to hear this but as someone who has actually worked at hotels:
Stop. Using. Third. Party. Sites.
They do not care. Booking.com, Expedia, Trivago, Travelocity, whatever fucking stupid ass third party site out there – they only cause more problems than they solve. You want a good deal? Hell – you want a straight-up better experience? Call the hotel directly, explain the price that the third party site is showing you, and ask them to match it. 99 times out of 100, they will, because when you book directly with the hotel, the hotel doesn’t have to pay the third party site jack shit. The way third party sites make their money in the first place is by telling hotels charging a rack rate of $200/night “we’ll promote your hotel to guests in the area for $175/night, but you’ll only be charging us $150”. The guest pays Expedia or whoever $175, Expedia pockets $25 as a fee for promoting the hotel and passes on $150 to the hotel. In other words, they can either lose out on $25 by price matching, or lose $50.
Every hotel would prefer you book directly, and will happily price match, so they don’t lose any money to a third party site. More than that, if there are any problems with your booking – wrong days, wrong room type, want to cancel, whatever – you would have to go through the third party site again to do any of that. And waiting on or talking to customer support staff with thick accents at 3AM while your kids are wailing and you just want to go to sleep to fix a problem with your booking that, had you not gone through a third party site, the front desk agent standing in front of you could fix right now, is not fun.
Please stop using third party sites. For the love of God and all that is holy, use them to get discounts but do not book with them.
Like, yes, this wouldn’t have done anything about the bedbug problem this hostel had, but the point remains that any issue is much easier to deal with when you don’t have to play a game of telephone with a middleman corporation that does not give a shit about you as a guest.
I’m not saying you can’t do that, but booking.com or Expedia could just as easily be hacked. They might invest more in security, but they also have a much larger attack surface. Furthermore, when you use a third party site, your credit card details usually won’t be passed on to the hotel directly, that’s true – but then, when you arrive, third party reservations (which only have a virtual card on file from the third party site) usually need you to provide a credit card for incidentals. So one way or another your card details will end up in the hotels system.
Travel credit cards are always a good idea, or pay in cash, just be prepared to have to leave a deposit with the front desk for damages (that you’ll get back if you don’t trash the place) if you choose to pay with cash. Dealing with the hotel directly, though, will almost always drastically reduce your headaches. Need a refund? Just talk to the front desk or management. Need to change your stay dates? Call the front desk directly. No waiting in a queue for an available operator in a call center in India, no “well the hotel has to approve of it before we can […]”, no bullshit.
I am legitimately trying to save you the headaches I watched probably hundreds of different people go through for five years on night audit, and almost every time it was a problem I couldn’t solve, it was because it was a problem created by a third party site.