How do travel apps that claim they can book, for example, a hotel for cheaper than the original price, do it? Is it legit?
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It’s totally legal and based on bulk buying, etc. The hotel sells a guaranteed amount of rooms, the booking company acts as a middle man and profits. They both come out ahead.
That said, I’ve learned that I will ALWAYS buy direct from the hotel. I’ve had a few cases where there were problems and the hotel’s answer was always “You must contact the seller to fix this”. I was not the hotels customer, I was the customer of HotelMiddleMan.com (made up example). Sometimes, the hotel didn’t even have a reservation in their system due to some kind of mix up between the reseller and the hotel.
So my wife and I book through the hotel company directly. Sometimes it does cost more, but then the hotel has the info and a stronger obligation to fix it for us.
When COVID happened we had a large trip planned to DisneyWorld via a middleman. The discounted price was excellent. But when Disney was easily offering refunds, my wife had to really jump through hoops to get the middleman to cancel everything and refund our money. It all worked out in the end and we got 100% of our money back, but my wife had to spend hours and hours on the phone and email over and over. It wasn’t worth the stress.
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