I’ll just leave this here… it’s not a misprint or an error, this was the price for a basic room. The exchange rate at the time meant that this was over €1650/night.
I should have said that the image I posted was not the current price for the Doubletree. However, this was certainly heading uncomfortably close to the 1000% increase in price that @Flyer59 thinks one would never see. 
To dig up an old thread…
I’ve been using airb&b for airline trips because one can book in advance, and usually for the price of a single hotel room you get a self-catering apartment which is vastly better value for money than hotels. And I’ve been using booking.com for short-notice stuff (GA travel, etc).
In some cases there is nothing on those two for e.g. some places in France, hence the posts about Abritel etc further back.
However I have been increasingly finding that booking.com is not well supported in Spain, France and Italy. The other day I flew to Bolzano and booking.com had basically nothing (some €200/night hotels). So I thought I will try Trivago which some people use. This redicted me to this site which had quite a lot of stuff and I got a really super hotel for €100.
I wonder whether booking.com is getting unpopular because of their substantial commission. Or maybe because of the association with America?
Also, it’s always been the case that most hotels put only 1 or 2 rooms on booking.com. Presumably this is done to “limit the damage” i.e. they don’t want to fill the hotel at a ~25% discount. They want to sell only the last rooms at a discount. But it also prevents group bookings, making people google for the hotel and book directly.
Interestingly, on the occassions I booked directly, I have never ever got a discount over booking.com by the time one has carefully compared like for like. And sometimes one gets ripped off when booking direct e.g. getting a half size room for 10% less than the other one on booking.com…
Peter wrote:
I wonder whether booking.com is getting unpopular because of their substantial commission. Or maybe because of the association with America?
It’s the commission I guess. In August we did our eclipse trip (+ tour around the Rocky Mountains) with a group of amateur astronomers and families (16 people altogether). We got everything booked through a local travel agent who specialises in the US. He booked mostly directly with hotels he knew himself, but on at least two occasions those did not have enough rooms left. So he used booking.com. Both hotels came back to him and asked him to cancel his booking.com reservation, offering him a much better price – giving us some estimate about their (booking.com’s) commission… And that was in the States, so the association with America should not be a factor.
Peter wrote:
Or maybe because of the association with America?
Booking.com is a Dutch company to the best of my knowledge
Peter_Mundy wrote:
Booking.com is a Dutch company to the best of my knowledge
Yes, but it is owned by an American mother: “The Priceline Group”.
And regarding airbnb it is about time we get rid of these parasites. Since one month we have been looking for a student’s appartment for our son who will start his first term at university in two weeks. Nothing so far, apart from some ridiculously expensive ones. But airbnb shows over 300 free rooms in the same town (Konstanz). This is our country where we and our children live, not that of some tourists. I fully understand why people in Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca demonstrate in the steets against tourists. And why towns like Munich and Berlin nor threaten with fines up to 500.000 Euros against renting normal rooms through airbnb.
What I find offensive about airbnb is the cases where social housing is being sublet to tourists – certainly common in Amsterdam.
what_next wrote:
Yes, but it is owned by an American mother: “The Priceline Group”.
We live and learn
Peter_Mundy wrote:
We live and learn
To be honest, I learned that 10 minutes ago from Wikipedia myself. I always thought booking.com was a german company…
Peter_Mundy wrote:
What I find offensive about airbnb is the cases where social housing is being sublet to tourists – certainly common in Amsterdam.
The same in Munich an Berlin. This is why (finally) the authorities start to intervene. It can not be that someone who works in a town has to drive 100km each day because all the affordable living space is rented to tourists. And even for privately owned properties a basic German principle of law applies: “Eigentum verpflichtet” (property obliges). Society makes it possible for you to own more properties than you can inhabit yourself, so you have to give back to societey. Not to bargain-hunting tourists.
