Priceline cancellation process… smart, or sneakily stupid?

[This post is preserved for historical reasons only. See UPDATE below.]

I booked a hotel through Priceline’s Booking.com subsidiary where you don’t have to pay up front but do have to give them a credit card with advance notice required if you cancel. Then I did need to cancel and found it surprisingly difficult.

The email confirmation made no mention of a cancellation procedure. I went back to the confirmation page on Priceline and there was nothing there about cancellation either. I poked around with searches for “cancel” on the Priceline website without success. I emailed the hotel at the address in my confirmation email and got no response. Finally, I called the hotel and they had no record of the reservation. They said since it was made through booking.com I’d have to go back through them.

So I did go on the booking.com website and entered the reservation number and PIN I’d been given and it took me to the page shown here. Notice there’s no cancellation option, just the choice to “change” my booking. I chose that and was then able to cancel without further difficulty.

I’m wondering if Priceline has run the numbers on the effects of this process, which is definitely more sneaky than what I’ve encountered on hotel sites and also on other aggregators like Expedia. On the one hand, there are probably people who, faced with the difficulty to cancel, just say screw it, I’ll stay there after all. But how often does that happen? Don’t you generally have a good specific reason when you cancel a reservation?

And the net effect on me is that, similar to CarRentals.com with its deceptive pricing policy, I’m much less likely to use booking.com in the future. How is that a good thing for them?

UPDATE as of June 2015. I used booking.com for a recent stay, and had to cancel. Happy to say that the cancellation procedure is completely transparent. There’s now a prominent link on your confirmation email that says “manage your booking” and when you click to that page there’s a prominent (red) “Cancel” button. Very pleased with this change in policy, which I assume was made by Priceline not out of the goodness of their heart but because it makes sound business sense to be up front with your customers.