Delayed two hours, hunched over my laptop in the Dallas Fort Worth C-terminal Admirals Club, I was frantically rearranging my plans. The government shutdown, still ongoing at the time, had caused major disruptions at U.S. airports. If my flight were canceled, the airline would refund me for my ticket. But my hotel room in Charlotte, North Carolina, appeared to be another matter. I clicked around the booking website on my screen. Its policy on cancellation was austere: You could void your reservation only if you did so three days in advance. If your plans happened to fall through unexpectedly the night before (because, let’s say, your nation’s legislature had failed to pass a budget), then you’d be out of luck.
This felt new. In the past, a hotel booking had been an easy thing to cancel. Up until the day before check-in, you could generally modify your plan without incident, and absent any fees. But this no longer seems to be the case. The age of travel flexibility is over. Hotel cancellation has been canceled.
The sad story of this change begins in about 2018; its villain is—surprise—the internet. Around that time, third-party travel-booking sites began to use a novel method of securing deals known to industry insiders as “cancel-rebook,” Christopher Anderson, a professor at Cornell University’s Nolan School of Hotel Administration, told me. It worked like this: The sites would let you book a room at the best available price, and then they would keep watching that hotel in the days and weeks that followed, to see if its posted rates would ever dip. A hotel might, for instance, drop its prices for last-minute bookings so that fewer rooms were left unfilled. If and when that happened, the travel websites’ cancel-rebooking scheme kicked in: Your reservation would be swapped for the cheaper one.
Cancel-rebook was great for consumers but terrible for hotels. The properties could no longer reduce their rates to manage unsold inventory without losing already-booked revenue to the online travel services. As a result, they started offering a bunch of different rates for the same room with varying degrees of flexibility. Travelers might find that they could book a room at a discounted, prepaid rate with no cancellation allowed, or at a mid-range rate with a two- or three-day cancellation deadline. In some cases, the old, until-the-night-before cancellation option would be on offer for a higher rate, too. This didn’t fully solve the problem of the cancel-rebook sites, because they could still swap reservations until just before the deadline. But it attenuated the worst effects.
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From the travelers’ perspective, the stakes of such restrictive policies are higher for hotels than they are for airlines. In most cases, if you cancel an airline flight on a major carrier, you can at the very least apply the value of your ticket to a future fare. But canceled-too-late and no-show hotel bookings are more likely a total loss. Hotels are not inclined to offer you a credit for your booking, even if they represent a sprawling chain with many thousands of properties. That’s because, unlike airlines, most hotels are not centrally owned. If you book the Ithaca Marriott, that would be owned by a franchisee, Anderson said. If a local owner has essentially licensed a hotel-chain brand for access to its customers, they may have no incentive to provide you with a credit that could be used some other time for a room at, say, the New York Marriott Marquis.
In other words, travelers and the online booking services have exploited—and unwittingly depleted—the shared resource of hotels’ flexibility in the hunt for the cheapest possible rooms. It’s a tragedy of the commons: Now all of us are left to hedge our travel plans against the hotels’ more restrictive policies, which themselves were hedges against the cancel-rebooking schemes.
What can travelers do to mitigate the situation? Hotel rates are less prone to drifting up and down than they used to be, Anderson told me, so there may be little cost in waiting to book your room until you’re sure you need it (and then choosing the best rate at that time). But even then, an unexpected delay or cancellation can still put you out of pocket. In that case, Anderson recommends a personal plea: Call the hotel, be nice, and explain your circumstances. “They want to make you happy,” he said. A Hilton spokesperson told me that exceptions to its properties’ cancellation policies are made on a “case-by-case basis, with broad waivers often extended” in the case of natural disasters or other events, and noted that cancellation charges may be waived for plans affected by the flight reductions. (Marriott and IHG, two other major hotel chains, did not respond to requests for comment.)
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This extended grace certainly sounds delightful! But the entire industry—perhaps the entire world—has been steered away from human interactions of this kind. Automated systems for e-commerce, such as cancel-rebook, have turned every commercial transaction—ordering a pizza, hiring a babysitter, hailing a car, whatever—into an opportunity to insert some technological middleman. Even if I did try to contact a hotel in the event of travel disruption, I’d expect to be funneled into a labyrinth of computerized customer-service menus or AI doomchats before anyone could even try to help me out of my predicament.
This is what it’s like to be a traveler today: You’re moving on a sea of internet-enabled processes, never really sure where the machines of arbitrage are pushing you, or why. If you don’t end up where you meant to go, then your options may be limited. You didn’t choose these terms for travel, but you now bear the risk they entail.
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