The fraud is the $129 room was gone hours, maybe days ago. It didn't just sell, the web site simply quoted a price they though was low enough to keep you from looking elsewhere, within reason. Once you looked serious about booking, they actually checked the hotel's inventory. You can really tell this happens when you try to book a room/flight/car that is sold out. They quote you a price, if you actually try to book, then, they tell you there is no space. Consolidator travel sites do not check the inventory of every room, flight, or car they quote you. They can't possibly do that. They are all estimates until they see your credit card number. One other thing about travel booking: I don't want the last or even second to last room at a hotel or seat on a plane. The chances of being bumped are too high. So telling me "only 1 seat left", isn't going to close the deal.
Expedia isn't checking availability, a middle man is, (one of the three GDS).
The middleman isn't checking availability every time because there's a cost to ask the carrier. And if you ask too much they will rate limit or deny you which means you get no availability.
The middleman is a price aggregation person, and tries to find rates and routes using all the rules the carriers specify.
Sure you can buy tickets directly from AA or UA. But what if you want to fly a connection that has both. Do you think AA wants to sell seats on someone's else plane?
Last time I worked in this industry (over a decade ago) sites like expedia didn't work through a GDS but hotels would explicitly put available stock directly into them, if they had 10 rooms availble they might put 5 on expedia, 2 on another site and 1 each on 3 smaller sites. So expedia only has to check it's own data and the prices typically didn't fluctuate intra-day. I was working on software to automate most of this process.
Whether you got the last seat at a price point has nothing to do with odds of getting bumped. Also US airlines almost never forcibly bump passengers who meet check-in requirements, especially with the new max compensation limits.
> Consolidator travel sites do not check the inventory of every room, flight, or car they quote you. They can't possibly do that. They are all estimates until they see your credit card number.
In a small town in Denmark, a hotel i was booked into was full, so they tried to send me to the other hotel in town, but that was full, so i slept on a sofa in a meeting room. The meeting room's floor was scattered with pieces of Lego, which made night-time trips to the bathroom somewhat terrifying. Not the most auspicious start to a business trip.
They may, but sometimes rooms also become damaged due to rock stars throwing wild parties, or more mundane things like when we noticed a concerning amount of water dripping through the ceiling in our bathroom in Denver. Once they came to check it we got a free upgrade to a larger room.
I don't think keeping unbooked rooms "just in case" is economical so if this sort of thing happens you may well need to be moved out to a nearby hotel at their expense.
