I thought an interesting point of the article was that the customer wasn’t entirely blameless and the article said as much. Read her situation a couple more times over.<p>This person arrived to check in at 11:30 PM and intended to catch a 6 AM flight the next day. So their original plan involved only sleeping from around 11:45PM to 4:30AM assuming they were right next to the airport.<p>This is a complaint about missing out on less than 5 hours of sleep in the first place.<p>Here’s the real issue: her itinerary wasn’t realistic to begin with, and she was never going to be properly rested regardless of her possession of a hotel room.<p>You can’t catch a friend’s wedding on Saturday night and then expect to make your husband’s family reunion in a whole different state on Sunday without some major fatiguing circumstances.<p>Arguably, Booking upheld their end of the bargain by refunding the hotel. This is all they’re obligated to do. No other type of business gives you any more than that.<p>Sure, Booking had crappy ineffective customer service. What else is new with the corporate world? Even if they had a perfect concierge level process they physically couldn’t accommodate the customer’s needs because they can’t materialize vacant rooms.<p>Every minute wasted in this situation defeats the purpose of a hotel room in the first place (I.e., she could have gotten a room further from the airport but that would have eaten up travel time that would have netted her 2 hours of sleep instead of 4, because of her own bad itinerary. If she could check in at an earlier hour this wouldn’t be a problem).<p>When your flight gets canceled, you aren’t owed another flight at the same date/time. I’m not sure what kind of emergency service anyone would expect to receive from a business like this. At no point was she in tangible danger, and this entire experience was a piece of inconvenience that was essentially self-inflicted.