Imagine you’re about to embark on a business trip to New York City. You want to book a hotel near the company office in Midtown. You search for hotels within your desired radius and price range, and hundreds of options appear. This should be a piece of cake.

Except it isn’t. When you click though, half of the deals advertised on the booking site turn out not to be available. You try another booking site, which appears to offer a different set of deals, many of which again turn out not to be available. You end up checking site after site, cross-referencing in an effort to establish which deals are actually the best. (Have hotels always been this expensive?, you wonder. No, they haven’t.) You finally have it figured out, so you go to make your reservation, and—oops, in the time you’ve spent cross-referencing, that deal has expired. You try another. Expired too. A third goes through … but the price turns out to be 25 percent higher than it said before—and way outside your price range. Oh, you thought that when the site said the room cost $309, it meant you’d pay $309? How silly of you!

Buying stuff online is often stressful, but booking a hotel these days is a uniquely excruciating experience. It will leave you questioning what is true and what is false. It will beat you down until, at a certain point, you won’t even care. You’ll just want to be done already.

It has not always been this way. Once upon a time, booking a hotel was not a soul-crushing slog. Back in the pre-internet days, things were simpler. Maybe you hired a travel agent to take care of things for you. Maybe you handled the booking yourself. Either way, prices were pretty much static, with the exception of differing rates for weekends and weekdays.

Read the full article at The Atlantic