Originally Posted by pdx1M

You should definitely book in any manner that you prefer. But you should also understand how the system works. The point of the booking system isn't to give the chain central pricing control. For the most part the individual hotel manangements (their revenue manager) owns that responsibility. The central booking system is really much more just a bookkeeper. The hotels load rates (including all sorts of special deals for corporations etc.). There are some national contracts that may be applied on those by the chain (again think big corporations and associations). What you are seeing when you talk to a hotel person directly is that they may well have limited authority from their local management to override pricing in some cases. This is no different from when I check into my favorite place in Hawaii and since they know me, they waive the resort fee for me. So, yes, you can definitely benefit in some cases by working with an agent. But this thread started out with the issue that the hotel and the central booking system weren't in agreement about the existence or validity of a reservation. That could have just as easily happened had the OP called the hotel directly a few hours earlier and had the hotel "make" the reservation. OP would have arrived to find the same problem - if the reservation wasn't entered correctly or some other human error about it made, that could have been just as easily made by the FDA as by some call center person. In fact, probably the least error prone booking path is actually the on-line one where you get to see immediately the confirmation number and results of the booking and can even immediately pull it back up to double check it - all with no other human in the loop to make an error. My point is quite simply that it doesn't make a difference who you book with if the reservation itself gets corrupted. And in any case, it isn't up to the customer to stand in the middle of a finger pointing exercise between Marriott corporate and a local hotel.