The AY and Booking.com Hoax
 

Finnair Plus informs that any hotel booked throught the special Finnair Booking.com homepage earns 1€ = 1 point.

In reality, after two hotel stays, both booked through that site, with duly inserted AY Plus number, gave me exactly 0 points. The classical story:

1. Booking.com informs that they cannot give the points, since these are conferred by Finnair.
2. Finnair informs that they cannot give the points, since they must receive the information from the hotels.
3. The hotels inform that they know nothing about the whole story.

Of course these points are only peanuts, but still... :td::td::td:

The hotel (or booking.com?) buys AY points to reward(bribe) you for staying at the hotel.
The hotel (or booking.com?) has to inform AY to put the points into your ffp account.

I've been using similar A3 Miles&Bonus Booking.com site for couple of years now and the miles do get posted but I think the delay varies a lot. Right now best real information I can give is that the miles from one hotel stay a month ago are in my account but miles from another one week ago are not. I would imagine the procedure how the points get posted is quite similar up to the point the information reaches FFP.

Same story from me - next I book direct at the Hotel!

The hotel wants business, so pays booking.com for any booking.

Booking.com wants more customer thus more sales, so pays Finnair to display booking.com link and pays a commission to Finnair every single time someone make a booking and actually complete stays.

Finnair wants the commission, maybe on a more sales more commission deal, so encourages its customer to book through the booking.com link through finnair.com by get AY+ points.

Customer book the hotel through finnair.com's booking.com link to get the Finnair points.

So he stays in the hotel, and the hotel should report the stay to booking.com as a complete deal. And pays booking.com commission; If the booking is non-refundable and paid directly to booking.com, the hotel get paid.

Booking.com get the commission and pays a percentage to finnair for the corporation.

Finnair get the commission, and pays the customer the AY+ points (which is peanuts in terms of monetary value).

Customer did not receive AY+ points, he should speak to Finnair.

Finnair should not tell customer to chase from booking.com, instead should dispute with booking.com for its commission.

The hotel is not responsible for any of the transaction other than being a witness to tell booking.com that the deal is done.

Moral side of the story: book from a cash-back website. Screw booking.com and Finnair.

I actually have quite opposite experience on booking.com through AY. Booked a quite expensive stay ~6 months ago. Ended up cancelling it before arrival as there was a better deal from Expedia for that same hotel. However, points for that stay were still deposited to my AY account (approx 2000 points).

1/ Use cashback sites - you'll get a 5-15% cashback (depending on the site and the hotel/OTA you're booking on) You'll also get the normal points and rewards this way.

2/ If you book via an OTA sign up for their reward programme. E.g the hotels.com program is another 10%. Expedia, ebookers have similar though less rewarding schemes.

The UK sites seem to be the most rewarding, but they insist on a UK bank account number to be filed, even if you use paypal. The yanks has no such issues.

My problems have been with Cabforce... Booking.com does post the points, sometimes with huge delays though. Any experiences here of Rocketmiles?

Rocketmiles posted well the few times I used them, but those were not to AY, but AA and BA