Before we dive into the chaos, picture this: you booked a great hotel deal through a third-party site, felt like a bargain-hunting genius, and then—disaster. Your dates are wrong, your room type isn’t available or maybe the system thinks you don’t exist at all. You call the website…they blame the hotel. You call the hotel…they blame the website. And somewhere along the way, you realize you’ve entered the hospitality version of a ping-pong match, except you’re the ball.