Using Amazon as an example of an e-commerce company - when buying an item on Amazon neither the gaming of ratings and reviews or the annoying and manufactured "sense of urgency" as stated in the post, seem to be part of the experience.
The booking.com experience feels like doing business with a sleazy used car salesman.
Yes, Amazon may get flak for other reasons but I have found the experience of shopping on them to be very clean and pleasant. To be clear, I am talking about the experience of finding a product and proceeding to checkout and payment, not about any potential issues about fake products and such.
Although even the few times when I received questionable products the issue was resolved pretty quickly and painlessly with either the merchant or Amazon.com
Contrast that with booking.com where all communications between you and the merchant(hotel) have to filter through booking.com and take 24 hours at a minimum to get a response.
Booking.com is, though, more aggressive than their peers. More in the same category as event ticket sellers.
Lots of "not quite lies" in the interface to generate false urgency where none actually exists. Like showing you how many other people "looked at this property", but not saying the timeframe...in the last hour? Day? Week? The idea is to close the deal because you think someone else will snap it up.
They are also crazy arrogant and condescending if you ever have to deal with them as a partner.
This is what A/B testing does to a popular site. You test for immediate customer engagement but cannot (easily) test long-term customer loyalty. This is why booking.com has become the largest online hotel booking site in several continents. Nevertheless, I think it will eventually be their downfall.
"Frankly, I don’t think I am going to stop using Booking.com. I am not aware of any other service with a comparable number of properties and reviews."
It's hard to quantify negative impact of future dealings, but it's even harder to say Booking.com should change their methods when the people aware enough to be annoyed continue to give them money. It's like complaining about Google following you around the web and using GMail.
Either the alternatives just aren't good enough or the negative externalities not severe enough to change consumer behavior. Either of those considerations could change, but until they do it's hard to argue Booking.com should reduce current earnings. Not when people who book a room above a bar that plays music into the early morning blame themselves for not reading the fine print...
A suggestion for people who are upset with this behavior:
Use Booking.com (and Google, Expedia, etc) as a showroom, after you have found a certain hotel, find their web site or phone and arrange a booking directly.
Booking.com takes an 18% commission. Only a severely incompetent business would refuse to give you a lower price in exchange for them not having to pay that 18%.
All the big franchises (Marriott, Hilton, IHG, Hyatt, Choice, Wyndham) will give you a cheaper “member” price at their direct website. Being a member is free, it’s just like airline miles and you even earn points.
Commissions vary depending on a lot of factors. My property in the south of France, we pay 10% and it’s well worth it. It’s incredible lead generation and saves us a ton on marketing and advertising. I’m happy to pay the commission because for small hotel owners, it’s much easier than having to spend continuously on marketing.
Right. But imagine you have your rooms listed for $220 in your own site, and for $200 on Booking. If someone books on Booking, you get $180. If someone calls and asks to book at the rate they see at Booking, but directly with you, you make $200.
Except that hotel room bookings work a lot differently for lot of hotels than any other types of bookings. Hotels usually sell rooms in bulk to Priceline, Expedia and other OTAs and possibly keep some for their own funnel. So they may not have the same incentive to sell at that price you saw on Priceline.
That is not true for the chain hotels in the US. They also all have best price guarantees where if you see a lower publicly advertised price than the hotel’s own website, then you get a free night. But that never happens since it’s all updated in real time now, and the hotel’s systems will not allow reservations at a lower price.
Actually I've been able to use Best Price Guarantees many times. But it's not as easy to use as you say it is: each program has it's own set of complicated terms and conditions and often reject seemingly reasonable requests. Also, usually the chain needs to independently verify the rate, which can take up to 1-2 days, and by that time, the rate may have changed. Also, often you need to book the lowest rate for the guarantee, which could be a nonrefundable rate.
And small hotels will give you extras as they're not allowed to lower the price but can give you more service. However, wouldn't do that in countries you're not comfortable dealing with as you lose the protection that booking.com gives you.
In Europe, I always check the price directly from the hotel, if it's last minute, I check hotels tonight and if the price is really much cheaper in booking.com, I call the hotel and get them to match the price.
I sometimes use hotels.com though since I often can get a 5% cashback plus their reward scheme which gives me a free night every ten nights (effectively a 10% discount)
Oh and for reviews, I check tripadvisor since, on the contrary to booking.com, they actually publish bad reviews.
I book via hotels.com to get there 8% discount (on hotels that apply), or booking when/if the hotel is on the genius 10% list. But yeah, if the hotel I want to stay in isn't on a discount on either site I'll book direct if the price is the same/less. I do travel often without a computer and need to book quickly so will just use booking or hotels app, as it's easy and quick, whereas the booking direct is usually rather hard. + I don't usually book within a hotel chain enough to gain any rewards, which you do on hotels.
If anything, booking.com feels like one of the worst whenever I use it. I vastly prefer tripadvisor, for example, even though their iOS app is a horrible unusable battery drain.
I've tried tripadvisor a few times, but always go back to hotels.com / bookings / google maps. I just find tripadvisor kinda tricky to use and filter to get the type of hotels I'm after.
> I am not aware of any other service with a comparable number of properties and reviews.
Why do you need so many properties and reviews? You're staying in one room, presumably. You just need at least one room with a few good reviews in your price range and you're good to go.
Because since people's tastes differ, if a site has a small inventory, it's very likely they will have nothing at least some of the time you want to book. If some small site has nothing that's a fit for you even, say, 10% of the time, the vast majority of people would choose a site they know will have something all of the time.
I find it strange too, though that may be because of the type of locations I stay. I don't seen any reason for customer loyalty to a single booking site. There is very little friction to just use the hotels own booking sites. For each town I stay in there is usually two or three hotels to choose from that have online booking (occasionally I have to make a phone call to book since there are no hotels with online booking.) From those two or three, I sort them by price, and work from the cheapest to the most expensive until I find the cheapest that I think will provide what I want, and book using that hotels site. Occasionally it is booking.com, but more often than not, it is the Motel 6 corporate site or the Comfort Inn corporate site or similar.
I also never look at reviews since my experience has found that reviews are useless to me. I think reviewers tend to care about things I don't, and have had excellent experiences at places with generally bad reviews.
> I also never look at reviews since my experience has found that reviews are useless to me. I think reviewers tend to care about things I don't, and have had excellent experiences at places with generally bad reviews.
This is the same with restaurant reviews on sites like Yelp. A restaurant that has 2.5 stars could have excellent, delicious food but are docked points because people who went there and reviewed cared more about the service than the food, or expected the service to be top notch at a place where great service isn't typically expected.
> I don't seen any reason for customer loyalty to a single booking site. There is very little friction to just use the hotels own booking sites.
Each site has its own layout and functionality. I like to use the same site every time so that the buttons will always be in the same place, I know how to sort by my criteria, the customer service number is already in my phone...
>"It's hard to quantify negative impact of future dealings, but it's even harder to say Booking.com should change their methods when the people aware enough to be annoyed continue to give them money"
Please tell me how to avoid the duopoly that is Booking.com(Priceline Group) and Expedia in Europe? Especially so when making new booking on short notice. Booking.com has maintained close to 60% market share:
I don't actually travel much, and have never used Booking.com. So no dog in this fight. But your question is pretty much my point: if people aren't going to use some other service, it's a lot harder to quantify long-term negative impacts of dark patterns vs the measurable short-term lift.
[Edit] There's only so much conversation to be had around a point like "we don't want to become MySpace." If what they are doing generates more revenue, and if people don't get so annoyed that they'll use another service, and if they avoid lawsuits and regulators...
You'll never hear this pitch in an executive meeting: "I have an idea that will reduce revenue X% with no quantifiable long-term benefits."
Why not use TripAdvisor? Not owned by Priceline or Expedia (yet!), nowhere as manipulative as Priceline, and you can actually compare between Priceline and Expedia offerings on the same page. The reviews are much better, rating system is not complicated/hidden and you can sort of ranking/reviews and much better UI with the new redesign.
TripAdvisor used to be part of Expedia. They were spun off in 2011.
And, of course, TripAdvisor has their own issues that they don't really care to deal with (fake reviews are a constant problem since they have no way to verify that someone actually stayed there).
Why? Trip Advisor is actually one of the biggest contributors to scourge the fake reviews! Anyone can't post reviews on Tripadvisor you don't need to be a verified guest.
'“The effects we find in our study are actually not that small. For example, the mean hotel in our sample has thirty negative reviews. We find that a hotel that is located next to an independent hotel owned by a small owner will have six more fake negative Tripadvisor reviews compared to an isolated hotel.”'[1]
Here is PDF link to the report: "Promotional Reviews: An Empirical Investigation of Online Review Manipulation", which is worth a read:
Unfortunately directly booking with the hotel has drawbacks as well. 6 months ago I booked The Pullman Hotel in London directly (they had the same pricing as the online agencies).
When I arrived late in the evening my room was not available: the (online, credit card backed) reservation I've made was "lost" and no more rooms available.
There was no way to sort it out easily so I booked another Hotel (higher price, and had no time to do some Tripadvisor/Rating research).
The exactly same thing happened when I booked a hotel in Czech last year via HRS. When I arrived I was told by the hotel guy that there was only 1 room available instead of the booked 2. I tried to sort it out directly with the hotel - no chance after 10 min. of discussions.
I then called the HRS hotline, the service agent put me on hold while he called the hotel. I saw the guy at the reception pick up the phone, a few seconds later he came to me and told me that 2 rooms were available. :/
That said: it seems that the OTAs (HRS, booking, expedia) have enough "arguments" (e.g.
threaten with delisting etc) that as a customer you may also have benefits from this kind of oligopoly.
Booking actually helps in these situations, a friend of mine works as a customer service agent there and spends a fair share of his time resolving such issues. If I get it right, in such cases Booking should suggest the new property to a guest and reimburse the price from the first hotel.
I actually think this is caused a by a highly croweded, overly competitive market. There are so many booking sites that they have to resort to these things to win sales.
I've always wondered if some of these tactics are kosher and legal. Especially the ones that say 'someone just booked this' or the notifications on ecommerce sites that say 'X bought this in the last hour'. Most of the ecommerce ones are just fake data meant to entice the shopper into buying into urgency.
There's probably a case for it being illegal, but the US laws are fairly high level and vague.
So, you have to catch someone's attention to get the FTC after you. They tend to go on industry specific hunts once public opinion goes a certain direction. Happened with diet pills, cryptocoin hardware, airlines not showing all in costs, etc.
Booking.com will probably eventually get their turn in the barrel. Could be a while though.
I think they get away with it by saying, "order in the next 15 minutes and you'll get this", but the truth is if you order after the next 15 minutes you also get it.
They're not explicitly saying you won't get it if you don't order in the next 15 minutes, but they're implying it. Telebrands is the company that's been running that game for like forever. Pretty shady!
That's a tactic used across many industries. There is a Dutch insurance company (Promovendum) that actively advertises as 'the insurance company for the higher educated' (in NL this means college or university). It is illegal to discriminate on this, so they do in fact accept anyone, they just don't say so.
The most questionable mainstream ad I've seen recently is by Amazon.com, which somehow manages to convince employees that it's "Earth's most customer-centric company" while concurrently using some of the sleaziest dark patterns of any merchant, small or large. Spot the $99/year recurring fee on this page: https://twitter.com/troyd/status/902673505157648384
If that legitimately violates the FTC's rules then I've seen a lot of sites in worse violation. Because honestly that $99/yr is pretty obvious in that screenshot. It definitely doesn't make it obvious but it is in plain text on that site.
> Nor can advertisers use fine print to contradict other statements in an ad or to clear up misimpressions that the ad would leave otherwise. For example, if an ad for a diet product claims "Lose 10 pounds in one week without dieting," the fine-print statement "Diet and exercise required" is insufficient to remedy the deceptive claim in the ad.
> …
> Most importantly, if you are concerned that a disclaimer or disclosure may be necessary to clarify a claim, evaluate your ad copy and substantiation carefully to ensure that you are not misleading consumers.
Obviously it's subjective whether this ad violates any FTC laws (and presumably, Amazon's legal counsel reviewed it and deemed it worth the risk), but presence of a statement in fine print (or as you stated, that "it is in plain text") isn't the deciding factor.
Thanks, didn't know there was a TIA guide. Would one consider 'X people bought this recently', or 'X people are looking at this now' to be an advertisement for the product, or just a statement unrelated to the actual product (what it is and/pr does, price)
I noticed Udemy also manipulates users by saying that x course is 80-90% off but only for one more day!!!!... until you realize it's been that exact same price for weeks/months.
I understand it's not new to have the retail price be higher than the 'sale' price (for example, clothes and furniture), but even at clearance outlets, the price difference while large is rarely as dramatic nor as prolonged.
Udemy is also huge for having a "One time $10/$15 coupon!" that "expires in 3 days" and will immediately be replaced by another one. All you really have to do is google "Udemy coupon" to get any class on the site for $10 or $15 depending on what the current coupon is.
This also works for the craft store chain Michael's but to a lesser extent. They almost ALWAYS have a 40-50% off coupon in their weekly ad. So if you find something that you want but it's expensive, you can usually get it for half off. It's pretty awesome!
Hi/Lo pricing is great that way. Harbor Freight always sends 20% off coupons. It's a wonderful technique for running price discrimination.
The frequency of running offers, and which offers to run, are just business details that can be tested and optimized. Some firms are a lot better at it than others. But at its core it's not fundamentally different than coupon mailers or rebate offers.
If you ever buy furniture for sticker price you're doing something wrong...
Not saying this is a nice thing to do, but they do it because it works, no? Didn't someone (JC Penny?) try getting rid of this constant "on sale/coupon" crap but that had a negative effect on their business?
If something is constantly "70% off" (especially non digital goods and services), shouldn't consumers stop for a second and think how this makes sense?
They've actually improved, too! It used to be $499 courses regularly marked down to $15 and similar ridiculous discounts. It wasn't just limited to people using coupon sites either... Udemy was mailing the crazy discounts to people all the time back in 2014-2015.
Review scores are also a bit offset. I have tried to give the absolute lowest to every metric booking.com gave me to rate and the resulting score was 2.5-ish.
I was thinking about making a browser extension that rescales the values accordingly but I just made a mental note that a score 7 hotel is in fact a score 6.
With this scaling the scores on the lower end gain more as a 3.3 score becomes a 5.
Take this into account if you opt for the lower-middle end.
What the.. That, unlike all of those dark UX patterns they are masters of, actually seems deeply deceptive and potentially illegal, depending on your locale. If this is true they have stepped across a line.
I remember a similar thing with Zocdoc. Something like, the appointment was on time (5/5), but my experience was horrible (1/5), so my review "averages to 2.5".
Reminds me of the thing about "it either will happen, or it won't, so that's a 50/50 chance".
Thank you for highlighting this. I used booking.com a few years back when I stayed in London on a budget. I realised something about the site had made the review scores feel really useless but I never realised why until I read your comment.
In the end I just compared on worst reviews until I found a hotel where the bad reviews were about really unimportant things to me. The hotel I stayed in actually had one of the lowest review scores of all the ones I had considered but the lowest-scored reviews described an experience I could enjoy far more than the worst experiences at comparable hotels.
Notably, many review sites don't let you score a zero. This will make the resulting number higher and many people are pretty bad at math. They see that it averages a 4 rating and think it can't be that bad, but it's because nobody could rate it a zero.
On the plus side, I learned a new phrase from HN today. I now know what 'dark pattern' means.
Actually review scores are the one thing I love about booking.com. I never book below 8.0 and always skim through at least 20 reviews (takes max 1 minute). I've never really been disappointed by an 8.0+ hotel and everything above 9.0 was really good.
I'd recommend staying away from hotels with very few reviews. But many (even smaller) hotels have several hundred reviews. They're usually very reliable.
You're right, it's a 2.5-10 scale. For future reference, the median review score for a hotel on booking.com is around 8.1, based on a bunch of scraped data. Varies a lot by location, though. Business travelers also tend to rate almost a full point lower than any other group (family, couple, solo, groups), but I'm not sure if you can break out that information on their UI.
My personal heuristic for using booking.com is rating > 8.0, then skim over the negative reviews for dealbreakers. Bad ratings for restaurants or concierge or whatever is fine for me, but "room reeked of cigarette smoke" is not. Positive reviews don't really have a lot of signal to me, but YMMV.
viagogo.com is a great example of user manipulation. They take what booking.com has done and 10x it. I've bought tickets on there (and got ripped off because they told me the wrong pickup location), and its a total shit show. They make it seem like there are all these real time updates going on, and really pushing you to BUY NOW, but I'm pretty sure its all a scam to urge you to buy as quickly as possible.
To anyone from Booking.com reading this: I'll go elsewhere next time I need to book a room.
Dark patterns may help profits in the short-term, but they're terrible for your brand. Just ask TicketMaster.
It isn't just tech-savvy users that will catch on to this either. If an everyday user uses Booking.com, reads reviews and thinks their room will be great, but then has a bad experience, they're going to stop trusting Booking.com's reviews, and stop trusting their brand. It will only take a few bad experiences to go elsewhere.
Do people not Google for alternatives? I can think of at least 5 competitors to Ticket Master. There's even one that only charges 5% seller fee and no buyer fee.
For most events (at least in the US), you can only get tickets via TicketMaster. Venues sign an agreement with TM that forbids them selling tickets elsewhere. TM controls venue's entire ticket sale workflow, including inventory, printing and sending tickets, etc.
Going with another vendor is a gigantic undertaking, you would need to overhaul most of your processes. Most venues don't have the resources/bandwidth to pull that off.
Sure and it's the same on the artist side. If you want to tour you can not avoid Ticketmaster. Remember Perl Jam at the height of their popularity and powers tried to take them on and lost:
Ticketmaster pay a substantial share of their "service fee" to venues and promoters. By signing an exclusivity deal with TM, venues can guarantee themselves a greater share of the effective ticket price. Artists are powerless to negotiate because of TM's dominant position in the ticketing market. It's a grubby little money-go-round scheme that exploits artists and fans alike.
I think that it would only take a startup selling a few really big names before the monopoly breaks.
Sell Taylor Swift on a different booking system that isn't pathological to users. A few other top shelf performers. Venues will be switching like there's no tomorrow to keep the top performers.
The tricky part of this is getting an audience with people like Taylor Swift. On the other hand, with people like Trent Reznor working for Apple, if you had an alternative that worked well and didn't suck, you could probably get some attention pretty quickly.
It's almost as though there is a market that needs to be disrupted. And all the elements are there.
I find the current "market equilibrium" for both hotel booking and event ticket sales quite weird. I mean, both of them charge ridiculously high fares for a service that costs a fraction of that to produce. I mean, take hotel booking. Hotels could (technically) easily set up a booking co-operative (or two to get some competition), and refuse to sell anywhere else online. The fees to be able to run the co-operative would be sub 1%. It needs no marketing budget because that is the only site that comes up when googling hotels (others are dead).
Or then I am missing something in the market dynamics of hotel booking.
My 30s search gave no answer. If my total cost of a ticket is 100, how much of that ends up typically to ticketmaster's pocket and how much to the venue?
Ticket Master is part of Live Nation Entertainment and Live Nation is the Ticket Master of the promoter and venue side. They are the largest promoter in the US. If an artist tries to circumvent the TicketMaster/Live Nation monopoly they will find that they aren't able to book any of the venues in the market they need. This a near monopoly, they are the mob. No startup is going to "fix" this.
Live Nations was spun out of Clear Channel which controls the majority of the important radio stations in the US. Needless to say the relationship between Clear Channel and Live Nation is a very "special" one. See:
Do you know any alternatives? Because last time I looked, every booking site I could find was also owned by the same company that owns Booking.com, other than Expedia, which is also a terrible site that uses dark patterns and other scamminess.
I use booking sites to find, look at and compare hotels. But I try to book by phone or E-mail. Often the hotel asks what rate are you seeing online and negotiations start from there. Except for the dark patterns I believe these companies are also known for channeling their profits to tax evasion paradises. Yeah, it might cost me a few minutes, but I don't book tens of hotels a year.
I never make any hotel decision based on booking.com information, other than their price. To be fair, the clue is in the name, make your decision elsewhere and then come back and use them to make the actual booking (assuming it was cheapest). I appreciate this keeps them and their dodgey tactics going but I'll pay that price.
I use booking.com occasionally because I can actually get to the information I need and want without difficulty.
The things described here are not exactly dark patterns - you can bypass them and get to the truth. (This is unlike TicketMaster.) Perhaps I would call them grey patterns.
TM has been doing pretty well in terms of stock price (not the user happiness) -- probably the metric that they care about. So, I am not sure if that's the best example.
> Dark patterns may help profits in the short-term, but they're terrible for your brand. Just ask TicketMaster.
TicketMaster's customers are people selling tickets, not those buying them.
Their entire business model is based around burning their own reputation, not the reputation of whoever's selling through TicketMaster. That's why they can get away with using dark patterns to make more money for their customers and themselves - consumers don't have a choice.
After hotels.com boned me, I've soured on the very notion of online bookings, price comparison sites for travel stuff, trusting ratings.
Caveat emptor (aka Freedom Markets™) is bad for business because it increases transaction costs (friction).
Reforms like consumer protection regulations are championed by businesses trying to make an honest buck once they get tired of the cheaters ruining the market for all the players.
Can you describe what happened with hotels.com? I've been using them exclusively because my travel is so random and it's just easier to have all the hotel bookings in one place. But it does make me uncomfortable that I'm getting taken advantage of in one way or another. Thx in advance.
I use them almost exclusively as well, but with a caveat: before booking, I always check the hotel's site for better pricing or bonuses you get for booking directly.
Yes, some of the practices are a bit annoying - I get multiple emails a week with their "10% off codes" that aren't valid for the majority of hotels on the site. But since I'm not worried about staying with any specific hotel chain, their stay 10 nights get one free (really it's often more 'get a steep discount on a night') ends up being worth it for me.
And the one time I wanted to cancel a reservation - I was told by someone staying at the hotel at the last minute that it was a dump - Hotels.com got it canceled for me and got the cancellation fee waived, which I wasn't expecting, but definitely appreciated. Of course, then I went ahead and booked a different hotel through them, so they got my business regardless.
First incident: Reservation at great place in Key West. Flew into Miami, drove to Key West, arrive late at night, no reservation. Never heard of us. Scramble find a room. Later, struggle to get our refund.
Resolve to never again use hotels.com
Second incident: Find Kalaloch Lodge resort online. Call them directly. Nice chit chat about peninsula, rain forests, etc. Drove to resort. Arrive, no reservation.
Turns out hotels.com and their affiliates buy up domain names, do SEO, and pretend to be the owner / operator of independent resorts.
aka cybersquatting. I call it fraud, theft, malfeasance.
The owners we spoke to said it happens all the time, they're super frustrated, don't know how to fight back.
Best as I can tell, Freedom Markets™ (caveat emptor) has become increasingly the norm. For everything. It's exhausting.
Thanks for the detail. For either of those incidents, did they seem to have a low number of reviews? I can't think of what else might telegraph that kind of problem, which surely is a hassle, especially if it's precious vacation time.
When I've traveled with my family, I'll sometimes call or email the hotel directly to confirm. As a group we are not as resilient as I am solo. We've not had a reservation go missing, but we have had rooms with no extra bed, which is almost as bad.
Where we have had those kinds of problems more often is using airline miles for rooms. The only solution there is to book a suite or something else special, then they are more likely to make sure it happens.
Last time I booked a room, I had leaking water everywhere in the room. Since I was alone and it was only for 1 night, I didn't bother to complain.
With that said, I will still book my rooms through Booking.com. But at least this article gave me some nice pointers to keep in mind in the future, like the "fine print".
Even worse. I went to a horrible, horrible hotel in Prague (which at the time was the #1 result, don't know if still is). My (obviously) bad review, while polite and with pictures attached, was ignored after 3 weeks in limbo. Not explicitly refused, no explanation. Just poof, never happened. And support is also ignoring my questions. All that being a "Genius" user. Unfortunately I don't have Twitter so no public-shaming-user-support.
Be careful with reviews. They might not be fake but certainly arbitrarily filtered.
I usually check reviews on Google maps and tripadvisor before making a decision on a multi-night stay, but for the 1 nights I can usually get by well enough with photos and the sites own reviews. Though for what it's worth, the hotels that offer the 10% discount for genius members on booking are usually real discounts, but it's about the only "real" thing I look at on booking.
Concur. I always cross-check on TripAdvisor. It sometimes feels obsessive, but on an expensive trip, a bad night can mess up several subsequent days. Hotels/Booking.com are selling, and many of the customers are not frequent travelers -- turkeys ripe for the plucking.
Put the same review on TripAdvisor. In my experience, they are not afraid to host bad reviews and I've always found the reviews there to be informative and indicative of quality.
I recently used booking.com for the first time, as I was in a rush and needed somewhere to stay that night. The hotel I booked through booking.com was a Best Western. After the booking went through, I received a flurry of emails from both booking.com and Best Western.
One of the Best Western emails encouraged me to sign up for their rewards scheme. Having liked Best Western hotels previously, I signed up, and downloaded the app onto my phone. To get rewards for the booking I just needed the Best Western booking ref. number.
There wasn't one. Just the booking.com ref. number on their Emails, and no ref. number on the Best Western ones.
Once at the hotel I asked for the Best Western booking ref. number and was told "As you've booked through booking.com you don't qualify for rewards on this stay, sorry."
So that will be my first AND last use of booking.com. Fool me once and all that.
That's not exactly the fault of booking.com though. Hotels have learned that if they want people to book directly with them (which gets them more money), they need to make it attractive to customers. They can't really offer a lower price than booking.com and hotels.com due to contracts they have with those companies so instead they offer a reward scheme and exclude bookings not made directly with them.
They also sometimes offer lower "member only" price for members of their reward scheme as a way to get around their contract (in that case the lower price they provide than booking.com is not public but only restricted to members so it's not a breach of contract).
That said, I don't use booking.com, I find their dark patterns too deceptive for me.
> That's not exactly the fault of booking.com though.
> They can't really offer a lower price than booking.com and hotels.com due to contracts
See, it is the fault of booking.com. I'm not saying I'd have done it differently in their position, but their demand that hotels charge the same via booking.com as directly (even while booking.com gets a cut) is the direct cause of complicated reward schemes like this.
Just because they have the same parent company doesn't make them the same company imho. Pretty much like how the Ritz Carlton is not the Four Points, although they are both Marriott companies.
If they say we're full, I tell them there are still free rooms on booking, if they want I can book there or they can give me the room and avoid paying booking
> To anyone from Booking.com reading this: I'll go elsewhere next time I need to book a room
I like to think that I'm take-savvy (I've been on this forum for quite a while) but I'll happily continue to use booking.com the same as I've done for the past 10 years, give or take. I don't care at all about their brand, I'm aware of their "dark patterns" and as such it's very easy to avoid them, what it matters for me it's that in the last 10 years they've always been reliable (as in 100% reliable) and on point with their descriptions and ratings, no matter the destination (from a 2-star hotel in the middle of the Carpathian mountains to a 5-star hotel in Istanbul). In other words they really do provide value, the same way as Ryanair provides value (it doesn't matter that everybody likes to hate on Ryanair, everybody is still flying with them).
I also spend more than 5 minutes reading through the actual reviews before making a reservation, unlike the writer of the article which is unhappy that not everything is mentioned front and center on the first page. As such, I've never ever had to deal with dirty sheets or a dirty bathroom when it came to locations reserved through booking.com.
>"what it matters for me it's that in the last 10 years they've always been reliable (as in 100% reliable) and on point with their descriptions and ratings, no matter the destination (from a 2-star hotel in the middle of the Carpathian mountains to a 5-star hotel in Istanbul).
I would say you have been unusually lucky then. The practice of fake reviews from booking.com are pretty well documented[1][2]. And 5 star hotels are generally a pretty safe bet just about anywhere in the world, you pretty much know exactly what the experience will be. Accuracy of a 5 star hotel says very little about booking.com.
>"In other words they really do provide value, the same way as Ryanair provides value (it doesn't matter that everybody likes to hate on Ryanair, everybody is still flying with them)."
You mean like suddenly grounding 50 flights a day for the next six weeks and giving customers no shortage of grief:
This and the recent Ticketmaster expose make me wonder: is it possible to objectively identify dark UI patterns like this via a browser extension? Usually I can try to see through them, but something that flags stuff like this with a non-obtrusive warning would be nice to add to the list of extensions I automatically throw on new installs for family members (that list currently includes PrivacyBadger and uBlock Origin)
There are a couple of safety and privacy browser plugins, e.g. WOT, that could crowd source this data gathering from their users who already help id scummy sites.
There was a HN thread that was linked to an article about it a month or so ago, but I can't find it now. You can also check out the top comments on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13312629
The time ticker "feature" is what was referenced in the other HN article from a month ago.
Airbnb does this too. No matter where or when you search for, you'll see a notification saying something like:
"Only 13% of listings are left for these dates. We recommend booking a place soon."
As a random example, apparently Kamloops, BC is filling up fast for Dec 3-6 (midweek in the middle of winter). And so is Flint, MI on Feb 19th, a Tuesday.
Strangely, Airbnb has another problem that is the exact opposite. My wife started to book a unit, got to a point where it said she had 9 hours left to complete the booking, and then someone else booked it first. She was so angry because it seemed to clearly indicate that she had X time left to complete the booking. She messaged the host again to find out what happened; apparently this can only occur when instant booking is available (and the host cannot deny another potential guest in order to keep days open for a pending guest).
Having seen dark patterns described/decried on HN, I thought it was funny that Airbnb apparently has accidentally-light patterns.
My biggest problem with Airbnb is opaque pricing at the search page. They will claim a room is say $250/night, but after fees, taxes and cleaning charges, it might be $400/night. Cleaning charges in particular can vary widely.
Even though Airbnb knows the exact travel dates and hence the exact amount, they still choose to show the lower daily price rather than the actual. I consider this a dark pattern too.
Yeah. Just like in the US they don't show taxes (which vary!) on products in retail shops. It's obnoxious, and I don't understand how this is legal, even in the US.
The difference here is that you can easily calculate taxes based on the price you can see since taxes don't vary in the same state/province (because this also applies to Canada...).
On Airbnb, it's up to the property owner to decide cleaning fees and such, and there isn't any rule about what that includes (that I know of).
One of the most useful business school classes I took was entitled "Consumer Behavior" which was a deep dive into behavioral psychology and all the techniques used by marketers / websites to grab our attention. Booking.com rather overtly hits on all the techniques we discussed in detail.
I used to think these techniques were "dirty." But humanity evolved to be responsive to this type of manipulation. It seems the web has accelerated this process with the ability to A/B test on a massive scale. All the big websites exploit cognitive biases to drive engagement - facebook, google, twitter, instagram, netflix, youtube.
This is one of the reasons I'm convinced knowledge of behavioral economics is one of the most critical pieces of knowledge to have in the early 21st century - not only can you use it to drive engagement on your own platforms, but you can learn what tell-tales you are biased to react to, and resist accordingly.
Not sure I understand your logic. Are you saying that these tactics aren't "dirty" because as human beings we are very susceptible to them? One would argue they are unethical precisely because of this. Or do you mean it's ok because everyone else does it?
Well he’s calling for more education and awareness. It’s like Big Food. The entire CPG industry has been stuffing people with sugar, salt, and fat for decades, exploiting human nature. We are finally seeing society resist this as we have become educated about the dangers of sugar and salt consumption. Meantime, putting ethics aside, all the major food and beverage companies made hay for a long time until recently. What is ethical and what is money-making can be at odds for a long time before they converge (if ever).
As someone who stove to be "rational" in everything I did, and dismissed the power of emotions in human decision making, coming face to face with the effectiveness of persuasion made me realize that winning friends and influencing people was about speaking a language that resonated with actual humans. The way people behave and respond has been studied for generations - and the best salespeople in all realms either intuitively or deliberately have discovered what makes people lean one way or another. It's a huge mistake to dismiss the biases that define us, but rather we should embrace and understand their impact.
For sure! Our "textbook" was "Influence" by Robert Cialdini. Here's a number of others:
-"Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Khaneman
-"The Undoing Project" by Michael Lewis
-"Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
-"Pre-suasion" by Cialdini
-"The Moral Animal" by Robert Wright
-"The Most Important Thing" by Howard Marks
-"Everybody Lies" by Seth Stevens-Davidowitz
-"How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big" by Scott Adams
-The "Freakonomics" Trilogy
Briscoes (a homeware shop in New Zealand http://www.briscoes.co.nz/), does this. Just looking at their website today, everything in store is 30-60% off sticker price.
Seems great, until you realise that literally almost every day, they have a similar sale. There's always massive discounts for something in store. I have literally never paid full price, or anything close to it.
The last time this website came up on HN (same issue), I conducted an experiment. The annoyances and manipulation described by the blogger sounded like it relied on Javascript and graphics. I wanted to see how far I could get without using a graphical browser.
I was able to
1. search hotels,
2. return a list of properties in CSV/JSON/TXT,
3. return prices and
4. book.
It required only a shell script of 107 lines, 308 characters, 2934 bytes. This could be further reduced.
I used only a command line http client, sed and tmux send-key (optional). Further optional: Fully customized HTTP headers, including randomized User-Agent if desired.
I had to store a session cookie for getting price or booking but no cookies were required for searching.
I used no Javascript.
I was able to eliminate all the annoyances and manipulation cited by the blogger.
Conclusion: At least for booking.com all these annoyances can easily be avoided by choosing the right browser.
(I did occasionally see the "Only ___ rooms left" message as this is returned in plain text. I did not however see the number change over repeated searches for the same hotel. In any event, I just deleted that line in the output, assuming it is untruthful.)
On the subject of fake reviews, I've recently started using Fakespot [0] with Amazon and Yelp. Sometimes making a decision for which goods to buy can be tricky, so it's really helpful to filter out a few shady options. Although, honestly, I don't think it makes much difference in most cases.
Are there any trusted review services for travel locations? Something like Consumer Report, but for travel. Although I don't know where their quality levels stand nowadays, I know my parents used to swear by em 10 to 20 years ago.
I use TripAdvisor and Google Maps. I don't know how people feel about their reputations, and I worry about TripAdvisor because they are pivoting more towards being like Booking.com.
But when I was in Havana, we wandered in to a string of terrible bars, cafes and restaurants over the first couple days. So we went to a hotspot and downloaded the offline TripAdvisor. We wouldn't go to a place unless TripAdvisor gave it a decent rating. After that, we had nothing but great experiences.
I completely agree. I plan my full trip with TripAdvisor. I only had minor problems. Also, those restaurants and hotels do care about their reputation so you get a better service
On Amazon I usually just make sure they are a verified purchaser of the product before considering a review. Does Fakepost offer something beyond that for Amazon?
Yelp I understand though as I don't think there is anything like a "verified diner."
It helps filter down the initial list of items you evaluate. For example, you might see two items with 1000 reviews and similar scores, but one of the items might have an inflated score due to review farming.
I've just been booking directly from hotels I trust because of this. Used to use hotels.com but they've gotten really bad recently. Can costs a bit more from the hotel but most of the time price is on par. End up getting more room upgrades when booking directly anyways - at least with hilton.
Me too -- this is a very important point. Often the hotel's direct rate will be the same as advertised on hotels.com. Of course you lose the ~10% rebate by not getting rewards points, but since the hotel is effectively earning 30% more from you, they're much more likely to give you a complimentary or discounted upgrade.
So if that sort of thing matters to you, I can also strongly suggest booking direct.
(Note: You do generally have to ask, but I've had good experiences. Do it on-site @ checkin, and I basically say the above -- "Hey I booked direct so you earned 30% more from me. Can you offer me an upgrade to an un-used room since I'm here now?")
My experience directly booking from hotel websites has been really bad. I usually end up using a service like Booking/Priceline/Kayak/Google, just because the UI is nicer than booking directly from hotels, even if it means having to deal with stuff like this.
Agreed. A couple of months ago as an experiment, when I was quoted 100 Euros a night from booking.com for a modest hotel in a small town in Austria that I had stayed at previously for much less. I didn't make the booking through booking.com but walked over to the hotel when I get to town for an the spot booking and got the same room with breakfast included or 75 Euros a night.
Wow - the New Union. I live in Manchester and the place is literally right at the top end of one of Manchester's main clubbing districts (the gay village). "Lively and central" is an understatement. It has a ropey reputation locally as a pub, but you couldn't pay me to stay there. I can see why he's pissed.
I will caveat that I've had some excellent experiences with Booking, but always with very careful cross-referencing with other sites.
Some airline ticket booking sites still track you and increase the ticket price on return visits, optimised to certain intervals. Many in the industry call it "dynamic pricing."
It made the news a few years back[1] but you can still see it sometimes in a few different industries. You can get into arguments with people about whether marketing as a whole is an enterprise built on manipulation, but this is quite clearly manipulative.
It's interesting that Amazon tried this in its very first years, but had to give up due to customer backlash. I wonder why the practice survives in travel services.
Whenever it's possible, I use something else, like HostelWorld.
Their interface is clean, to the point, and the reviews and ratings can actually be trusted.
I'm happy someone did this website. I just came back from a long trip and every time somebody asked me why I hate Booking.com, I pointed exactly to some of the points that were made there. The fake sense of urgency, the cluttered UI.
And the cherry on top: The fact they display the "total cost of all nights" in the results, instead of the per-night cost. That's not a misleading UX, it's just a bad UX decision.
But because of it's popularity amongst accommodation owners and travelers, its fall is unlikely.
> The fact they display the "total cost of all nights" in the results, instead of the per-night cost. That's not a misleading UX, it's just a bad UX decision.
I prefer the total cost in the results, since that's what I'll ultimately pay. Why do you prefer per night? Doesn't that make you do the multiplication in your head?
I agree it’s better to display the “total cost of stay” in the search results, however that isn’t what Booking.com displays. As OP said they display the “total cost of all nights” which excludes taxes and cleaning/service fees.
A few weeks ago I stayed in an apartment in Austria which was €49 for one night, with a €45 cleaning fee... I thought that seemed a bit crazy (ok there were 7 of us, so still pretty good), but clicking through other results I saw all the properties in this area had similar fees. One had the same price per night and a €70 cleaning fee! I guess it’s a way to avoid taxes or such.
45€ doesn't sound like much. For a complete apartment cleanup, including bed linen and etc, you need at least three or four hours, so that's around 11-15€/hour. Seems quite reasonable for Austria.
Yeah for Austria it doesn't seem like a bad price, it's just weird that the price is nearly the same as the accomodation fee. And as a Brit the idea of any kind of service fee is pretty foreign in the first place (why not just include it in the advertised price?).
It's a fixed cost, so they use a fixed fee. If they just added a percentage to the price per night, people who stayed more days would be paying more despite not requiring more cleaning.
The downsides of A/B testing. Unless of course you have confidence in your brand and decision making to not always trust users and the short term bottom line.
This post has some decent points about reviews and the fine print, but the rest comes off as a bit precious.
I travel a lot and have used Booking.com to save myself quite a bit of money over the years. I still regularly compare their prices with other sites and they are pretty consistently cheaper than competing sites.
The "hurry" parts of their site do induce a little anxiety but I tend to also appreciate the real time information so I know I get the room I want.
I just spent 3 weeks travelling the USA and we used Booking.com to see what was around. But then we went directly to the hotel's site to make the booking and you know what? Same price, if not slightly cheaper in some (not all) instances.
They similarly totally lie about matching the lowest price. Had the misfortune of booking through them once, then I found the same hotel for a much lower price on another site (makemytrip) so I sent a screenshot to the support.
After a day they outright DENIED to honor this "Lowest Price Guarantee" with some lame excuse. When I told them that I'll go to the small claims court I never heard back from them. Don't believe a word on this site.
Did you pay for the room with a credit card charge to Booking.com? If so it would be easier to dispute part of the charge with your card issuer instead of going to small claims court.
Yes i did pay with a credit card. Unfortunately unlike US, disputing a cc charge here isn't that easy either. At that time the policy was to take a printout and then go to the bank and submit it there in person (same reason i never went to small claims court too). Seemed like too much hassle.
I instead wowed to never book another hotel on their site (using agoda ever since) and telling friends and posting on forums (it was on the frontpage on reddit india for 1 day) about how they cheated me. I think that must have costed them more money than they cheated me out by not honoring their guarantee.
315 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadThe booking.com experience feels like doing business with a sleazy used car salesman.
Although even the few times when I received questionable products the issue was resolved pretty quickly and painlessly with either the merchant or Amazon.com
Contrast that with booking.com where all communications between you and the merchant(hotel) have to filter through booking.com and take 24 hours at a minimum to get a response.
Lots of "not quite lies" in the interface to generate false urgency where none actually exists. Like showing you how many other people "looked at this property", but not saying the timeframe...in the last hour? Day? Week? The idea is to close the deal because you think someone else will snap it up.
They are also crazy arrogant and condescending if you ever have to deal with them as a partner.
It's hard to quantify negative impact of future dealings, but it's even harder to say Booking.com should change their methods when the people aware enough to be annoyed continue to give them money. It's like complaining about Google following you around the web and using GMail.
Either the alternatives just aren't good enough or the negative externalities not severe enough to change consumer behavior. Either of those considerations could change, but until they do it's hard to argue Booking.com should reduce current earnings. Not when people who book a room above a bar that plays music into the early morning blame themselves for not reading the fine print...
Use Booking.com (and Google, Expedia, etc) as a showroom, after you have found a certain hotel, find their web site or phone and arrange a booking directly.
All the big franchises (Marriott, Hilton, IHG, Hyatt, Choice, Wyndham) will give you a cheaper “member” price at their direct website. Being a member is free, it’s just like airline miles and you even earn points.
Easy/Lenient/Refundable: Starwood (20% off) Marriott (25% off)
Easy/Lenient/Nonrefundable: Hilton ($100 certificate)
Medium/Nonrefundable: Hyatt ($50 certificate)
Hard/Nonrefundable: IHG (1st night free)
I sometimes use hotels.com though since I often can get a 5% cashback plus their reward scheme which gives me a free night every ten nights (effectively a 10% discount)
Oh and for reviews, I check tripadvisor since, on the contrary to booking.com, they actually publish bad reviews.
But what good is publishing bad reviews if they are fake? See:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/avaseave/2014/01/27/when-online...
Why do you need so many properties and reviews? You're staying in one room, presumably. You just need at least one room with a few good reviews in your price range and you're good to go.
This also helps avoid hotels full of snooty elitists.
I also never look at reviews since my experience has found that reviews are useless to me. I think reviewers tend to care about things I don't, and have had excellent experiences at places with generally bad reviews.
This is the same with restaurant reviews on sites like Yelp. A restaurant that has 2.5 stars could have excellent, delicious food but are docked points because people who went there and reviewed cared more about the service than the food, or expected the service to be top notch at a place where great service isn't typically expected.
Each site has its own layout and functionality. I like to use the same site every time so that the buttons will always be in the same place, I know how to sort by my criteria, the customer service number is already in my phone...
Please tell me how to avoid the duopoly that is Booking.com(Priceline Group) and Expedia in Europe? Especially so when making new booking on short notice. Booking.com has maintained close to 60% market share:
http://www.hotrec.eu/newsroom/press-releases-1714/dominant-o...
[Edit] There's only so much conversation to be had around a point like "we don't want to become MySpace." If what they are doing generates more revenue, and if people don't get so annoyed that they'll use another service, and if they avoid lawsuits and regulators...
You'll never hear this pitch in an executive meeting: "I have an idea that will reduce revenue X% with no quantifiable long-term benefits."
Disclosure: Ex-Tripadvisor engineer.
And, of course, TripAdvisor has their own issues that they don't really care to deal with (fake reviews are a constant problem since they have no way to verify that someone actually stayed there).
'“The effects we find in our study are actually not that small. For example, the mean hotel in our sample has thirty negative reviews. We find that a hotel that is located next to an independent hotel owned by a small owner will have six more fake negative Tripadvisor reviews compared to an isolated hotel.”'[1]
Here is PDF link to the report: "Promotional Reviews: An Empirical Investigation of Online Review Manipulation", which is worth a read:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18340.pdf
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/avaseave/2014/01/27/when-online...
When I arrived late in the evening my room was not available: the (online, credit card backed) reservation I've made was "lost" and no more rooms available.
There was no way to sort it out easily so I booked another Hotel (higher price, and had no time to do some Tripadvisor/Rating research).
The exactly same thing happened when I booked a hotel in Czech last year via HRS. When I arrived I was told by the hotel guy that there was only 1 room available instead of the booked 2. I tried to sort it out directly with the hotel - no chance after 10 min. of discussions.
I then called the HRS hotline, the service agent put me on hold while he called the hotel. I saw the guy at the reception pick up the phone, a few seconds later he came to me and told me that 2 rooms were available. :/
That said: it seems that the OTAs (HRS, booking, expedia) have enough "arguments" (e.g. threaten with delisting etc) that as a customer you may also have benefits from this kind of oligopoly.
https://www-moneysavingexpert-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/www.m...
So, you have to catch someone's attention to get the FTC after you. They tend to go on industry specific hunts once public opinion goes a certain direction. Happened with diet pills, cryptocoin hardware, airlines not showing all in costs, etc.
Booking.com will probably eventually get their turn in the barrel. Could be a while though.
They're not explicitly saying you won't get it if you don't order in the next 15 minutes, but they're implying it. Telebrands is the company that's been running that game for like forever. Pretty shady!
The most questionable mainstream ad I've seen recently is by Amazon.com, which somehow manages to convince employees that it's "Earth's most customer-centric company" while concurrently using some of the sleaziest dark patterns of any merchant, small or large. Spot the $99/year recurring fee on this page: https://twitter.com/troyd/status/902673505157648384
> Nor can advertisers use fine print to contradict other statements in an ad or to clear up misimpressions that the ad would leave otherwise. For example, if an ad for a diet product claims "Lose 10 pounds in one week without dieting," the fine-print statement "Diet and exercise required" is insufficient to remedy the deceptive claim in the ad.
> …
> Most importantly, if you are concerned that a disclaimer or disclosure may be necessary to clarify a claim, evaluate your ad copy and substantiation carefully to ensure that you are not misleading consumers.
Obviously it's subjective whether this ad violates any FTC laws (and presumably, Amazon's legal counsel reviewed it and deemed it worth the risk), but presence of a statement in fine print (or as you stated, that "it is in plain text") isn't the deciding factor.
I understand it's not new to have the retail price be higher than the 'sale' price (for example, clothes and furniture), but even at clearance outlets, the price difference while large is rarely as dramatic nor as prolonged.
This also works for the craft store chain Michael's but to a lesser extent. They almost ALWAYS have a 40-50% off coupon in their weekly ad. So if you find something that you want but it's expensive, you can usually get it for half off. It's pretty awesome!
The frequency of running offers, and which offers to run, are just business details that can be tested and optimized. Some firms are a lot better at it than others. But at its core it's not fundamentally different than coupon mailers or rebate offers.
If you ever buy furniture for sticker price you're doing something wrong...
If something is constantly "70% off" (especially non digital goods and services), shouldn't consumers stop for a second and think how this makes sense?
- Selling to a different demographic (young adults - like 20-25 y/o) <-- This was probably a huge reason for the failure
- Making their stores "trendy" (for example, removing POS, instead employees walk around with iPads that have scanners attached)
- Removing constant "70% off" sales
Removing the sales probably was a part of the failure. But it was not as huge of a deal as people make it out to be.
Reminds me of the thing about "it either will happen, or it won't, so that's a 50/50 chance".
In the end I just compared on worst reviews until I found a hotel where the bad reviews were about really unimportant things to me. The hotel I stayed in actually had one of the lowest review scores of all the ones I had considered but the lowest-scored reviews described an experience I could enjoy far more than the worst experiences at comparable hotels.
On the plus side, I learned a new phrase from HN today. I now know what 'dark pattern' means.
I'd recommend staying away from hotels with very few reviews. But many (even smaller) hotels have several hundred reviews. They're usually very reliable.
My personal heuristic for using booking.com is rating > 8.0, then skim over the negative reviews for dealbreakers. Bad ratings for restaurants or concierge or whatever is fine for me, but "room reeked of cigarette smoke" is not. Positive reviews don't really have a lot of signal to me, but YMMV.
Dark patterns may help profits in the short-term, but they're terrible for your brand. Just ask TicketMaster.
It isn't just tech-savvy users that will catch on to this either. If an everyday user uses Booking.com, reads reviews and thinks their room will be great, but then has a bad experience, they're going to stop trusting Booking.com's reviews, and stop trusting their brand. It will only take a few bad experiences to go elsewhere.
Going with another vendor is a gigantic undertaking, you would need to overhaul most of your processes. Most venues don't have the resources/bandwidth to pull that off.
And that's how TM stays a monopoly.
Source: used to work for a large venue.
http://ultimateclassicrock.com/pearl-jam-sues-ticketmaster/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/business/12tickets.html
Not in the US you can't. And certainly not for venues large than a club.
Sell Taylor Swift on a different booking system that isn't pathological to users. A few other top shelf performers. Venues will be switching like there's no tomorrow to keep the top performers.
The tricky part of this is getting an audience with people like Taylor Swift. On the other hand, with people like Trent Reznor working for Apple, if you had an alternative that worked well and didn't suck, you could probably get some attention pretty quickly.
It's almost as though there is a market that needs to be disrupted. And all the elements are there.
Or then I am missing something in the market dynamics of hotel booking.
Live Nations was spun out of Clear Channel which controls the majority of the important radio stations in the US. Needless to say the relationship between Clear Channel and Live Nation is a very "special" one. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Nation_(events_promoter)
and
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/business/25ticket.html?mcu...
I never make any hotel decision based on booking.com information, other than their price. To be fair, the clue is in the name, make your decision elsewhere and then come back and use them to make the actual booking (assuming it was cheapest). I appreciate this keeps them and their dodgey tactics going but I'll pay that price.
Though I do only use it for flight tickets, not for hotels. And I always go there in an incognito tab, to make sure I avoid any cookies etc.
The things described here are not exactly dark patterns - you can bypass them and get to the truth. (This is unlike TicketMaster.) Perhaps I would call them grey patterns.
TM has been doing pretty well in terms of stock price (not the user happiness) -- probably the metric that they care about. So, I am not sure if that's the best example.
Source: https://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chd...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-ticketing/excl...
TicketMaster's customers are people selling tickets, not those buying them.
Their entire business model is based around burning their own reputation, not the reputation of whoever's selling through TicketMaster. That's why they can get away with using dark patterns to make more money for their customers and themselves - consumers don't have a choice.
After hotels.com boned me, I've soured on the very notion of online bookings, price comparison sites for travel stuff, trusting ratings.
Caveat emptor (aka Freedom Markets™) is bad for business because it increases transaction costs (friction).
Reforms like consumer protection regulations are championed by businesses trying to make an honest buck once they get tired of the cheaters ruining the market for all the players.
Yes, some of the practices are a bit annoying - I get multiple emails a week with their "10% off codes" that aren't valid for the majority of hotels on the site. But since I'm not worried about staying with any specific hotel chain, their stay 10 nights get one free (really it's often more 'get a steep discount on a night') ends up being worth it for me.
And the one time I wanted to cancel a reservation - I was told by someone staying at the hotel at the last minute that it was a dump - Hotels.com got it canceled for me and got the cancellation fee waived, which I wasn't expecting, but definitely appreciated. Of course, then I went ahead and booked a different hotel through them, so they got my business regardless.
Resolve to never again use hotels.com
Second incident: Find Kalaloch Lodge resort online. Call them directly. Nice chit chat about peninsula, rain forests, etc. Drove to resort. Arrive, no reservation.
Turns out hotels.com and their affiliates buy up domain names, do SEO, and pretend to be the owner / operator of independent resorts.
aka cybersquatting. I call it fraud, theft, malfeasance.
The owners we spoke to said it happens all the time, they're super frustrated, don't know how to fight back.
Best as I can tell, Freedom Markets™ (caveat emptor) has become increasingly the norm. For everything. It's exhausting.
When I've traveled with my family, I'll sometimes call or email the hotel directly to confirm. As a group we are not as resilient as I am solo. We've not had a reservation go missing, but we have had rooms with no extra bed, which is almost as bad.
Where we have had those kinds of problems more often is using airline miles for rooms. The only solution there is to book a suite or something else special, then they are more likely to make sure it happens.
With that said, I will still book my rooms through Booking.com. But at least this article gave me some nice pointers to keep in mind in the future, like the "fine print".
Be careful with reviews. They might not be fake but certainly arbitrarily filtered.
One of the Best Western emails encouraged me to sign up for their rewards scheme. Having liked Best Western hotels previously, I signed up, and downloaded the app onto my phone. To get rewards for the booking I just needed the Best Western booking ref. number.
There wasn't one. Just the booking.com ref. number on their Emails, and no ref. number on the Best Western ones.
Once at the hotel I asked for the Best Western booking ref. number and was told "As you've booked through booking.com you don't qualify for rewards on this stay, sorry."
So that will be my first AND last use of booking.com. Fool me once and all that.
They also sometimes offer lower "member only" price for members of their reward scheme as a way to get around their contract (in that case the lower price they provide than booking.com is not public but only restricted to members so it's not a breach of contract).
That said, I don't use booking.com, I find their dark patterns too deceptive for me.
> They can't really offer a lower price than booking.com and hotels.com due to contracts
See, it is the fault of booking.com. I'm not saying I'd have done it differently in their position, but their demand that hotels charge the same via booking.com as directly (even while booking.com gets a cut) is the direct cause of complicated reward schemes like this.
1. Priceline (this includes Booking.com, Kayak, Agoda, and others).
2. Expedia (includes Hotels.com, trivago, and others).
3. Smaller aggregators (such as lastminute.com).
4. Booking directly.
The dark patterns described in the blog post are used by everyone, including many hotels themselves, so you're never going to avoid them.
Than check on goggle and call them directly
If they say we're full, I tell them there are still free rooms on booking, if they want I can book there or they can give me the room and avoid paying booking
I like to think that I'm take-savvy (I've been on this forum for quite a while) but I'll happily continue to use booking.com the same as I've done for the past 10 years, give or take. I don't care at all about their brand, I'm aware of their "dark patterns" and as such it's very easy to avoid them, what it matters for me it's that in the last 10 years they've always been reliable (as in 100% reliable) and on point with their descriptions and ratings, no matter the destination (from a 2-star hotel in the middle of the Carpathian mountains to a 5-star hotel in Istanbul). In other words they really do provide value, the same way as Ryanair provides value (it doesn't matter that everybody likes to hate on Ryanair, everybody is still flying with them).
I also spend more than 5 minutes reading through the actual reviews before making a reservation, unlike the writer of the article which is unhappy that not everything is mentioned front and center on the first page. As such, I've never ever had to deal with dirty sheets or a dirty bathroom when it came to locations reserved through booking.com.
I would say you have been unusually lucky then. The practice of fake reviews from booking.com are pretty well documented[1][2]. And 5 star hotels are generally a pretty safe bet just about anywhere in the world, you pretty much know exactly what the experience will be. Accuracy of a 5 star hotel says very little about booking.com.
>"In other words they really do provide value, the same way as Ryanair provides value (it doesn't matter that everybody likes to hate on Ryanair, everybody is still flying with them)."
You mean like suddenly grounding 50 flights a day for the next six weeks and giving customers no shortage of grief:
http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/ryanair-...
>"I also spend more than 5 minutes reading through the actual reviews before making a reservation ..."
That doesn't really mean much when the reviews are gamed does it?
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/06/bookingcom-invest...
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonha-revesencio/the-truth-abo...
Not that I would be the least surprised by any kind of scandal from those thugs but I haven't heard anything recently.
The time ticker "feature" is what was referenced in the other HN article from a month ago.
"Only 13% of listings are left for these dates. We recommend booking a place soon."
As a random example, apparently Kamloops, BC is filling up fast for Dec 3-6 (midweek in the middle of winter). And so is Flint, MI on Feb 19th, a Tuesday.
Having seen dark patterns described/decried on HN, I thought it was funny that Airbnb apparently has accidentally-light patterns.
On Airbnb, it's up to the property owner to decide cleaning fees and such, and there isn't any rule about what that includes (that I know of).
I used to think these techniques were "dirty." But humanity evolved to be responsive to this type of manipulation. It seems the web has accelerated this process with the ability to A/B test on a massive scale. All the big websites exploit cognitive biases to drive engagement - facebook, google, twitter, instagram, netflix, youtube.
This is one of the reasons I'm convinced knowledge of behavioral economics is one of the most critical pieces of knowledge to have in the early 21st century - not only can you use it to drive engagement on your own platforms, but you can learn what tell-tales you are biased to react to, and resist accordingly.
-"Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Khaneman -"The Undoing Project" by Michael Lewis -"Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb -"Pre-suasion" by Cialdini -"The Moral Animal" by Robert Wright -"The Most Important Thing" by Howard Marks -"Everybody Lies" by Seth Stevens-Davidowitz -"How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big" by Scott Adams -The "Freakonomics" Trilogy
Seems great, until you realise that literally almost every day, they have a similar sale. There's always massive discounts for something in store. I have literally never paid full price, or anything close to it.
The last time this website came up on HN (same issue), I conducted an experiment. The annoyances and manipulation described by the blogger sounded like it relied on Javascript and graphics. I wanted to see how far I could get without using a graphical browser.
I was able to
1. search hotels,
2. return a list of properties in CSV/JSON/TXT,
3. return prices and
4. book.
It required only a shell script of 107 lines, 308 characters, 2934 bytes. This could be further reduced.
I used only a command line http client, sed and tmux send-key (optional). Further optional: Fully customized HTTP headers, including randomized User-Agent if desired.
I had to store a session cookie for getting price or booking but no cookies were required for searching.
I used no Javascript.
I was able to eliminate all the annoyances and manipulation cited by the blogger.
Conclusion: At least for booking.com all these annoyances can easily be avoided by choosing the right browser.
(I did occasionally see the "Only ___ rooms left" message as this is returned in plain text. I did not however see the number change over repeated searches for the same hotel. In any event, I just deleted that line in the output, assuming it is untruthful.)
Yeah, totally common for average people to do this.
The right browser == non-graphical browser. Good joke.
You can achieve the same by installing a simple browser extension for managing cookies & randomizing browser footprint. Firefox has some.
Are there any trusted review services for travel locations? Something like Consumer Report, but for travel. Although I don't know where their quality levels stand nowadays, I know my parents used to swear by em 10 to 20 years ago.
[0] https://www.fakespot.com
But when I was in Havana, we wandered in to a string of terrible bars, cafes and restaurants over the first couple days. So we went to a hotspot and downloaded the offline TripAdvisor. We wouldn't go to a place unless TripAdvisor gave it a decent rating. After that, we had nothing but great experiences.
Yelp I understand though as I don't think there is anything like a "verified diner."
So if that sort of thing matters to you, I can also strongly suggest booking direct.
(Note: You do generally have to ask, but I've had good experiences. Do it on-site @ checkin, and I basically say the above -- "Hey I booked direct so you earned 30% more from me. Can you offer me an upgrade to an un-used room since I'm here now?")
I will caveat that I've had some excellent experiences with Booking, but always with very careful cross-referencing with other sites.
It made the news a few years back[1] but you can still see it sometimes in a few different industries. You can get into arguments with people about whether marketing as a whole is an enterprise built on manipulation, but this is quite clearly manipulative.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2010/aug/07/computer-...
Whenever it's possible, I use something else, like HostelWorld. Their interface is clean, to the point, and the reviews and ratings can actually be trusted.
I'm happy someone did this website. I just came back from a long trip and every time somebody asked me why I hate Booking.com, I pointed exactly to some of the points that were made there. The fake sense of urgency, the cluttered UI. And the cherry on top: The fact they display the "total cost of all nights" in the results, instead of the per-night cost. That's not a misleading UX, it's just a bad UX decision.
But because of it's popularity amongst accommodation owners and travelers, its fall is unlikely.
I prefer the total cost in the results, since that's what I'll ultimately pay. Why do you prefer per night? Doesn't that make you do the multiplication in your head?
A few weeks ago I stayed in an apartment in Austria which was €49 for one night, with a €45 cleaning fee... I thought that seemed a bit crazy (ok there were 7 of us, so still pretty good), but clicking through other results I saw all the properties in this area had similar fees. One had the same price per night and a €70 cleaning fee! I guess it’s a way to avoid taxes or such.
I travel a lot and have used Booking.com to save myself quite a bit of money over the years. I still regularly compare their prices with other sites and they are pretty consistently cheaper than competing sites.
The "hurry" parts of their site do induce a little anxiety but I tend to also appreciate the real time information so I know I get the room I want.
After a day they outright DENIED to honor this "Lowest Price Guarantee" with some lame excuse. When I told them that I'll go to the small claims court I never heard back from them. Don't believe a word on this site.
I instead wowed to never book another hotel on their site (using agoda ever since) and telling friends and posting on forums (it was on the frontpage on reddit india for 1 day) about how they cheated me. I think that must have costed them more money than they cheated me out by not honoring their guarantee.