Modifying a site to be less sensational does not make the makers of the site any less dishonest. Why would I do business with a site that is using sensationalism to get to my money when I could just do business with one of dozens of other travel websites who treat me better?
It's not like booking.com has a monopoly. Why not so business with a booking company where customer relationship is more of a priority?
> Why would I do business with a site that is using sensationalism to get to my money when I could just do business with one of dozens of other travel websites who treat me better?
It’s cheap, it’s reliable, and whenever I’ve had any sort of issue then Booking.com have fixed it right away. For all this urgency stuff, I’ve found them absolutely excellent.
I agree. I don't like booking.com's sales tactics but otherwise they're an excellent aggregator. Sort of like Amazon. I don't like that they promote their own branded stuff over competitors but I still use them.
It's a sad state of things. I've grew unsensitised to that sort of things. Nowadays I usually automatically ignore that and what my brain perceives as ads. They all became background noise to me at this point.
You may want to take a closer look at the "dozens of other travel websites." Yes, there are still a few independent ones, but the majority of major sites are all owned by just two companies, Expedia and Booking Holdings (formerly Priceline). It's unfortunate but true.
I love HN articles about going down the rabbit hole. This one did not disappoint. At the end, though, I started to wonder about legal issues with altering downloaded code behavior. Cybersecurity laws are so clumsily written that the kind of alterations to Booking.com code described here seem likely to fall afoul of one or more such laws not to mention the site terms of usage.
Personally, don't see how modifying anything on the client matters. Actual site and service is a series of authenticated API calls that trigger actions on their server side. None of those meaningful things are modified, only the client layer/ dressing so to speak.
This seems corrrect though it made me curious. I've skimmed the Booking ToS and can't find anything that expressly forbids altering the site appearance to make it render differently. The closest is perhaps Section A14. Intellectual Rights. [0]
So either Booking.com have thought about this and don't care, or they have not thought of it. Given that they do expressly prohibit monitoring/scraping/crawling for commercial purposes I would guess it's the former.
They've limited liability in a way that any loss is limited to the amount paid and also do not offer indemnification, which further limits their exposure.
(Reading legal documents is my personal rabbit hole.)
Who'd be sued? The people who use booking.com with this extension? It'd be a genius (/s) move for a service to sue their customers, ensuring they'll never return.
IANAL, but I imagine a sleazy lawyer from the company could attempt to sue the users for altering a "copyrighted work", although it probably doesn't apply if the derivative work isn't for public consumption. Also it would mean defacing a book would be illegal.
I used booking.com a lot a few months ago and was just constantly amazed at how dumb all these “nudges” are. My favorite was a warning on a hotel listing saying “only 1 room at this price left on booking.com”. Turned out the hotel was completely empty! The hotel has only one of their smallest size room, so _necessarily_ when the hotel is empty there is only one of the cheapest rooms left. But still they try to make you feel anxious!
Well... they're not lying, then, are they? Should the code really be supposed to account for obscure edge cases like that? I always assume that there are a limited number of rooms available for third-party booking in any case, so I've come to accept that there will be hassles and risks associated with that.
Starting to use airbnb more often for that and other reasons.
"only 1 room at this price left on booking.com", could also mean, the hotel only lets booking.com sell a limited number of rooms through their site, and presto, only 1 type of that room left, "on booking.com"!
I used to think it, too. Then I consulted for a company deep into split testing for marketing persuasion, and it made very clear to me how often I've got an intrusive, consumptive thought entering my brain that I can trace back to an advertisement.
It's why I am pretty militant about ad-blocking (and also paying for things, because I want those things to still exist); I notice it today when I have a really weird "hey, I want that" crop up and derail my train of thought, and interrogating why is often valuable and leads back to the same things. (Even billboards actually work!)
Find places online, then call to reserve. Just last week I called a place I found on Booking and found they had a room at half the price shown online. This is in France though where there seem to be rules about how rates are advertised.
I’ve stayed at a few places where when I went to the front desk to extend my stay, they discretely told me to book via Booking.com rather than with them, because I’d get a better rate that way, and they were right. Like flight pricing, hotel room and channel pricing is complicated.
Booking.com have a price guarantee, and a good one, so you will rarely get a better price from the hotel _unless you’re a member of their loyalty programme_ … so for the big hotel chains, sign up to those and book via their apps
I guess the front desk has no discretion to give discounts, in smaller places the owner can give you the booking.com price because it means they don't have to give a cut (is it 30%?) to the bastards from Amsterdam.
I remember walking into a hotel at around 10 PM (I was road-tripping around Iceland and could've slept in the car too) and asking if they'd give me a discount (1 room more to sell), and the front desk person clicked around on a lot on his computer and when a colleague asked him, he said "I'll just give him the agency rate.".
I believe commissions are pretty standardized at 10-12% by now; OTAs have been competing on commission in the fight to sign up hotels.
The most likely reason you might get a better rate from a third-party booking site than from the hotel direct is if the hotel allows the site to do variable pricing to try to capture more willingness-to-pay; sometimes that variable pricing will work out in your favour.
I wonder if commissions have dropped a lot in the past ~5 years, or if your hotel just has a better rate. I remember hearing that average commission back then was in the 20% range (less for major chains with negotiating power), and I know that Booking/Expedia would be happy to kick down 8-12% for any traffic people referred to them. Any startup with zero volume could sign up for an affiliate account to get access to Expedia's availability and booking APIs and get 8% for each booking, and larger customers could negotiate that upwards. I think I saw 14% for one supplier, but I don't remember if that was Booking or Expedia or a smaller company.
I have only recent direct experience (OTAs all being 10-12%), but I do know one recent change is that “AirBnB model” listings are turning up on Booking.com a lot more now (renting out your holiday home as if it were a hotel with one unit). I know AirBnB charges 20% commission (I think they call it a service fee), perhaps for these cases Booking.com is offering those operators 20% as well.
That makes perfect sense, they were the same type of single villa style. The biggest things I discovered is that while airbnb charges the host 3-4%, they charge the guest 9-15%. Booking.com reverses this and charges the guest no fees while the host has all the cost, 20% and the most risk if the charge/credit card was fraudulent.
That's incorrect. It's never been as high as 20%. That's a claim that I've seen frequently over the years on HN, but it was never the case, at least at Booking.com.
They have a few mechanisms to try and drive up commission from the usual 12%, though. They have a preferred program which boosts search results but costs
3%> They would have loved to drop it to better tune search, but they were addicted to the incremental revenue.
At various times there were also dynamic ranking boost efforts, where a hotel could increase boost their ranking (with a preview) by increasing the commission percentage. IIRC that went as high as 18%.
Both of those applied to the default search results order ONLY. If you clicked "order by price" or similar then you simply got that.
Never heard of booking.com until today, never used it. I sometimes book directly with a hotel or use Expedia or whatever else returns the cheapest price.
The exception I've found for flights is that sometimes the OTAs can setup selling-airline and codeshare combinations that would be impossible to do direct. e.g. an airline won't book flights on its own metal through its codeshare partners. Maybe I could call in and get it, but that's a hunt I don't wish to do.
Had a flight on all American Airlines metal that the OTA purchased through Iberian airlines on a mix of AA bookings and Finnair codeshares. The flight did not touch Finland or Spain.
I try to avoid multiple carriers after getting caught out missing a flight in Dubai due to maintenance delays in Sydney. With a single carrier, the carrier has to pay for accomodation etcetera and it is their problem to get you to your destination.
With multiple carriers, sometimes things become your problem.
If you buy multiple independent tickets to get the cheapest fares possible, you can be really screwed.
So it really depends on your appetite for risk. I sometimes choose the lowest risk to get to my destination, and a high risk option on the way home where I am less time constrained and can be more flexible dealing with any issues. New Zealand is the antipodes to Europe and can take 24 hours to arrive (including stopovers), so any flight problems are significantly worse than for many other countries.
All flights were on one carrier: American Airlines. AA's in an alliance with Iberian, Finnair and others. But I guess each one was selling the same flights, with the same rights and everything, at different prices, on one ticket.
But I do see Google's OTA listing offering things like you say where you're not protected in the event of a missed connection delay and have some shady insurer that's supposed to 'protect' you outside of the airlines.
Just anecdata from the other side (i was a hotel manager for the last 7 years): BDC has nigh-unbeatably good SEO, you can't beat it even with e.g. searching for
"[hotel name] in [city]", 99% of the time. The other 1% is Expedia in the search results :D
A note on alternatives - loads of former competitors have been bought by either BDC or EXP, i.e. hotels.com is just Expedia, kayak or priceline are BDC, etc.
I have never had anything but bad experiences with any non-first-party booker; I now book only directly with {hotels, airlines, rental car companies}. It's just not worth the couple bucks you sometimes save; if there's a problem nobody is willing to be the one to fix it.
I used to use various sites, but I realized that if I concentrated on Marriott/Bonvoy I could reach their highest status level (Ambassador). I've almost reached the dollar value and night count to retain my status through 2024, and it's only April!
I'm quite happy with them. I get a lot of free upgrades, lots of points for free nights, free breakfast, late checkout, etc. And if anything is the least bit out of order, they fix it for me.
I hate AirBnb. There are lot of bad actors now, and AirBnb customer support is useless. Even if I need a flat for a long period (like a month or more), I try to find an independent agency and use them. Searching on AirBnb can be a good starting point: if the listing shows an agency name you can usually find them on Google. AirBnb "protection" is useless anyway, so I don't understand why I should pay such a huge premium for it.
Booking.com is fine. I didn't get stressed out about the messages that the author writes about. But now I only use Booking.com when there is no Bonvoy hotel in the place I'm going. I have never had to escalate anything to Booking, but in general the places in booking are as described. There aren't as many bad actors as there are with AirBnb.
EDIT: I'm not employed. All my travel is personal travel paid out my own pocket.
Loyalty programs are just a scam for you and the hotel to rip off your employer, right? Or are you really getting a cheaper/better deal than using a marketplace such as booking.com
Generally, no, loyalty programs from hotels are not a scam. Or, I guess, it’s probably most accurate to say that they do not have to be a scam to be profitable, some places may run them as a scam anyway.
Speaking from the other side of the desk, guests can vary wildly in how much they cost to accommodate. A good guest (mostly one who cleans up after themselves) can cost as little as one-quarter of the average guest, that significantly improves the margin on the room and we can definitely afford to pass some of those savings on to you once we know you’re a good guest.
Speaking from a broader view, the kind of guest who stays often enough to meet loyalty targets is usually travelling for work. Their demand for accommodation is inelastic (job needs them in this place for this long) but very substitutable (pretty much any clean room will do). It makes sense to sacrifice some margin to capture that.
So there’s a few good reasons why hotels or hotel chains can offer real discounts in their loyalty programs.
Right, and as a hotel/airline, if given the choice between upsetting two paying customers.. who do you upset: someone who has done 100 nights/flights with you this year, or the guy who got a last minute rate from an online travel site and picked you because you were $5 cheaper?
The 100 nights/flights guy is also probably a much lower touch customer as they are just in&out for work, and "know how things work" generally so doesn't have unreasonable expectations for what they have paid.
It can go both ways. The 100 nights/flights person gets really familiar/routined to what's on offer and is going to complain when you change the brand of rum. Corporate expects you to personally welcome them, read their preference notes and make sure you give them something to bring to their kids because it's their birthday.
You're expected to upgrade them to the best available room/seat but they complain to corporate when someone that does 101/year gets the upgrade instead. If their flight gets cancelled/delayed because they flew into a known hurricane, you better watch out for it and proactively re-book them or hand out food/hotel vouchers.
The $5 discount OTA person... give them the crap room/seat that nobody else wants and just ignore their whining.
Just based on my experience of being the latter and trolling flyertalk...
I mean thats one dark way to look at hotel loyalty programs.
Another way to look at them is they are a gamified & transparent method of becoming "a regular" at a hotel/airline and generally get in return, commensurate better product/treatment/service, especially in cases of adverse events like short notice changes, delays, cancellations, etc.
Just like if you go to the same pub/restaurant in your hometown over & over, you'll get recognized as a regular.. and maybe on occasion get some free apps, access to a table when they might otherwise say they are full, and friendlier treatment. Except at a national/global scale across a brands properties/planes/airports/etc.
It is interesting to me that travel is one of the few remaining places where customer loyalty is in any way rewarded. And why shouldn't it be?
Sometimes it's a tax thing. The points usually don't count as a taxable benefit, so even if you're travelling for your own incorporated business, it's a way to squeeze a few percent of your expenses out as tax-free income.
Or at least a tax-free retirement benefit (not bad if you have an employer).
But it is funny to read on the travel discussion boards how much road-warriors hate hotel/airline X Y or Z because their points program isn't great, but they're substantially cheaper.
Some country's tax policies consider employer-paid meals a (partly/fully) taxable benefit, but if the hotel provides it for free, that's cool.
Same thing with credit card points. That's a huge one for squeezing out tax-free income out of your business.
I guess that depends on the country. In several European countries I have worked the points are property of the employer or they are taxable benefits. However, it is widely practiced and probably rarely prosecuted that employees just use them for their private fun and don't declare anything to the tax office.
However, if you get into any quarrel with your employer that can be fatal. Now they have an good argument to fire you with any compensation because of your wrongdoing. This had recently happened to the head of a Finnish government agency, ironically enough the audit office.
Part of the push for loyalty programs is that Booking (and Expedia) have tried to have a "most favored nation" clause in their agreements with hotels that states that hotels can't advertise a lower price elsewhere...unless they have an existing relationship with the customer. Hotels are often paying 20%+ in commission, so they're highly incented to get you to sign up for their program and give you free wifi or whatever and a few bucks off the room price.
EU regulation is pushing back on the MFN clauses, but I'm not sure what the current state of things is.
Booking.com's entire business is dependent on them being able to advertise the lowest price. If not, then all hotels would just use booking.com for visibility and get all reservations themselves. In short: Booking.com would pretty much instantly go out of business.
If Booking.com wasn't charging any commissions, there would be a strong reason reason for anyone (hotels or guests) to avoid them.
If the difference was small enough, many guests would still book through booking.com instead of the hotel out of ignorance, not caring enough, or because booking provides a better experience.
It'd cut their profits by limiting the commissions they can charge, but I don't see why they would go out of business.
This is definitely incorrect (has no customer support). Maybe they can choose to fuck you over sometimes, but I have definitely used their customer support as recently as december 2022 (first to call from my destination for some onsite help, then later after the trip to get money back). I wouldn't say they were seamless (that would be if there was no problem at all), but definitely good enough.
I've been booking using booking.com for several years, but not exclusively.
As the author notes, it was not always full of dark patterns as it is today... and it's always been reliable and easy to book, view locations, compare prices etc. One of the best UIs for booking hotels I've found.
I sometimes check AirBnb as well (if hotel is not my favourite option for some trip) and even the hotel's websites directly. Booking.com seems to get lower prices or at least match the hotels in most cases.
There are lots of other websites for booking hotels. But after trying a few, I don't see any advantage over booking.com so that's what I use (and ignore the dark patterns if possible).
I’m a receptionist, handle about 150 bookings a week. Two-thirds direct, the other one-third are third-party booking sites. Booking.com (Agoda, Priceline, Kayak) makes up about half of that one-third. The other half of the one-third is equally split between Expedia (hotels.com, Orbitz, Travelocity, Wotif, Trivago) and a big bunch of various corporate travel agents and agencies.
Despite the proliferation of booking sites on the web, all of them are either part of Bookings Holdings (Booking.com’s parent company, 17bln revenue last year), or part of Expedia Group (11bln revenue last year), and I would expect the distributions of third party bookings at most hotels to roughly reflect that revenue split. There is one other competing group, Trip.com (5bln), but they mostly service China and don’t have as much penetration into Western markets as far as I know.
Yes, there is space for small niche sites with certain angles, but all of those sites will still be owned by one of the big two parents. There isn’t even much space for a niche player intending to eventually get bought out by one of the big groups like you see in some software fields, because hotels are pretty risk-averse in general and won’t just hand out access to their reservation channels to small players easily.
I did some work on hotel booking for one of the the "small" players in the space (at the time, a distant third in the EU after Booking/Expedia). The majority of their room availability was sourced through the two big players. That's probably going to be the case for most aggregators, and there's a fair chance that your favorite non-Booking/Expedia aggregator is actually just selling you their content and collecting around 10%.
In a hotel like yours, does making the reservation direct, rather than using third-party services, makes any difference (i.e., rates, more available rooms, etc)?
The only difference is price. The money we get from a third-party site after they take their commission comes out to the same as what we get direct, so the guest is simply paying the third-party site’s commission (usually around 10-12%). It’s that way because we set the price on their channel. The only other downside is changing your booking has to go through them instead of us, and cancellations have to abide by their policies in addition to ours. In practice this doesn’t make much difference to the end result, but it sometimes adds a bit of friction for some guests.
Room availability, staff service, everything else is identical. We have no incentive to encourage you to cut out the middleman and thus we don’t, but to my knowledge we also aren’t prohibited from doing that. Customers do sometimes ask about this stuff and I say “if you know exactly where you want to stay, might as well book direct to save a few dollars, but those sites offer a real service in helping you find a good place when you’re unfamiliar with the area”. Customers also sometimes say they can get a better rate on an OTA than what we are offering, and I always encourage them to book with whatever method gets them the best deal - “we honor all bookings and you will get the exact same room either way”. Usually that better price does not materialize, the guest realizes they were looking at a cheaper room or even a different hotel, though it does happen from time to time even with us (which I have never been able to understand; the OTA must simply be choosing to lose money on those bookings for some reason). We do not overbook, nor do we allow OTAs to overbook.
(I don’t know how representative this is of hotels in general; the owner is particularly upstanding and moral, kind of a “pillar of the community” guy, so this might be an unusually fair setup. But I’ve never heard a customer say we’re unusually fair, so I think this probably is pretty common.)
Essentially the role OTAs play in our case is they are a search engine and perhaps a more convenient booking process, nothing more. I believe this is a common way hotels use OTAs, though that’s just my impression.
The other common way hotels use OTAs is more tightly integrated, OTAs get to do variable pricing and probably other things I don’t know about since we don’t join any of those programs. I can’t speak to those arrangements but I imagine that’s what is going on when the OTA can offer you a better rate than the hotel direct, which definitely does happen with some hotels. That might also be what is going on when you ask questions about OTA rates and it feels like the staff member is under a gag order, but again, I do not know anything at all about that mode of OTA integration.
Thanks for your explanation, I love to learn more about the businesses I use through their employees.
About room availability, I thought that if Booking or any other third-party says "this hotel has 5 rooms left", it didn't necessarily mean the hotel had actually only 5 rooms available for the dates, but maybe there were only 5 rooms left from the "batch" the hotel put in Booking (my assumption was that, to make the orchestration of reservations between different platforms easier, hotels divided the number of rooms between them, or something like that...)
I can’t speak to those spooky warnings of “only X left” from OTAs, I assume they’re technically true in some way but heavily massaged to increase anxiety because that improves conversion.
Orchestrating reservations is a lot more streamlined than you’re imagining. All sources have access to the reservation management system and can poll it for availability, while the booking is in progress it simply blocks out the booking with a “pending” booking. When the booking is made, the source adds it to the hotel’s system themselves. I have had customer support with both OTAs on the phone and heard them say “I can see you have this many rooms available…”. So if we have 7 rooms left, Expedia knows we have 7 rooms, Booking.com knows we have 7, and we know we have 7.
The only exception is if we have rooms with potential maintenance issues (air conditioners, TVs, and hot water systems have Heisenbugs too!), we will sometimes reserve one room of that type in case we need to move a guest. In that case, we would have 8 rooms available but Expedia and Booking.com would see 7.
> it didn't necessarily mean the hotel had actually only 5 rooms available for the dates, but maybe there were only 5 rooms left from the "batch" the hotel put in Booking
Booking.com doesn't know about any rooms that are not made available to them by the hotel, so everything is based on that. In my experience, most hotels just have all their rooms available at all times for booking.com - but maybe some of them experiment with availability to sell a bit more themselves.
The "A person just booked..." and "Only 2 rooms left" messages that booking.com uses to annoy customers are actually correct. I've worked on the other side, and seen from the backend that they don't lie.
> (my assumption was that, to make the orchestration of reservations between different platforms easier, hotels divided the number of rooms between them, or something like that...)
No, they use hotel software that integrates and synchronizes instantly with all platforms, their own web site and the front desk.
> No, they use hotel software that integrates and synchronizes instantly with all platforms, their own web site and the front desk.
Yes, I think that's feasible. However, I sometimes stay at medium to small size hotels (doing my reservation through Booking or other 3rd parties) but when I get to the place, I can see them managing my stay using Excel files or similar "almost by hand" methods. So I was skeptical that those kind of places had actually a system that can automatically synchronize with all the third party platforms they use in real time.
The absolute best in class of these systems cost $100 per month for a small-medium sized hotel, so it's not expensive at all. Many hotels still refuse to use them because of their own backwardness. Then they screw up and overbook and try to blame booking.com when they don't have a room for them.
Right now, somewhere in the bowels of booking.com, a middle manager is crafting an e-mail to the front-end devs, "hey can we remove that .persuation-msg CSS class, and replace it with those nonsensical .xj892FXy0-style class names that are all the rage now? Thanks!"
Please tell me you're aware that those "non-sensical" classnames are machine generated during a production build? An eng isn't manually choosing that name.
It's not just the front end though. I used booking.com to book a hotel room with my wife and daughter, and it had a label on the booking option saying "your child's stay is free!" or similar. Turns out that her staying might be free, but the bed for her to sleep in is £30 per night, which was an extra I had to pay when we arrived. Booking.com is fine for finding somewhere because so many places are on it, but in the future I'll always book directly with the location through their website.
> in the future I'll always book directly with the location through their website
I've tried this with a hotel in Italy, and found out that the price was actually higher. I couldn't believe it. I actually asked the reception whether they were really sure. Yes, this is our price, they said.
Beyond the TOS nobody reads (not even sellers), this sort of difference might be due to a number of factors. It could well be that they provide rooms discounted to Booking.com because they want to fill a certain amount no matter what, and then do price-anchoring for other rooms on their website. This is more or less like them giving rooms massively discounted to package sellers (Thomas Cook etc).
It's common with many online businesses. On large online aggregators (booking.com, amazon, steam etc.), they have to post a low price to be competetive in a sea of other available option. Whereas, on their own website, they can charge whatever they want, and hope to get a price-insensitive sucker who didn't check on amazon first.
You can often get them to drop the cost if you say "if you're not going to match them I'll just book it on booking.com" because they'll get less income. That rather depends on the person you're talking to caring about the hotel's income though, so the larger they are the less likely it is.
I'm very much ashamed of this, but when the receptionist couldn't match the Booking.com price I made a reservation through Booking.com while I was in the lobby. Two minutes later the booking came through in their system and I got the keys to the room.
I don't see it as something to be ashamed of as a customer. Some manager made a nutty pricing descision and now they have to live with stupid behaviour.
The charge was buried deep in the small print on Booking.com so technically they'd advised me about the charge. I challenged it, but it was a live chat with someone who clearly had no power to change anything. I decided I'd rather just suck up the charge and treat it as a learning experience rather than spend any more time on it.
> "Typically, additional costs for children (including extra beds/cots) are not included in the price. Please contact the property directly 1-2 days before your stay to find out more."https://www.booking.com/tpi_faq.html
After this, what's the point of using Booking.com?
Unfortunately years of experience has shown that threatening to shoot or stab people when you are mugging them increases the chances of them handing you the valuables they have on them.
The muggers don't threaten their victims just for the sake of inducing fear.
There is actually a joke from a famous Scottish comedian (whose name escapes me rtn) that goes "as I came off the bus, a guy at the stop went OI! GIVE ME A QUID, OR YOU'RE GETTING STABBED! Now, compared with the likelihood of getting maimed, losing a pound looked like extremely good value! I don't know about you, but I'm a sucker for a bargain!"
I love this kind of efforts to make the web more palatable, although changing the wording of some phrases seems to go maybe a bit too far.
For me I'd rather have a cross-browser solution in the form of uBlock Origin's rules. Is there any place where someone has collected some useful ones for booking.com?
After browsing hotels for some time I've seen booking.com show several hotels start to sell out of rooms. That usually causes me to hurry up and book, but after several hotels showed full at once I got suspicious and checked my partners phone. The hotels still showed as available there. Dark stuff. Their website is otherwise pretty good though and I still use them.
This kind of behavior should just fall under fraud laws. If a person intentionally lies or misrepresents themselves for the purposes of gaining money it's usually considered fraud in most countries. This should be the same.
The problem is that there are a lot of laws that in practice only apply to not-well-connected individuals. When done by companies or well-known people it's considered good business acumen.
i've started flying recently a lot and in this one particular circuit i see loads of dark patterns.
1. there was this snow season last month and the roads stopped working and suddenly the air prices skyrocketed. (as is now expected), i had to buy a ticket in emergency which i paid 4x the reasonable rate with all websites saying "oops, the fare has increased" trick.
2. many websites did the "just 1 seat remaining" trick and i jumped the gun.
when the next day i traveled, the plane was half empty.
what happens is, travel agents buy up tickets well in advance and then sit on the bookings, they either sell directly or wait for online portals to sell them.
these travel agents having purchased tickets in bulk then say "oh, the ticket is priced $100 on kayak, i will sell it for 95. lets give you some discount" all the while having purchased the same for like 20.
these people are willing to forego tickets because its more profitable to keep the prices high
Usually, the notices I have seen actually say "only 1 ticket remaining at this price". Which they can technically make true by simply setting their pricing algorithm to sell the next ticket for a penny more or a penny less.
They're gambling, because there are actually fines for those sorts of behaviors if they don't clear the unused bookings in a reasonable time or if ARC (the Airlines Reporting Corporation) or the distribution systems detect a fraudulent pattern.
I'm actually building an internal tool for such fines (called "debit memos") for a company with several thousand travel agents, and they're not uncommon at all.
In the Netherlands it probably does (“oneerlijke handelspraktijken”). The main regulator for the European activities of booking is in the Netherlands. If GP were to document this and submit it to the ACM [1] this might be picked up. The maximum fine is a puny 900 k€ though. They already got a few of these and don’t seem to care much.
And that just shows the problem with regulating these large platforms - local regulators with their hands tied against billion dollar platforms. The EU should just step in and regulate these monsters directly and pro-consumer. Or regulators should grow a pair and try to get the CEO / board replaced (a theoretical possibility when they keep getting administrative fines in NL). That will shake up the stockholders enough to shake some sense into these firms.
It banks on the experience that many have had where delaying a decision has resulted in "Lossing" out on staying where (or at a price) you wanted. Much worse if coordinating with multiple parties going on the trip :)
I guess the most fair disclosure would provide a Google flights like pricing chart that shows cost increase and seasonal availability projections.
I try to make the decision independently of the point of sale vendor. The aggregator can help limit impact of these tactics by API contract with these sites that focus on price/availability without artificial urgency.
This is why I sometimes hate a/b testing. I'm sure someone at booking a/b tested these things and saw an increase in revenue. The thing that these tests don't measure are very long term effects where people either start to hate your product and look for alternatives, or become so numb to the changes that the initial novelty effect wears off. The person who ran the test gets a promotion for increasing revenue during the quarter but the net result is a massive negative for the longevity of the product.
That is not a problem with A/B testing. It's a problem with the values of the company. I've worked with people who will say, "Oh, this tests well, but we don't want to do it because of [long term concerns X and Y]."
People who value revenue metrics over all else will still do shitty things for users even if they don't A/B test.
The problem with that approach is you now have evidence that the short term change will show immediate results and no evidence of the long term concerns. Given solid numbers vs somebody's gut, most managers will go with the solid numbers, even if the company has good values.
> Given solid numbers vs somebody's gut, most managers will go with the solid numbers, even if the company has good values.
If this is true, that indicates that a company's theoretical "good values" are not being passed down to those decision-makers in a way that makes them impact decision-making.
Which means the company does not have those "good values" in the first place. They have lip service.
Values that are not practiced are not values. You are what you do, both when someone is watching and when someone is not.
I think I see where you’re coming from, but how I interpreted it, it’s just really hard to make these decisions, and from a managers perspective its not that black and white:
- almost any change will have have people arguing for and against it
- if ‘company values’ is a trump card to prevent a change, it will be used by the people against the change
- as a manager, to still make decisions in such an environment, you’ll find yourself needing to weigh the upsides and downsides even if there are strong company values (it just puts a higher weight on certain concerns)
- as parent said, short term impact supported with numbers is easier to weigh and defend than (possible but unknown) long term detrimental impact.
Thus, I think parent is right. Even in corporates with strong company values, it’s easier to prioritize the short term proven impact over long term unproven impact. And therefore, at scale, such decisions will be made.
Still, that’s what sets a good manager from an average, no?
No different with how there are relatively few good engineers but most are average or bad?
I mean there are companies that put out good products but most are average at best.
I suppose A/B testing is bad in the way that table saws are bad — that they are dangerous and I see a lot of videos of people using them in ways that are gonna chop off their fingers, but I wouldn’t blame the table saw for it or want to take it away.
You're assuming bad intent on numbers and good intent on gut. I've seen many places that just go with gut on everything, that's worse. I like working places that get numbers on everything.
You’re making a lot of assumptions. Looking at data and reacting to it absolutely does not imply a lack of values. What if the “good values” are to look at the numbers? This would be the right thing to do for the livelihood of employees, and the right thing to do from a scientific perspective. Some “good values” include never passing dogma down over time but instead questioning assumptions and testing for results.
This is where an involved founder can make all the difference. They’re often the only ones with the authority and incentive to say no to short-sighted cash grabs that degrade the brand and the user experience.
This is why you have long-term holdbacks: a group of users who never sees a set of experiments. That way you can measure over a longer period of time the true impact of a set of experiments.
You cannot control for lots of other externalities, such as inflation and competitors coming to market. These parameters will affect long-term users as well.
Well presumably these externalities are independent of the variables you are changing so they should affect your hold-out set and your experiment sets equally.
Booking.com does not do it. Once an A/B test shows positive outcome with a high enough confidence level, the experiment goes "full on" and is shown to everybody.
Long term holdbacks actually are way way harder to implement and maintain in a fast moving product than meets the eye. We had passionate and ultimately unfruitful conversations about how to do that when I was there in 2016.
The only thing we had at the time was continued tracking against the experiment groups after flipping that switch.
For very long term effects (e.g., the impact of painting every surface of your website in ads which will certainly drive users away), hold backs aren't enough because it's too hard to consistently identify users. If ads will drive me away over the course of a year, there's a five percent holdback, and I use multiple devices and cash maybe be consistently identified for a few days or weeks at a time, that means that 95% of the time I use the website I get the bad experience, and I eventually bounce. The holdback will show no effect.
Solid numbers of what? Here we're talking about numbers on short-term effects only, with zero data on long-term effects.
I'd claim that people who are reeds in the wind when there's a short-term gain available do not in fact have good values. "Take the money and run" is a value for sure, and it's common enough. But I'd have a hard time calling it good.
There is also a mathematical problem of assigning events and actions to long term effects. The usual IT crowd unfamiliar with the respective literature will try to ab test and grid search out of the actual scientific part of data science. I had also fallen to that trap.
There is a grey line. I think only one room left is actually useful info. But yeah they push it too far. But most people in a company will be able to argue for themselves the info is useful and truthful so in their minds it's morally ok.
Only one room left would be useful information if it were accurate. Most of the time, booking agents don't really have an accurate picture of inventory though. It's more like only one room available for booking.com to book right now.
It could be that the hotel is holding back rooms for other channels or because they like to not be fully booked so far ahead of time or perhaps the hotel has found listing only one room at a time gets them a better look to book ratio (in part because of anxiety inspiring features like this).
Without an understanding of the industry though, it's not really useful information.
> This is the tyranny of easy metrics. It's easy to measure how much money is saved by preventing cancelations, it's much harder to measure how much long-term business is lost by poisoning your reputation with the 99.9% of customers who had to jump hoops and dodge sleazeballs to get out of the subscription. But the latter could well be orders of magnitude money more over the long run.
I agree but a truly nuanced approach to interpretation of A/B tests is rare especially when mixed incentives are involved. Ignoring empirical evidence is bad and taking it as gospel is also bad.
Yeah-- I think blaming dark patterns on A/B testing is like blaming thermostats for chilly houses. A/B tests just show if one thing does more of something you're testing for than something else. If you're just testing for "conversions" then you're going to make websites like booking.com. If you're testing to see if users are more stressed out by one situation or another, or testing to see if expert users are stymied by some interface abstraction designed to make things easier for less sophisticated users, then that's totally different.
Sure, but it’s a lot harder to test for things like stress or being stymied than it is to test for conversion. Easy implementation + results that make money graphs go up will win every time without C-level involvement.
It's a lot easier to break something with a hammer than bang in some nails. Using a marker to deface property is a lot easier than using it to draw a picture.
I suspect if you were to think a bit, you could come up with some ideas yourself. If you're really stuck, let me know what you've got so far and I'll fill in the rest.
You'll be waiting quite awhile. If there's anything HN has taught me, it's the meaning of "pearls before swine". And the futility in providing free labor for people who seem to think they're entitled to it.
It's a discussion forum, amigo. You're supposed to share your insights with those who haven't yet achieved them. If you're not comfortable doing that, you can just not post instead of posting merely to whine and insult.
I share with people who seem like they'll benefit from it. That includes people who have done at least a little work to understanding what's going on. It definitely doesn't include HN's legion of querulous jerks who mainly look for nitpicks, gotchas, and other opportunities to feel smart, even when that comes at the expense of the good discussion this place is nominally for. You get to influence which group people see you as part of.
When I worked at eHarmony there were two things that we were aware of above all else:
1. Users hated all the advertising even if they were signed in with a paid account
and
2. eHarmony had no intention of stopping this because they valued the revenue from the advertising over the user experience.
I noticed that Redfin has started adding ads to their site which really annoys me. Folks you’ll get a sizable commission for connecting me with the listing agent. The ad revenue has to be a rounding error compared to that. Why are you damaging your brand by showing me ads for luxury vacations next to houses that I’m looking at buying?
To this list, I'd add Amazon's ads. It's providing them with very obvious revenue growth. It's parasitic on their ecommerce business, though, in ways that for me and many others, harm the things that made Amazon popular in the first place.
That'll never change, though, because that revenue has enough people attached to it that they'll fight tooth and nail to keep it no matter how much it harms the rest of Amazon.
Companies need to balance between metrics and vision. It's easy to chase metrics and lose track of why your company exists. If you're just chasing metrics, what differentiates you from anyone else? What big bets are you making? Every company I've worked at has fallen into this trap, and it's gotten worse due to the tech slump.
It is also one of these things where the first to do it gets the advantage.
If you are the first to do the "only 2 rooms left" trick for example, you will get the full results before people get desensitized. But people will get desensitized everywhere, not just on your website, so if a competitor tries to pull the same trick, he won't get the same effect as you did. If fact, it may be time for you to roll back, to make competitors look bad for using the now well known and ineffective trick you invented. And if it works long term, then you get a head start.
Yup, this "poisoning the well" effect is real, and it's blatantly uncompetitive - which is why it's so important for regulatory agencies to step in and act fast and hard so that this "first mover advantage" is eliminated.
The problem is, regulatory agencies are slow as molasses and courts are overloaded with crap, which means by the time the process is done years later, the companies have long since switched to yet another sleazebag tactic.
I don't want government agencies involved in dictating the minutia of acceptable UI design for a private website.
Businesses have brand reputations. Just let people vote with their wallets. That won't discourage all dark patterns, but is preferable to a world of over-regulation.
Businesses, particularly in oligopoly/platform scenarios, don't care about brand reputation. Just look at Meta - they don't even care about billions of euros worth of GDPR fines, it's all priced in.
There's no point letting "people vote with their wallets" when companies have monopolies or near-monopolies due to network effects - and these shitty tactics work, so their most effective competitors are practically forced to use them to compete.
See also: Google, Amazon, etc. The laissez-faire voting with wallets approach has failed time and again. It doesn't seem to discourage dark patterns at all. I'd love to use companies with less infuriating interfaces but they can't compete.
I'm not too concerned about over-regulation. I don't think there's much innovation possible in the renting rooms to the public space; the biggest change I've seen recently is in more dark manipulation of customer behaviour. However, perhaps there's an alternative to having governments regulate UI design, like requiring 3rd-party API access.
I don't disagree with you, certainly some "improvements" only have short-term positive effects. However, at least the A/B test was performed and data collected. Your assumption that it will eventually be "a massive negative" is pure speculation with no data behind it.
The value of a "brand" is really, really difficult to measure objectively, but certainly has an effect on your revenue. It's hard to know in advance what's going to tarnish your reputation in the long run, but by the time you can measure it, it's far too late.
One of the effects this has on me is that I will use booking.com to find places (amongst other tools), but book directly with the accommodation. Only if the accommodation doesn't do its own booking will I use booking.com to book (about once every twenty places).
It often is, but I still book direct because I want to be a customer of the hotel and not of some third party. When things go wrong, I don't want to be be told to take it up with the third party (and this has happened to me).
I book directly. If there is a problem with the reservation, hotels have much more flexibility to accommodate changes. You can usually cancel on the arrival date with no penalty, change room type, etc.
I've heard others say that if you quote an online price, the front desk can match it (better to get 100% of the discounted price than 60%), although I haven't tried it myself.
We had someone from Booking.com come and speak at a company I was working at a good few years ago to talk about their testing process. They were using the multi-armed bandit approach[1] of just throwing dozens of changes at the wall and seeing which worked best. It definitely reflected in the UX.
“Dozens of changes” but without values who gets to decide WHAT changes are tested? Sure there is UX/CRO research but without a moral compass it is exactly how you end up with dark patterns.
Agreed, and my impression was there wasn't a lot of scrutiny there. It was purely numbers driven, if it could be tested and measured it would, and if it won it was adopted. Very little emphasis on UX, product cohesion, or any specific design principles.
Can’t believe they are giving talks on this like it’s innovative or something when admiring. I’d honestly be embarrassed saying that my design process was to make shit up and see what happens instead of investing in UX design/ research professionals can run generative studies to better understand their consumer base and sentiments towards booking trips online, like Airbnb heavily invested and can be seen as having a world class user experience next to booking.com
Many companies in my experience do test for these things. They remove old features and measure impact periodically, or run a long term hold out bucket, or some other such approach. The deep dark secret of the web is that there often there isn't a negative impact that can be measured no matter how much people try to measure one.
Booking.com lost me as a customer for life after I fell victim to their sleazy tactics a few times. I have refused to book anything on booking for the last few years because I didn't want to be mislead into booking a crappy hotel by their algorithms again.
I guess my decision doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things, because they are still around and judging by the screenshots it's as bad as ever, and people still use the site...
I’m surprised California hasn’t outlawed this tactic as deceptive marketing or such? Any idea why companies can falsify data for the sole purpose of deceiving consumers to increase their revenue?
I've just tried this and now they show me identical room for the same price with two different nags. Not sure if they have only 2 or 5 (or 7?) "Queen Studios" left.
I have a personal experience where booking.com’s nudging caused me to reconsider my trip. I was trying to find something suitable to stay in Paris. Maybe it was the exaggeration of booking.com or maybe there was some truth, but at some point I shut down and made a 180 on my plans. I had realised that I don’t want to go somewhere where I have to compete against this avalanche of other visitors who were or were not snapping my accommodation options away. I am now visiting friends in another European city.
I had a similar reaction to Lyft’s “you have 2 minutes to accept this faster trip” prompt and emphasizing the faster, more expensive option first.
I saw that, balked a bit at the interaction and ended up taking a train instead. Not only was it $6.25 instead of $46 it got me there faster than Lyft’s fastest option. Including time walking to and from the station.
I wasn’t in a hurry but the in your face “look how much money people are willing to spend to save 5 min” helped me rethink my priorities.
Similarly (though also exhibiting teenage American language taking over the world symptoms) is Netflix's new (or new-ish, I just noticed it yesterday as a fairly frequent user) 'everone is watching' category. I have absolutely zero interest in that, it's literally repulsive, trivially incorrect, and just plain stupid even apart from the language - who cares what others have chosen to watch, how does it compare to what I've given thumbs up/down?
I join you in cringing at the word choice but I appreciate ways to find things that aren't similar to stuff I already like.
With a lot of recommendation systems, you watch and give the thumbs up to one piece of Danish art house cinema and forevermore that's all it will give you.
Plus it's more fun to watch something if there's a good chance you can find someone to talk about it.
Fair enough, but honestly in my experience Netflix is a long way off over-fitting to thumbs. I never watch cartoons or 'kids' category stuff, how hard can it be.
Looking at the Youtube frontpage while logged in stares deep into your soul
(+ Youtube tries desperately to occasionally get you to also watch some open mouthed shock faced idiot in a thumbnail with $$$$$$$$$$$ in the title brought to you by the prank content creator house of the day).
I don't have an account, looking at the YouTube frontpage (which is presumably designed to appeal to some notional average user) is a seriously depressing picture of people/society.
I actually just got a message from Lyft this week when I was leaving the airport. I opened the app, checked the prices ($38!!), and closed it to catch the train instead ($7).
I quickly received a push notification saying "Save 50 minutes by taking Lyft. If you take transit, you will arrive at 12:36am".
Well, it was already quite late and it would be nice to save 50 minutes. So I booked the Lyft, and proceeded to wait for 40 minutes as over a dozen drivers would be assigned to me, see where I wanted to go (6km away), and cancel my ride. I gave up and cancelled the Lyft and only barely made the last bus. Lyft made my life a whole lot more stressful for no reason.
I was amazed to learn that 218 million people arrived in France during 2019 (tourist numbers indicate 90 million - not sure how the two numbers correlate).
I really startet to hate using Booking.com, especially because every time after using it, they start bombarding me with emails. I could probably turn them off.
Another thing that makes me laugh now: I often go to the same hotel, and Booking.com provides better rates then booking directly (no idea why, I asked multiple times for the same discounts). And for my favorite category the hotel has only one room. So booking.com constantly warns me "only 1 room left!". Yeah, I know, there is only one ;)
> (no idea why, I asked multiple times for the same discounts)
Hotels sell a fraction of their inventory cheaply to resellers.
Also, they oversell, because people cancel. And when the hotel is oversold, and has to cancel a reservation, guess which customers get their booking declined?
When you are on booking.com you have the most choices. Not only between all the inventory they have, but you can also browse Airbnb.
When you're at the hotel and you ask their rate, your basically committed. They know how much time and money it cost you to drive to a different hotel. So they can set their rates accordingly.
And hotels hate reservations made over the phone or by email because too many guests never pay a deposit and never show up.
"And hotels hate reservations made over the phone or by email because too many guests never pay a deposit and never show up."
I'm thinking you're from a non-western country, otherwise that would be false; the only wiggle room you gave yourself was 'booking through email' which I don't think even really exists, unless you meant booking through a hotel's website. Hotels take your deposit when you make a reservation over the phone or on their website, and if you book through booking vs the hotel the hotel will lose 15-30% of the room sale.
You have just as many choices when looking for hotels, just look at google or bing. You don't need booking for anything. People rarely just drive up to hotels without checking hotels in the area beforehand on their phone. I'm not familiar with it in developing countries.
Even in Europe there are many smaller boutique hotels who cannot charge your credit card based on a phone conversation. Their bank either require them to use a speed point machine with the card present. Or use an online payment gateway with 3D secure it similar technology.
So they require the deposit as a bank transfer. And this is where the guest gets second thoughts.
People do actually go on road trips. "Oh look how nice that hotel looks. Let's stop and see if they have space for us". They get quoted a high price and that's when the hotel make profit.
I'm actually finding that to no longer be the case... just booked a hotel for a holiday and booking directly through the hotel's website was around 15% cheaper (and didn't try to charge me 50% extra for an infant). The hotel's payment flow for Amex was broken, but well that's another issue ;)
In theory, the solution in situations like this is to continue the test over a longer time. Typically with ‘holdbacks’ – subsets of users who don’t get a feature for a long time. This is easier if you have an app that everyone uses because with a website, it’s harder to reliably find holdbacks who are also a representative sample (eg it won’t work so well to hold back everyone using the site in a certain language as those people may be statistically different from the general population in other ways).
There are still a bunch of problems – higher maintenance burden, harder to iterate on a site quickly. Though I think you identify what I would consider the bigger problem which is that they cause political difficulties as a holdback can only really turn around and say that the positive impact people claimed wasn’t really borne out in the long term. So even at places that do holdbacks, the results may be silenced or ignored. If a holdback shows something continuing to work, that’s hard to get excitement about even though I think one should expect many of these a/b test results to not have long lasting effects.
The types of effects you want to measure would take months or years to show and are the combination of many different small decisions. Teams need to apply common sense thinking, empirical data, and the willingness to wrestle with uncertainty. All of that is hard, blindly following a/b test results relieves people of that cognitive burden
Am I the only one who thinks THAT is a dark pattern? It would at a minimum, confuse me, if I had a different UI / feature set than my friend(s) - confused for being unaware why my experience looks different, and you better bet that 90%+ of users do not know what an A/B test is. At worst, I'm angry because they are getting a better experience and I randomly got shafted with no ability to upgrade.
That's the same kind of thinking that would criticize pharmaceutical companies for giving placebos. They do it because they don't know with confidence, and they want to. They are collecting evidence.
To get into a medical trial you a) know it's a trial b) get informed that you might get a placebo c) consent to participate in the trial.
If a pharmaceutical company was discovered filling 30% of pill bottles they sent to pharmacies with placebos, they'd be sued unto the eighth generation.
While I agree, the problem is in the data-driven decision-making.
There is simply no good way to get good data for this long term type of effect. It's either going to be user interviews, some arbitrary score like customer satisfaction, or maybe a really convoluted split test (long ago cohorts vs new ones... but let's try to remove criteria so it's not apples and oranges).
If a company culture only values data in its product decisions, this is always going to happen.
Good luck fighting an argument against someone who has a supporting data point, and a revenue increase!
Real-life stores do this as well - make individually profitable changes (local maximums) that eventually make the whole experience so miserable that you no-longer want to shop there. Direct upselling is the most obvious, along with constant messing about with pricing and offers, as well as constantly pushing lower quality expensive own-brand goods, but the one I notice most is various cynically high pricing of non-core impulse items around checkouts - it tends to stick in my mind as the shop being expensive.
> I'm sure someone at booking a/b tested these things and saw an increase in revenue.
I know people who used to work at Booking.com. That's exactly what happened. From what I can gather, you're not allowed to make changes to the site without running a test.
Spot on! I think we have a similar problem with TV / video ads. Many of them are funny or intriguing the first time you see them (so they perform well in "one-shot" tests and focus groups), but after five views they start getting exceedingly annoying. A counter example is a State Farm's ad with a guy sitting quietly on a couch and watching TV for a few seconds; I find it very effective.
I find this kind of feels like a squeeze on one's attention.
Where every app or signup has this false premise seeded in a design that it alone is at the center of your digital existence and therefore you can do anything it takes to vie for and keep attention and engagement because the product may experience too much attrition otherwise.
1) Take color away from sites who abuse it and watch your attention and focus go through the roof.
I think people really must not appreciate booking.com. My wife strayed from the formula, booked directly with major chain, used loyalty points to book a stay at a European hotel they operate. Got charged full price by the hotel, got charged for a number of meals she didn’t have, and we’ve been dealing with that since September 2022. When we have problems with reservations we made through booking.com, and post Covid a lot of hotels seem to overbook so we’ve rolled in and found we have no place to stay on several occasions, it’s just single phone call to booking.com resolve the issue. I don’t know what booking’s cut is but they earn every penny.
This happens no matter whom you book with. The difference between booking directly and booking through booking.com is the difference between "sorry, sucks to be you, bye" and "there's this more expensive accommodation available for you and you don't have to pay anything extra".
This is just as anecdotal as your story and the original post: For the last 15 years I've spent about 100 nights in hotels per year all over the world and this has never happened to me.
When I had a reservation it has always been honored.
I've booked directly with small hotels, using chain sites and various aggregators (trivago, hrs, booking, Expedia, hotels.com). The experience has been pretty much the same.
My only reason to use aggregators is to collect rewards across different hotels.
It probably depends on your time of arrival. With some rooms sold as fully refundable or as "one night fee for no show", the hotel does not know, even at 10PM, how many people will actually show up, so many go with first come first serve method. As a single data point, I had two cases of booked room not being available and both happened when I got to the hotel after midnight. My 2c.
I have spent far fewer nights but it has happened to me twice. Once in New York City and once in Portugal. Both times the hotels between the lines admitted that it was their fault and compensated me with better rooms in other hotels just a short walk away.
It is not booking that does the overbooking, it is the hotels. It doesn't matter that I made the reservation in advance, pre-paid, and spoke to someone at the hotel the day prior to arrival. They probably give away my room to avoid confrontation with someone else who was overbooked. By the time I roll into town, which is usually 1-2am because I like driving at night, the hotel is locked down tight and the clerk is pretty comfortable behind his intercom telling me to sleep in my car because they gave away my room (yeah! they actually said that). So I called booking and 45 minutes later I'm checking into a hotel (they had to call several places and talk to people to find one that actually had a room because the computers kept seeing availabilities even though the hotels were at capacity).
Not sure if it needs to be said, but try informing your hotel the day of, but close enough to when you're actually arriving that you're speaking to the same person, that you will be checking in late so they're less likely to give it to a walk in.
People _do_ book hotels and no-show enough that they're more than willing to assuming you're not gonna use it if you don't give them a heads up.
We did that, and to emphasize again we pre-paid, they could have left the room empty for the entire night and been compensated. Instead they gave it away, and this has happened several times now. I suspect what is going on is they give away any rooms during normal hours to avoid conflicts with other people who were overbooked, then let the night clerk who is safely locked away inside the office deal with the rest.
If you book an airline ticket and get bumped from your flight, it has to do with the airline not whoever sold you the ticket. Booking in this case is your intermediary who gets you a seat on another flight on the spot.
- the info is correct. There may be a lot of small print but everything's there. You don't get surprise cash deposit requirement, etc.
- I dealt with their customer support a couple of times. Each time I got talking to a living human within minutes. Stark contrast with airbnb
- it's not owned by Ctrip that's buying everything travel related. If/when it is, I'm out but until then I think I'm a pretty loyal customer
Using Booking for years, recently deactivated Airbnb so now it's my only option.
What I don't like is that it looks like they are going as far as given jurisdiction allows. Depending on where I connect from I can see prices excluding taxes and possibly other dark patterns that I don't always notice. I wouldn't mind destressing the GUI a bit for sure
Oddly enough, this not being the case is the reason I ended up not using Booking.com for my last hotel booking. I had to go to the hotel website to find accurate basic information (like the size of the bed, which was wrong on all of the Booking.com room options) and ended up just booking the hotel while I was there.
Interesting, never knew they have bed sizes... I would see if it is single/double/whatever and then consult photos/reviews. I guess my information requirements are different;)
I showed up at a hotel at around 19:00. Website stated that their reception was open till 21:00. Nobody was there, front door was locked. A single call to Booking.com and an hour later they had put me in another hotel, free of charge. Cost of the other hotel would be paid by the first hotel.
I now do most of my bookings through Booking.com. It is very rare that booking directly gives a lower price (I always try) and the upside of guaranteed logging in that area is a big bonus for me.
Exact opposite experience. I will never, ever book third party again. If you book direct, a cc chargeback is always available to quickly resolve a dispute without debating Indian call center reps for an hour.
I'm about three months into my chargeback, I've had to supply additional documentation twice, and every time I do the hotel gets thirty days to review and respond.
Booking.com's advantage used to be that they had actually good customer service, spread all around the world, no huge call centers in India. They've recently outsourced most of it though, so I can't speak for what it's like at the moment.
A much easier solution: don't use their product. This would serve as a fantastic article about the reasons why it's worthwhile to stop giving them money. Except, it's the exact opposite of that--it teaches (or encourages?) everyone to learn the tricks required to ignore a company's unethical behavior, or install the extension to do it for you.
But booking usually has better prices. Also competitors are not much better in terms of user experience.
As a consumer I want to continue to use it, but to be blind to their persuasive techniques.
Here is the direct link to the extension [0] for anyone who wants to try it out. It's kind of hard to find on the actual webpage because the author made links the same color as normal text.
This is an interesting thought experiment. I'm surprised the CSS class names are so transparent. They must think they're doing nothing wrong. "Persuation" is about what I'd expect from people who downvote every spelling correction.
The Chrome extension is ultimately an enabler of bad behavior though. I wish someone over on Lawyer News would share a post about how they used their free time to put together a lawsuit against Booking.com for fun.
Also what makes this author think the numbers of rooms left are any more accurate or honest than the rest of the surrounding bullshit? Just the fact that they're numbers? Anyway you don't need that info. Is there at least 1 room (or n rooms if you requested n rooms) left, yes or no? It's a boolean. Available or not.
I'm often browsing hotels ahead of actually committing to any firm travel plans, so a message like "rooms available" suggests I likely have plenty of time to keep looking (and potentially going to another website to book), but "only 3 rooms left" might prompt me to pull the trigger earlier than I otherwise would have. Of course, I am personally convinced these numbers are totally made up and just ignore them anyway.
Yeah there's a bit of a disconnect between what we wish it was -- a useful indicator of the actual number of rooms left, for purposes of gauging the urgency -- vs. what they use it for[0], which is to create the urgency artificially.
[0] I should say "probably" since I don't have any concrete evidence.
They aren't totally made up, but they are deliberately obtuse. Hotels are ultimately the ones that control the availability of rooms sold on the platform. It is a common tactic to only list a handful of room nights until those are sold, then add more. This means that all of their rooms always have the urgency messaging. The larger chains do this at scale and across multiple third party sites. So Booking isn't really lying, those numbers are "true", in that there are "only 2 rooms left" but they don't mention the hoteliers' smarmy behavior in abusing the urgency messaging about the availability or their own complicit participation in the lie-by-omission.
The people who desire and authorize this sort of manipulative crap to be put on websites needs to have very bad things done to them. Manipulative money men are the bane of tech.
I think this is a great example of how easy it is to change a ui in the browser, and something I think we take for granted now. Take any other tech and it'll be hard, potentially impossible.
Something that concerns me is that we end up with Flutter(-like) websites, on a canvas using wasm. No cool stuff like this would exist, no way to escape the ads, and eye strain from websites that Dark Reader can't change. I wouldn't be surprised seeing "dark mode" as an added benefit to a subscription one day.
(Yes, Flutter has html too. But if I tell my boss that it's because of my ideology for the web, that pixel's are a bit off, and performance is degraded, I might as well look for another job.)
It's sort of toxic socially though as devs write dark patterns during working hours and dark pattern blockers in hobby time, for other nerds to use. So dev caste gets usable web and profits from antisocial behaviour, while low non-dev castes are left to drown in the swamp.
I think you're underestimating how tech illiterate much of the population is. A quick Google suggests the percentage of people using an adblocker of any kind is only 30-40%. I would consider that the absolutely minimum of web viewing tech literacy.
The point remains though that the technical capabilities necessary to install chrome extensions and the technical capabilities required to program dark patterns are vastly different. No one is getting hired on their ability to do the former.
The asymmetry is that one small group of web devs can roll out a change to millions of users whose ability and patience to combat those dark patterns will vary.
A quick Google suggests the percentage of people using an adblocker of any kind is only 30-40%
That's around 10-20x higher than I think it is in practice. I suspect the majority of users have naturally developed a "mental adblock" instead from all the visual overload, based on how they will completely ignore non-ad information that isn't presented in an attention-getting-enough manner. I've watched others search for information on the Internet without an adblocker and have been astonished at how all the distractions on the pages don't seem to faze them at all, while I could barely keep my eyes on the screen.
You assume the dark patterns and the dark pattern blockers are written by the same people. I, for one, have probably written shitty code and badly designed UI in the past, but I've always refused to become a sleazy salesman, even back when I was doing customer support. I use element blocking all the time but I'm not going to put effort into these shitty websites and I doubt most devs will either. I'm also not installing blocking extensions for every website I visit.
Luckily, even non-technical people are downloading browsers with adblockers that come prepopulated with all kinds of filters, not just basic ads anymore. Opera has run a surprisingly effective ad campaign, for example. All it takes is for one of these browsers to take a more aggressive stance against these dark patterns. Brave already comes with a whole bunch of "annoyance" filters ready to be enabled.
I've told "normal" people about how bad Booking.com is, showed them how they manipulated you, but those people either didn't see the problem ("everyone is trying to manipulate you so what") or don't want to find another website. As long as the government won't step in, and consumers won't stop falling for these tricks, nothing will change. The technical problem is solved, but greedy developers and developers without morals (or the freedom to refuse) need to be fought by other means.
The problem is, nobody cares except for a bunch of ad blocking nerds.
We've been there before: I remember the proliferation of Flash sites back in the day. Our local legal firm had their entire site written in Flash, for what was basically brochureware plus a contact form. Presumably some lawyer's nephew wanted to practice their Flash skills, or they were taken for a ride by a contractor.
And this is why we need to watch out for that potential timeline where everything gets written as pixels to a web canvas and can’t be MITM altered/filtered/uBlocked
that would be lovely and I would install it right away, too. I see the time and effort it takes, tho. Would you be able to provide a css ruleset one could add to their browser of choice?
I'm not a front-end engineer so I can't help here. Though, from what I understand, Firefox uses the same extension system nowadays and it's mostly a question of publishing in Mozilla store.
370 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadIt's not like booking.com has a monopoly. Why not so business with a booking company where customer relationship is more of a priority?
It’s cheap, it’s reliable, and whenever I’ve had any sort of issue then Booking.com have fixed it right away. For all this urgency stuff, I’ve found them absolutely excellent.
You may want to take a closer look at the "dozens of other travel websites." Yes, there are still a few independent ones, but the majority of major sites are all owned by just two companies, Expedia and Booking Holdings (formerly Priceline). It's unfortunate but true.
Opinions?
So either Booking.com have thought about this and don't care, or they have not thought of it. Given that they do expressly prohibit monitoring/scraping/crawling for commercial purposes I would guess it's the former.
They've limited liability in a way that any loss is limited to the amount paid and also do not offer indemnification, which further limits their exposure.
(Reading legal documents is my personal rabbit hole.)
[0] https://www.booking.com/content/terms.html#nov2021_terms_all...
IANAL, but I imagine a sleazy lawyer from the company could attempt to sue the users for altering a "copyrighted work", although it probably doesn't apply if the derivative work isn't for public consumption. Also it would mean defacing a book would be illegal.
They changed it to "on our site" in 2020.
Same applies for airlines
I used booking.com a lot a few months ago and was just constantly amazed at how dumb all these “nudges” are. My favorite was a warning on a hotel listing saying “only 1 room at this price left on booking.com”. Turned out the hotel was completely empty! The hotel has only one of their smallest size room, so _necessarily_ when the hotel is empty there is only one of the cheapest rooms left. But still they try to make you feel anxious!
Starting to use airbnb more often for that and other reasons.
I used to think it, too. Then I consulted for a company deep into split testing for marketing persuasion, and it made very clear to me how often I've got an intrusive, consumptive thought entering my brain that I can trace back to an advertisement.
It's why I am pretty militant about ad-blocking (and also paying for things, because I want those things to still exist); I notice it today when I have a really weird "hey, I want that" crop up and derail my train of thought, and interrogating why is often valuable and leads back to the same things. (Even billboards actually work!)
Is everybody here using booking.com?
Or is anybody using alternatives as well?
If you use something else: What?
If you only use Booking.com: Why?
Booking.com have a price guarantee, and a good one, so you will rarely get a better price from the hotel _unless you’re a member of their loyalty programme_ … so for the big hotel chains, sign up to those and book via their apps
I remember walking into a hotel at around 10 PM (I was road-tripping around Iceland and could've slept in the car too) and asking if they'd give me a discount (1 room more to sell), and the front desk person clicked around on a lot on his computer and when a colleague asked him, he said "I'll just give him the agency rate.".
The most likely reason you might get a better rate from a third-party booking site than from the hotel direct is if the hotel allows the site to do variable pricing to try to capture more willingness-to-pay; sometimes that variable pricing will work out in your favour.
They have a few mechanisms to try and drive up commission from the usual 12%, though. They have a preferred program which boosts search results but costs 3%> They would have loved to drop it to better tune search, but they were addicted to the incremental revenue.
At various times there were also dynamic ranking boost efforts, where a hotel could increase boost their ranking (with a preview) by increasing the commission percentage. IIRC that went as high as 18%.
Both of those applied to the default search results order ONLY. If you clicked "order by price" or similar then you simply got that.
(Worked for booking until end of 2017.)
Though, Google Maps' UI is buggy and often the deals are out-of-date/sold out, but I still find it better overall
Had a flight on all American Airlines metal that the OTA purchased through Iberian airlines on a mix of AA bookings and Finnair codeshares. The flight did not touch Finland or Spain.
With multiple carriers, sometimes things become your problem.
If you buy multiple independent tickets to get the cheapest fares possible, you can be really screwed.
So it really depends on your appetite for risk. I sometimes choose the lowest risk to get to my destination, and a high risk option on the way home where I am less time constrained and can be more flexible dealing with any issues. New Zealand is the antipodes to Europe and can take 24 hours to arrive (including stopovers), so any flight problems are significantly worse than for many other countries.
But I do see Google's OTA listing offering things like you say where you're not protected in the event of a missed connection delay and have some shady insurer that's supposed to 'protect' you outside of the airlines.
A note on alternatives - loads of former competitors have been bought by either BDC or EXP, i.e. hotels.com is just Expedia, kayak or priceline are BDC, etc.
I used to use various sites, but I realized that if I concentrated on Marriott/Bonvoy I could reach their highest status level (Ambassador). I've almost reached the dollar value and night count to retain my status through 2024, and it's only April!
I'm quite happy with them. I get a lot of free upgrades, lots of points for free nights, free breakfast, late checkout, etc. And if anything is the least bit out of order, they fix it for me.
I hate AirBnb. There are lot of bad actors now, and AirBnb customer support is useless. Even if I need a flat for a long period (like a month or more), I try to find an independent agency and use them. Searching on AirBnb can be a good starting point: if the listing shows an agency name you can usually find them on Google. AirBnb "protection" is useless anyway, so I don't understand why I should pay such a huge premium for it.
Booking.com is fine. I didn't get stressed out about the messages that the author writes about. But now I only use Booking.com when there is no Bonvoy hotel in the place I'm going. I have never had to escalate anything to Booking, but in general the places in booking are as described. There aren't as many bad actors as there are with AirBnb.
EDIT: I'm not employed. All my travel is personal travel paid out my own pocket.
But it doesn't apply in my specific case. I'm not employed. I pay for everything out of my own pocket.
I bet a better deal from Marriott directly as a member than by going through a third-party.
Speaking from the other side of the desk, guests can vary wildly in how much they cost to accommodate. A good guest (mostly one who cleans up after themselves) can cost as little as one-quarter of the average guest, that significantly improves the margin on the room and we can definitely afford to pass some of those savings on to you once we know you’re a good guest.
Speaking from a broader view, the kind of guest who stays often enough to meet loyalty targets is usually travelling for work. Their demand for accommodation is inelastic (job needs them in this place for this long) but very substitutable (pretty much any clean room will do). It makes sense to sacrifice some margin to capture that.
So there’s a few good reasons why hotels or hotel chains can offer real discounts in their loyalty programs.
The 100 nights/flights guy is also probably a much lower touch customer as they are just in&out for work, and "know how things work" generally so doesn't have unreasonable expectations for what they have paid.
You're expected to upgrade them to the best available room/seat but they complain to corporate when someone that does 101/year gets the upgrade instead. If their flight gets cancelled/delayed because they flew into a known hurricane, you better watch out for it and proactively re-book them or hand out food/hotel vouchers.
The $5 discount OTA person... give them the crap room/seat that nobody else wants and just ignore their whining.
Just based on my experience of being the latter and trolling flyertalk...
(used to be. then came covid. now i use my points to fly volunteers to ukraine.)
Another way to look at them is they are a gamified & transparent method of becoming "a regular" at a hotel/airline and generally get in return, commensurate better product/treatment/service, especially in cases of adverse events like short notice changes, delays, cancellations, etc.
Just like if you go to the same pub/restaurant in your hometown over & over, you'll get recognized as a regular.. and maybe on occasion get some free apps, access to a table when they might otherwise say they are full, and friendlier treatment. Except at a national/global scale across a brands properties/planes/airports/etc.
It is interesting to me that travel is one of the few remaining places where customer loyalty is in any way rewarded. And why shouldn't it be?
Or at least a tax-free retirement benefit (not bad if you have an employer).
But it is funny to read on the travel discussion boards how much road-warriors hate hotel/airline X Y or Z because their points program isn't great, but they're substantially cheaper.
Some country's tax policies consider employer-paid meals a (partly/fully) taxable benefit, but if the hotel provides it for free, that's cool.
Same thing with credit card points. That's a huge one for squeezing out tax-free income out of your business.
However, if you get into any quarrel with your employer that can be fatal. Now they have an good argument to fire you with any compensation because of your wrongdoing. This had recently happened to the head of a Finnish government agency, ironically enough the audit office.
EU regulation is pushing back on the MFN clauses, but I'm not sure what the current state of things is.
If the difference was small enough, many guests would still book through booking.com instead of the hotel out of ignorance, not caring enough, or because booking provides a better experience.
It'd cut their profits by limiting the commissions they can charge, but I don't see why they would go out of business.
There are lots of other websites for booking hotels. But after trying a few, I don't see any advantage over booking.com so that's what I use (and ignore the dark patterns if possible).
Despite the proliferation of booking sites on the web, all of them are either part of Bookings Holdings (Booking.com’s parent company, 17bln revenue last year), or part of Expedia Group (11bln revenue last year), and I would expect the distributions of third party bookings at most hotels to roughly reflect that revenue split. There is one other competing group, Trip.com (5bln), but they mostly service China and don’t have as much penetration into Western markets as far as I know.
Yes, there is space for small niche sites with certain angles, but all of those sites will still be owned by one of the big two parents. There isn’t even much space for a niche player intending to eventually get bought out by one of the big groups like you see in some software fields, because hotels are pretty risk-averse in general and won’t just hand out access to their reservation channels to small players easily.
Room availability, staff service, everything else is identical. We have no incentive to encourage you to cut out the middleman and thus we don’t, but to my knowledge we also aren’t prohibited from doing that. Customers do sometimes ask about this stuff and I say “if you know exactly where you want to stay, might as well book direct to save a few dollars, but those sites offer a real service in helping you find a good place when you’re unfamiliar with the area”. Customers also sometimes say they can get a better rate on an OTA than what we are offering, and I always encourage them to book with whatever method gets them the best deal - “we honor all bookings and you will get the exact same room either way”. Usually that better price does not materialize, the guest realizes they were looking at a cheaper room or even a different hotel, though it does happen from time to time even with us (which I have never been able to understand; the OTA must simply be choosing to lose money on those bookings for some reason). We do not overbook, nor do we allow OTAs to overbook.
(I don’t know how representative this is of hotels in general; the owner is particularly upstanding and moral, kind of a “pillar of the community” guy, so this might be an unusually fair setup. But I’ve never heard a customer say we’re unusually fair, so I think this probably is pretty common.)
Essentially the role OTAs play in our case is they are a search engine and perhaps a more convenient booking process, nothing more. I believe this is a common way hotels use OTAs, though that’s just my impression.
The other common way hotels use OTAs is more tightly integrated, OTAs get to do variable pricing and probably other things I don’t know about since we don’t join any of those programs. I can’t speak to those arrangements but I imagine that’s what is going on when the OTA can offer you a better rate than the hotel direct, which definitely does happen with some hotels. That might also be what is going on when you ask questions about OTA rates and it feels like the staff member is under a gag order, but again, I do not know anything at all about that mode of OTA integration.
About room availability, I thought that if Booking or any other third-party says "this hotel has 5 rooms left", it didn't necessarily mean the hotel had actually only 5 rooms available for the dates, but maybe there were only 5 rooms left from the "batch" the hotel put in Booking (my assumption was that, to make the orchestration of reservations between different platforms easier, hotels divided the number of rooms between them, or something like that...)
Orchestrating reservations is a lot more streamlined than you’re imagining. All sources have access to the reservation management system and can poll it for availability, while the booking is in progress it simply blocks out the booking with a “pending” booking. When the booking is made, the source adds it to the hotel’s system themselves. I have had customer support with both OTAs on the phone and heard them say “I can see you have this many rooms available…”. So if we have 7 rooms left, Expedia knows we have 7 rooms, Booking.com knows we have 7, and we know we have 7.
The only exception is if we have rooms with potential maintenance issues (air conditioners, TVs, and hot water systems have Heisenbugs too!), we will sometimes reserve one room of that type in case we need to move a guest. In that case, we would have 8 rooms available but Expedia and Booking.com would see 7.
Booking.com doesn't know about any rooms that are not made available to them by the hotel, so everything is based on that. In my experience, most hotels just have all their rooms available at all times for booking.com - but maybe some of them experiment with availability to sell a bit more themselves.
The "A person just booked..." and "Only 2 rooms left" messages that booking.com uses to annoy customers are actually correct. I've worked on the other side, and seen from the backend that they don't lie.
> (my assumption was that, to make the orchestration of reservations between different platforms easier, hotels divided the number of rooms between them, or something like that...)
No, they use hotel software that integrates and synchronizes instantly with all platforms, their own web site and the front desk.
Yes, I think that's feasible. However, I sometimes stay at medium to small size hotels (doing my reservation through Booking or other 3rd parties) but when I get to the place, I can see them managing my stay using Excel files or similar "almost by hand" methods. So I was skeptical that those kind of places had actually a system that can automatically synchronize with all the third party platforms they use in real time.
I've tried this with a hotel in Italy, and found out that the price was actually higher. I couldn't believe it. I actually asked the reception whether they were really sure. Yes, this is our price, they said.
I don't even if this is legal in your country, but in Germany they ruled against it: https://www.thelocal.de/20210518/germany-upholds-ban-on-book...
Many hotels are idiotic about this and will put a cheaper price on booking, then wonder why booking is taking all their reservations. Unexplainable...
> "Typically, additional costs for children (including extra beds/cots) are not included in the price. Please contact the property directly 1-2 days before your stay to find out more." https://www.booking.com/tpi_faq.html
After this, what's the point of using Booking.com?
They don't stress customers just for the sake of having a less pleasant experience.
I work in the online accomodation business, BTW.
The muggers don't threaten their victims just for the sake of inducing fear.
I work with the local gangs in my area, BTW.
For me I'd rather have a cross-browser solution in the form of uBlock Origin's rules. Is there any place where someone has collected some useful ones for booking.com?
Now I want to build a similar extension. Leave a reply there if you know some site that badly needs de-stressing.
The problem is that there are a lot of laws that in practice only apply to not-well-connected individuals. When done by companies or well-known people it's considered good business acumen.
https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/online-hotel-booking
Booking.com, amongst others, gave enforceable undertakings that they'd change their practices.
1. there was this snow season last month and the roads stopped working and suddenly the air prices skyrocketed. (as is now expected), i had to buy a ticket in emergency which i paid 4x the reasonable rate with all websites saying "oops, the fare has increased" trick.
2. many websites did the "just 1 seat remaining" trick and i jumped the gun.
when the next day i traveled, the plane was half empty.
what happens is, travel agents buy up tickets well in advance and then sit on the bookings, they either sell directly or wait for online portals to sell them.
these travel agents having purchased tickets in bulk then say "oh, the ticket is priced $100 on kayak, i will sell it for 95. lets give you some discount" all the while having purchased the same for like 20.
these people are willing to forego tickets because its more profitable to keep the prices high
I'm actually building an internal tool for such fines (called "debit memos") for a company with several thousand travel agents, and they're not uncommon at all.
And that just shows the problem with regulating these large platforms - local regulators with their hands tied against billion dollar platforms. The EU should just step in and regulate these monsters directly and pro-consumer. Or regulators should grow a pair and try to get the CEO / board replaced (a theoretical possibility when they keep getting administrative fines in NL). That will shake up the stockholders enough to shake some sense into these firms.
[1] https://www.consuwijzer.nl/doe-uw-melding-bij-acm-consuwijze...
Could I just craft a POST request and book what I want?
Each of these companies are only allocated a certain amount of inventory so the availability is probably there, especially at the larger hotels
Additionally do they float the price and if so can I edit that also in the post request and name my own price?
If their interface has a fuzzy relationship to reality than maybe you can fuzz it your way
I'm not a criminal but I'm still curious.
I guess the most fair disclosure would provide a Google flights like pricing chart that shows cost increase and seasonal availability projections.
I try to make the decision independently of the point of sale vendor. The aggregator can help limit impact of these tactics by API contract with these sites that focus on price/availability without artificial urgency.
People who value revenue metrics over all else will still do shitty things for users even if they don't A/B test.
If this is true, that indicates that a company's theoretical "good values" are not being passed down to those decision-makers in a way that makes them impact decision-making.
Which means the company does not have those "good values" in the first place. They have lip service.
Values that are not practiced are not values. You are what you do, both when someone is watching and when someone is not.
- almost any change will have have people arguing for and against it
- if ‘company values’ is a trump card to prevent a change, it will be used by the people against the change
- as a manager, to still make decisions in such an environment, you’ll find yourself needing to weigh the upsides and downsides even if there are strong company values (it just puts a higher weight on certain concerns)
- as parent said, short term impact supported with numbers is easier to weigh and defend than (possible but unknown) long term detrimental impact.
Thus, I think parent is right. Even in corporates with strong company values, it’s easier to prioritize the short term proven impact over long term unproven impact. And therefore, at scale, such decisions will be made.
No different with how there are relatively few good engineers but most are average or bad?
I mean there are companies that put out good products but most are average at best.
I suppose A/B testing is bad in the way that table saws are bad — that they are dangerous and I see a lot of videos of people using them in ways that are gonna chop off their fingers, but I wouldn’t blame the table saw for it or want to take it away.
And how do you know the short term changes will degrade the brand and the user experience?
Long term holdbacks actually are way way harder to implement and maintain in a fast moving product than meets the eye. We had passionate and ultimately unfruitful conversations about how to do that when I was there in 2016.
The only thing we had at the time was continued tracking against the experiment groups after flipping that switch.
I'd claim that people who are reeds in the wind when there's a short-term gain available do not in fact have good values. "Take the money and run" is a value for sure, and it's common enough. But I'd have a hard time calling it good.
It could be that the hotel is holding back rooms for other channels or because they like to not be fully booked so far ahead of time or perhaps the hotel has found listing only one room at a time gets them a better look to book ratio (in part because of anxiety inspiring features like this).
Without an understanding of the industry though, it's not really useful information.
> This is the tyranny of easy metrics. It's easy to measure how much money is saved by preventing cancelations, it's much harder to measure how much long-term business is lost by poisoning your reputation with the 99.9% of customers who had to jump hoops and dodge sleazeballs to get out of the subscription. But the latter could well be orders of magnitude money more over the long run.
Then why were they testing it, if they already knew other concerns would veto that alternative?
Accounts being jerks get less leeway from me than people being respectful and/or standing behind their words.
Bookmarking for later.
1. Users hated all the advertising even if they were signed in with a paid account
and
2. eHarmony had no intention of stopping this because they valued the revenue from the advertising over the user experience.
I noticed that Redfin has started adding ads to their site which really annoys me. Folks you’ll get a sizable commission for connecting me with the listing agent. The ad revenue has to be a rounding error compared to that. Why are you damaging your brand by showing me ads for luxury vacations next to houses that I’m looking at buying?
To this list, I'd add Amazon's ads. It's providing them with very obvious revenue growth. It's parasitic on their ecommerce business, though, in ways that for me and many others, harm the things that made Amazon popular in the first place.
That'll never change, though, because that revenue has enough people attached to it that they'll fight tooth and nail to keep it no matter how much it harms the rest of Amazon.
If you are the first to do the "only 2 rooms left" trick for example, you will get the full results before people get desensitized. But people will get desensitized everywhere, not just on your website, so if a competitor tries to pull the same trick, he won't get the same effect as you did. If fact, it may be time for you to roll back, to make competitors look bad for using the now well known and ineffective trick you invented. And if it works long term, then you get a head start.
The problem is, regulatory agencies are slow as molasses and courts are overloaded with crap, which means by the time the process is done years later, the companies have long since switched to yet another sleazebag tactic.
Businesses have brand reputations. Just let people vote with their wallets. That won't discourage all dark patterns, but is preferable to a world of over-regulation.
See also: Google, Amazon, etc. The laissez-faire voting with wallets approach has failed time and again. It doesn't seem to discourage dark patterns at all. I'd love to use companies with less infuriating interfaces but they can't compete.
I'm not too concerned about over-regulation. I don't think there's much innovation possible in the renting rooms to the public space; the biggest change I've seen recently is in more dark manipulation of customer behaviour. However, perhaps there's an alternative to having governments regulate UI design, like requiring 3rd-party API access.
I've heard others say that if you quote an online price, the front desk can match it (better to get 100% of the discounted price than 60%), although I haven't tried it myself.
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
I digress…
I guess my decision doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things, because they are still around and judging by the screenshots it's as bad as ever, and people still use the site...
And watch booking.com try to tell you that "19 people have booked this today" or some such bullshit.
[0]: https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/bookingcom-commits-adjust...
[1]: https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/booking-and-expedia-infor...
https://imgur.com/a/oqOTYlz
...while watching uBlock Origin go crazy blocking stuff.
I saw that, balked a bit at the interaction and ended up taking a train instead. Not only was it $6.25 instead of $46 it got me there faster than Lyft’s fastest option. Including time walking to and from the station.
I wasn’t in a hurry but the in your face “look how much money people are willing to spend to save 5 min” helped me rethink my priorities.
With a lot of recommendation systems, you watch and give the thumbs up to one piece of Danish art house cinema and forevermore that's all it will give you.
Plus it's more fun to watch something if there's a good chance you can find someone to talk about it.
(+ Youtube tries desperately to occasionally get you to also watch some open mouthed shock faced idiot in a thumbnail with $$$$$$$$$$$ in the title brought to you by the prank content creator house of the day).
I quickly received a push notification saying "Save 50 minutes by taking Lyft. If you take transit, you will arrive at 12:36am".
Well, it was already quite late and it would be nice to save 50 minutes. So I booked the Lyft, and proceeded to wait for 40 minutes as over a dozen drivers would be assigned to me, see where I wanted to go (6km away), and cancel my ride. I gave up and cancelled the Lyft and only barely made the last bus. Lyft made my life a whole lot more stressful for no reason.
Sources:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/436536/total-number-of-i...
https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/french-foreign-policy/tour...
Another thing that makes me laugh now: I often go to the same hotel, and Booking.com provides better rates then booking directly (no idea why, I asked multiple times for the same discounts). And for my favorite category the hotel has only one room. So booking.com constantly warns me "only 1 room left!". Yeah, I know, there is only one ;)
Hotels sell a fraction of their inventory cheaply to resellers.
Also, they oversell, because people cancel. And when the hotel is oversold, and has to cancel a reservation, guess which customers get their booking declined?
When you're at the hotel and you ask their rate, your basically committed. They know how much time and money it cost you to drive to a different hotel. So they can set their rates accordingly.
And hotels hate reservations made over the phone or by email because too many guests never pay a deposit and never show up.
I'm thinking you're from a non-western country, otherwise that would be false; the only wiggle room you gave yourself was 'booking through email' which I don't think even really exists, unless you meant booking through a hotel's website. Hotels take your deposit when you make a reservation over the phone or on their website, and if you book through booking vs the hotel the hotel will lose 15-30% of the room sale.
You have just as many choices when looking for hotels, just look at google or bing. You don't need booking for anything. People rarely just drive up to hotels without checking hotels in the area beforehand on their phone. I'm not familiar with it in developing countries.
So they require the deposit as a bank transfer. And this is where the guest gets second thoughts.
People do actually go on road trips. "Oh look how nice that hotel looks. Let's stop and see if they have space for us". They get quoted a high price and that's when the hotel make profit.
There are still a bunch of problems – higher maintenance burden, harder to iterate on a site quickly. Though I think you identify what I would consider the bigger problem which is that they cause political difficulties as a holdback can only really turn around and say that the positive impact people claimed wasn’t really borne out in the long term. So even at places that do holdbacks, the results may be silenced or ignored. If a holdback shows something continuing to work, that’s hard to get excitement about even though I think one should expect many of these a/b test results to not have long lasting effects.
If a pharmaceutical company was discovered filling 30% of pill bottles they sent to pharmacies with placebos, they'd be sued unto the eighth generation.
There is simply no good way to get good data for this long term type of effect. It's either going to be user interviews, some arbitrary score like customer satisfaction, or maybe a really convoluted split test (long ago cohorts vs new ones... but let's try to remove criteria so it's not apples and oranges).
If a company culture only values data in its product decisions, this is always going to happen.
Good luck fighting an argument against someone who has a supporting data point, and a revenue increase!
I know people who used to work at Booking.com. That's exactly what happened. From what I can gather, you're not allowed to make changes to the site without running a test.
Where every app or signup has this false premise seeded in a design that it alone is at the center of your digital existence and therefore you can do anything it takes to vie for and keep attention and engagement because the product may experience too much attrition otherwise.
1) Take color away from sites who abuse it and watch your attention and focus go through the roof.
Grayscale the Web is a handy extension. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/grayscale-the-web-...
It has a setting to just turn off all color, or just a site.
2) Add a firewall layer when signing up. I recently registered a voip number and an extra email account to check out for things.
It stops explosions of emails and text messages on my space of the same try to chase people into engaging in a pipeline.
It's surprising how few of these well oiled machines can do without being able to interrupt you constantly.
3) Notifications off, and checking them scheduled.
A good way to test any product beyond it is to silence all notifications. Maybe I have a habit to keep going back, or not.
You book through booking.com, and upon arrival, regularly find your reservation bumped due to overbooking?
That’s not positive for booking.com!
I've booked directly with small hotels, using chain sites and various aggregators (trivago, hrs, booking, Expedia, hotels.com). The experience has been pretty much the same. My only reason to use aggregators is to collect rewards across different hotels.
People _do_ book hotels and no-show enough that they're more than willing to assuming you're not gonna use it if you don't give them a heads up.
- the info is correct. There may be a lot of small print but everything's there. You don't get surprise cash deposit requirement, etc.
- I dealt with their customer support a couple of times. Each time I got talking to a living human within minutes. Stark contrast with airbnb
- it's not owned by Ctrip that's buying everything travel related. If/when it is, I'm out but until then I think I'm a pretty loyal customer
Using Booking for years, recently deactivated Airbnb so now it's my only option.
What I don't like is that it looks like they are going as far as given jurisdiction allows. Depending on where I connect from I can see prices excluding taxes and possibly other dark patterns that I don't always notice. I wouldn't mind destressing the GUI a bit for sure
Oddly enough, this not being the case is the reason I ended up not using Booking.com for my last hotel booking. I had to go to the hotel website to find accurate basic information (like the size of the bed, which was wrong on all of the Booking.com room options) and ended up just booking the hotel while I was there.
I now do most of my bookings through Booking.com. It is very rare that booking directly gives a lower price (I always try) and the upside of guaranteed logging in that area is a big bonus for me.
On booking.com I booked a place with a lockbox and it didn’t have all the required keys on it.
Multiple phone calls gave me no help and I found a way to effectively break into the building and I just did that every day for the rest of my stay
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookingcom-de-stre...
I'm sure there's an extension to fix that
The Chrome extension is ultimately an enabler of bad behavior though. I wish someone over on Lawyer News would share a post about how they used their free time to put together a lawsuit against Booking.com for fun.
Also what makes this author think the numbers of rooms left are any more accurate or honest than the rest of the surrounding bullshit? Just the fact that they're numbers? Anyway you don't need that info. Is there at least 1 room (or n rooms if you requested n rooms) left, yes or no? It's a boolean. Available or not.
[0] I should say "probably" since I don't have any concrete evidence.
Make them feel anxious and on their toes about something that is important for them. Exactly like the dark patterns they create.
Closely followed by engineers who happily implement this kind of shit (unless you included them already)
Something that concerns me is that we end up with Flutter(-like) websites, on a canvas using wasm. No cool stuff like this would exist, no way to escape the ads, and eye strain from websites that Dark Reader can't change. I wouldn't be surprised seeing "dark mode" as an added benefit to a subscription one day.
(Yes, Flutter has html too. But if I tell my boss that it's because of my ideology for the web, that pixel's are a bit off, and performance is degraded, I might as well look for another job.)
The asymmetry is that one small group of web devs can roll out a change to millions of users whose ability and patience to combat those dark patterns will vary.
That's around 10-20x higher than I think it is in practice. I suspect the majority of users have naturally developed a "mental adblock" instead from all the visual overload, based on how they will completely ignore non-ad information that isn't presented in an attention-getting-enough manner. I've watched others search for information on the Internet without an adblocker and have been astonished at how all the distractions on the pages don't seem to faze them at all, while I could barely keep my eyes on the screen.
Luckily, even non-technical people are downloading browsers with adblockers that come prepopulated with all kinds of filters, not just basic ads anymore. Opera has run a surprisingly effective ad campaign, for example. All it takes is for one of these browsers to take a more aggressive stance against these dark patterns. Brave already comes with a whole bunch of "annoyance" filters ready to be enabled.
I've told "normal" people about how bad Booking.com is, showed them how they manipulated you, but those people either didn't see the problem ("everyone is trying to manipulate you so what") or don't want to find another website. As long as the government won't step in, and consumers won't stop falling for these tricks, nothing will change. The technical problem is solved, but greedy developers and developers without morals (or the freedom to refuse) need to be fought by other means.
The problem is, nobody cares except for a bunch of ad blocking nerds.