[HN Gopher] De-Stressing Booking.com
___________________________________________________________________
De-Stressing Booking.com
Author : robin_reala
Score : 484 points
Date : 2023-04-16 15:22 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.alexcharlton.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.alexcharlton.co)
| chpatrick wrote:
| Luckily (?) I live in Hungary where they got fined over this so
| these dark patterns are not visible.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| 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.
| systemtest wrote:
| 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.
| dannyeei wrote:
| I'm very jealous of your experience.
|
| 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
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| I recommend actually booking a hotel instead of a rebranded
| Airbnb.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I appreciate Booking:
|
| - 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
| joe5150 wrote:
| > "the info is correct"
|
| 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.
| catiopatio wrote:
| This reads like a bizarro-world advertisement.
|
| You book through booking.com, and upon arrival, regularly find
| your reservation bumped due to overbooking?
|
| That's not _positive_ for booking.com!
| stavros wrote:
| 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".
| lars_francke wrote:
| 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.
| usr1106 wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| It's happened to me once and to my parents once, and we
| don't even book that often. Maybe it depends on the
| country.
| ptero wrote:
| 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.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| 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).
| codersfocus wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| 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.
| pshirshov wrote:
| A Firefox version please?
| tyingq wrote:
| Given the title, I was hoping this was a "how we're scaling our
| Perl backend" post, but still interesting. The hubris of using
| <div> class names like "persuation"(sic) is funny.
| 55555 wrote:
| Booking.com is actually much better about this crap than Agoda.
| splonk wrote:
| Agoda is owned by Booking.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Interesting idea, but goes a bit too far for me. I'd prefer it if
| it just removed stuff, rather then rewriting.
| MaanuAir wrote:
| Communicating by fear in non-dangerous contexts is a bad sign of
| an attempt to manipulate you.
| SimonPStevens wrote:
| I used to use booking.com a lot. I can cope with the dark
| patterns and the aggressive anxiety based encouragement (although
| I find it repulsive).
|
| But more recently what's put me off is many of their listings
| aren't hotels, they are private landlords letting apartments
| Airbnb style. I'd like to be able to filter out those types of
| listings because having had a few bad experiences with AirBnB in
| the past what I usually want is a hotel. I don't want to deal
| with a private landlord hassling me, cleaning deposits, and
| rules, etc.
| eCa wrote:
| They have a filter for that (that I always use).
| dwg wrote:
| Have you tried filtering search results by "Property Type"
| (Hotel) and "Property Rating" (3-star, etc.)?
| monkeydust wrote:
| This is cool but I just mentally filter all this out already, no
| extension needed.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| I'd like to think I'm above this kind of manipulation but I'm
| sure I'm influenced like anyone else by things I'm unaware of.
| eropple wrote:
| As a rule: people who think this, don't.
|
| 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!)
| aeonflux wrote:
| Yeah, like others said. You don't.
| xiwenc wrote:
| Specifically regarding booking.com i try to book accommodation
| way in advance with free cancellation until X date. When the trip
| gets closer i always review my booked accommodations at least X-1
| days in advance for better deals.
|
| Sometimes i do find better price and location. I have started
| this strategy recently. So not much empirical evidence yet.
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| [dead]
| mirrorlake wrote:
| 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.
| ponector wrote:
| 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.
| Aillustrator wrote:
| I would like to know ow the world of hotel booking looks like
| these days.
|
| 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?
| fwlr wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Very interesting! Do you think there is space for small or
| niche players?
| fwlr wrote:
| No.
|
| 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.
| ricktdotorg wrote:
| great mini-thread! thank you for your industry insight!
| splonk wrote:
| 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%.
| severino wrote:
| 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)?
| fwlr wrote:
| 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.
| severino wrote:
| 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...)
| fwlr wrote:
| 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.
| samplenoise wrote:
| 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.
| petesergeant wrote:
| 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
| netsharc wrote:
| 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.".
| fwlr wrote:
| 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.
| splonk wrote:
| 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.
| rootsudo wrote:
| That's interesting info - Thanks! But the standard for
| booking.com is for sure 20% for any new operator.
| stcroixx wrote:
| 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.
| switch007 wrote:
| I associate Booking with higher prices. I find better deals on
| Google Maps/Super(.com)
|
| Though, Google Maps' UI is buggy and often the deals are out-
| of-date/sold out, but I still find it better overall
| mr_mitm wrote:
| I travel quite a bit and I like hotels.com much better than
| booking.com
| ww520 wrote:
| Use OTA for research. Book direct with the hotel.
| oezi wrote:
| The issue is that booking directly is usually crappy and the
| hotels rarely care (or are under gag order not to say
| otherwise).
| petesergeant wrote:
| Only true for the big-brand hotels in my experience. This is
| almost always true for flights though
| Scoundreller wrote:
| 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.
| robocat wrote:
| 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.
| slater wrote:
| 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.
| switch007 wrote:
| Btw you should probably define such a non standard
| abbreviation such as "BDC" the first time you use it
| dmd wrote:
| 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.
| LastNevadan wrote:
| I travel a _lot_.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| TravelPiglet wrote:
| Booking.com has no customer support. They'll happily fuck you
| over and not respond to any attempts to contact them.
| temp_praneshp wrote:
| 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.
| oezi wrote:
| 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
| steveBK123 wrote:
| 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?
| splonk wrote:
| 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.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| 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.
| usr1106 wrote:
| 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.
| fwlr wrote:
| 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.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| 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.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| 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...
| steveBK123 wrote:
| I think Flyertalk are somewhat of a self selecting bunch
| of over optimizing nuts, to be fair to your average
| frequent flyer.
| petesergeant wrote:
| In my experience Hilton, Bonvoy-affiliated, Sofitel, etc
| give better prices when a member and when you book directly
| than via any other channel
| LastNevadan wrote:
| Yes, that's part of their strategy.
|
| 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.
| brabel wrote:
| 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).
| e4e5 wrote:
| I like Google travel a lot to find hotels and then I book
| directly. It's the best for cities because of how integrated with
| maps it is and since Google doesn't sell me anything, I don't
| have to be as weary of these dark patterns.
| wiredfool wrote:
| You know google is selling you hotel bookings?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Is there a place to book/research hotels that isn't?
| slater wrote:
| 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!"
| seattle_spring wrote:
| 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.
| narcraft wrote:
| I think that's the intended joke
| seattle_spring wrote:
| Whooshed me good.
| slater wrote:
| ;)
| jononomo wrote:
| I finally moved all my domains away from GoDaddy for similar
| reasons -- just using the site stressed me out.
| PresidentObama wrote:
| From the last time booking.com was discussed I picked up some
| ublock origin filters that make the website more bearable.
|
| You can copy and paste them directly in your ublock config
| (ublock options -> My filters) !
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21860328
| booking.com##.soldout_property
| booking.com##.sr_rooms_left_wrap.only_x_left
| booking.com##.lastbooking booking.com##.sr--x-times-booked
| booking.com##.in-high-demand-not-scarce
| booking.com##.top_scarcity booking.com##.hp-rt-just-booked
| booking.com##.cheapest_banner_content > * booking.com##.hp-
| social_proof booking.com##.fe_banner__red.fe_banner__w-
| icon.fe_banner__scale_small.fe_banner
| booking.com##.urgency_message_x_people.urgency_message_red
| booking.com##.rackrate
| booking.com##.urgency_message_red.altHotels_most_recent_booking
| booking.com##.fe_banner__w-icon-large.fe_banner__w-icon.fe_banner
| booking.com##.smaller-low-av-msg_wrapper
| booking.com##.small_warning.wxp-sr-banner.js-wxp-sr-banner
| booking.com##.lock-price-banner--no-button.lock-price-banner.bui-
| u-bleed\@small.bui-alert--large.bui-alert--success.bui-alert
|
| Apart from these, I use some additional ublock filters to block
| some of their tracking that I am not ok with. $re
| moveparam=/^(error_url|ac_suggestion_theme_list_length|ac_suggest
| ion_list_length|search_pageview_id|ac_click_type|ac_langcode|ac_p
| osition|ss_raw|from_sf|is_ski_area|src|sb_lp|sb|search_selected|s
| rpvid|click_from_logo|ss|ssne|ssne_untouched|b_h4u_keep_filters|a
| id|label|all_sr_blocks|highlighted_blocks|ucfs|arphpl|hpos|hapos|
| matching_block_id|from|tpi_r|sr_order|srepoch|sr_pri_blocks|atlas
| _src|place_types)/,domain=booking.com
| $removeparam=/sid=.\*;BBOX/,domain=booking.com
| ||www.booking.com/c360/v1/track
| ||www.booking.com/fl/exposed
| ||booking.com/personalisationinfra/track_behaviour_property
| ||booking.com/has_seen_review_list
|
| Note that these may result in you receiving some higher prices by
| removing some referrer info. If you do see that happening, feel
| free to remove the offending config if the price difference is
| significant for you. I usually don't bother for differences of <
| $10 (price displayed on the search page vs the property page).
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Could someone explain a bit how this works?
| 867-5309 wrote:
| what about _.js_sr_persuation_msg_ from tfa?
| oriettaxx wrote:
| super! thank you so much!
| non- wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookingcom-de-
| stre...
| djha-skin wrote:
| 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?
| listenallyall wrote:
| > It's not like booking.com has a monopoly
|
| 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.
| aflag wrote:
| 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.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > 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.
| darkstar_16 wrote:
| 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.
| rdiddly wrote:
| 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.
| joe5150 wrote:
| 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.
| rdiddly wrote:
| 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.
| frereubu wrote:
| 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 PS30 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.
| trollied wrote:
| That's so messed up. I'd probably report their dark pattern
| crap to the advertising standards agency. They don't like that
| sort of thing.
| bartvk wrote:
| > 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.
| systemtest wrote:
| 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.
| whizzter wrote:
| 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.
| leephillips wrote:
| Why ashamed? I don't see anything wrong with this.
| frereubu wrote:
| 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.
| badpun wrote:
| 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.
| Bellamy wrote:
| That's because the terms of use of bookings.com insist that
| you can't offer a price lower than on booking.com.
|
| 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...
| toyg wrote:
| 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).
| pdntspa wrote:
| 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.
| expertentipp wrote:
| > websites needs to have very bad things done to them
|
| Make them feel anxious and on their toes about something that
| is important for them. Exactly like the dark patterns they
| create.
| temp_praneshp wrote:
| > Manipulative money men are the bane of tech.
|
| Closely followed by engineers who happily implement this kind
| of shit (unless you included them already)
| hodgesrm wrote:
| 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.
|
| Opinions?
| netsharc wrote:
| 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.
| asnyder wrote:
| 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.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| 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.)
|
| [0] https://www.booking.com/content/terms.html#nov2021_terms_
| all...
| philsnow wrote:
| This extension is ~roughly the same as a user style sheet.
| pachico wrote:
| Unfortunately, this is the result of years of AB tests that prove
| that urgency messages increase conversion.
|
| They don't stress customers just for the sake of having a less
| pleasant experience.
|
| I work in the online accomodation business, BTW.
| executesorder66 wrote:
| 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.
|
| I work with the local gangs in my area, BTW.
| pachico wrote:
| This is terribly demagogic
| toyg wrote:
| 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!"
| wpietri wrote:
| It's not the fault of the tests. It's the fault of the people
| who choose value short-term conversion metrics over everything
| else.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| These practices are illegal and they have been fined for it
| before.
| mahmoudhossam wrote:
| illegal where exactly?
| jbverschoor wrote:
| In the EU / the Netherlands. They used to provide false
| information about the availability.
|
| They changed it to "on our site" in 2020.
|
| Same applies for airlines
| easywood wrote:
| In several European countries, that's really not hard to find
| online: https://www.reuters.com/article/booking-hldg-hungary-
| idINL5N... https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-privacy-
| watchdog-fines...
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Can we have an extension that calls them and tells them my entire
| family is booking rooms individually with the hotel direct, and
| there are now only 3 people left who will buy through booking.com
| site, so hurry and offer us an extra discount.
| j1elo wrote:
| 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?
| artemavv wrote:
| This is brilliant! I was irritated by Booking.com nudges for a
| long time but I thought nothing could be done about it.
|
| Now I want to build a similar extension. Leave a reply there if
| you know some site that badly needs de-stressing.
| kapitanjakc wrote:
| agoda.com
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| 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.
| mdale wrote:
| 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.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 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.
| wjnc wrote:
| 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 kEUR 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.
|
| [1] https://www.consuwijzer.nl/doe-uw-melding-bij-acm-
| consuwijze...
| Quarrel wrote:
| In the UK at least, they've tried.
|
| https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/online-hotel-booking
|
| Booking.com, amongst others, gave enforceable undertakings
| that they'd change their practices.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| 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
| jvans wrote:
| 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.
| listenallyall wrote:
| 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.
| RussianCow wrote:
| 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.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| 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).
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I also had great results just walking up to the reception
| desk and booking there. Some deals are too good to be put
| online.
| wbobeirne wrote:
| 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.
|
| 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
| digitalengineer wrote:
| "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.
| wbobeirne wrote:
| 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.
| andix wrote:
| 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 ;)
| shswkna wrote:
| 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.
| schneems wrote:
| 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.
| patneedham wrote:
| But did you still use booking.com for that other European
| city trip, or another platform?
| marcinzm wrote:
| 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.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| Why? The tactics burn themselves out.
| dyno12345 wrote:
| see also: facebook
| wpietri wrote:
| 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.
| lylejantzi3rd wrote:
| 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.
| eropple wrote:
| _> 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.
| hectormalot wrote:
| 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.
| grogenaut wrote:
| 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.
| MarkSweep wrote:
| 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.
| rdca wrote:
| 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.
| dotancohen wrote:
| 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.
| bootsmann wrote:
| 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.
| smachiz wrote:
| isn't that why it's good? You can't control infinite
| variables, the only ones here are A/B and you're keeping
| a subset of them as a control group?
| dotancohen wrote:
| I suppose that is a way of looking at it.
| HPsquared wrote:
| "Seeing like a State" in action.
| projectazorian wrote:
| 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.
| lylejantzi3rd wrote:
| > 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.
|
| And how do you know the short term changes will degrade
| the brand and the user experience?
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Maybe deep down, users love dark patterns! Our judgement
| is powerless to determine; only the objective data can
| tell us!
| chefandy wrote:
| In my experience founders are often more than happy to
| toe the line between nudges and shoves.
| chambers wrote:
| DHH, founder of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp, drew a line
| between core values and A/B testing
| https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-don-t-a-b-test-core-
| values-91b5...
|
| > 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.
| SilasX wrote:
| >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]."
|
| Then why were they testing it, if they already knew other
| concerns would veto that alternative?
| [deleted]
| canadianfella wrote:
| [dead]
| antman wrote:
| 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.
| jvans wrote:
| 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.
| chefandy wrote:
| 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.
| tspike wrote:
| 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.
| jiggywiggy wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| 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...
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Yup. Go now to booking.com and pick a remote roadside motel
| in Wyoming for a midweek stay sometime in March of 2024.
|
| And watch booking.com try to tell you that "19 people have
| booked this today" or some such bullshit.
| philjohn wrote:
| Part of the reason you should always have a long term holdout,
| so you can see how the win degrades over time, which with dark
| patterns, it can do.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| 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.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Booking.com is a de facto monopoly - break it up!
| oriettaxx wrote:
| Turkey banned booking.com for this reason, and while in turkey
| booking.com tells you: you cannot book from this country (so
| you need a VPN)
|
| Then I know in Greece the booking.com commission is about
| 20%.... which is a lot! In Argentina it was (5 years ago) much
| lower due to availability of several other platform, so yes
| being the only provider is not a good thing
|
| Btw I love booking.com: I still remember the scams in Venice
| until the internet popped up with reviews, and I really
| appreciate platform that helps who works very good: I met
| owners that told me: "yes, it costs, but I get customers as
| soon as I provide a great service"
|
| I dislike airbnb as other have written: poor customers service
| when you tell them a host try to scam.
| _nalply wrote:
| I booked on booking.com 2016 and now again. I feel booking.com
| reduced their dark patterns. After 2016 I said to myself, never
| again, and 2023 I said to myself, let's have a look, and it is
| better.
|
| This said, I try to take the approach of an eagle. Browse
| leisurely and then shoot down to the prey. Ignore pretty things
| blinking and focus solely on what you need.
| SergeAx wrote:
| I am a many years Booking.Com user, but since about 4 years I
| stick to this pattern: look up hotel on Booking, then go to
| hotel's website, register account there and get a member rate or
| privilege. In exchange they will at worst send me some email
| marketing once, which is easy to unsubscribe.
|
| In larger networks I also getting some bonus points, but the main
| benefit of being a direct and even registered customer is an
| attitude of hotel. Most of the time it is better room or even
| upgrade, or just an available ear for requests or complains.
|
| The reason of that is a visible disloyalty and even dishonesty of
| Booking.Com site and app towards me. I am just not in the mood to
| de bullied and dark patterned by a search engine.
| aeonflux wrote:
| Despite their shady practices I still only book through
| Booking.com when I to unknown places for the firs time. At the
| end of the day Booking sticks to customers when theres an issue
| and all the Venues/Hotels seem to care about their relation
| with Booking.
| tims33 wrote:
| a/b testing obviously drives these kinds of site designs. The
| business leaders get what they want, but eventually these
| over-a/b tested products open themselves to disruption.
|
| I also think its funny when people accuse these companies of
| being immoral, but I think a/b testing is creating these bizarre
| amoral companies. And once they get lost they seem really lost.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| The sorting orders are the most weird (but still way better than
| Airbnb where you control nothing and are doomed to scroll an
| infinite list). For example, teh sort order I use most often is
| to sort by price, but I need to start from the most expensive
| offers as I'm looking for (the pretenders to the) best places in
| a given area. Unfortunately, Booking.com allows to sort by price
| in one direction only, so I have to start from the end and from
| the bottom of each page. Weird but easy to solve.
|
| But what I hate is that they won't let me sort by rating! Why do
| they include ratings, though? They present several weird options
| I'd never use as they are optimized to land me with a place I
| don't want. I just want to sort by rating - and let me decide if
| the number of ratings received makes it trustworthy.
| lozenge wrote:
| Those ratings are fake anyway. You can score it a 1 (actually
| the lowest option is 2.5) due to nearby noise making it
| impossible to sleep. But they'll also ask you to rate the
| cleanliness, service, and location(??) and suddenly your
| terrible stay is a 6.0 rating.
|
| https://ro-che.info/articles/2017-09-17-booking-com-manipula...
| splonk wrote:
| I rant about the 2.5-10 scale on every Booking thread. It's
| not totally fake but it's very deceptive.
|
| When I had access to a large amount of rating data, the
| median rating on Booking was 8.1. If you can filter for
| business travelers (not sure if the UI allows this, but the
| data might still be in the page), that drops down to mid 7s.
| jansommer wrote:
| 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.)
| meltedcapacitor wrote:
| 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.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| You don't need to be from the "dev caste" to install an ad
| blocker or the Booking.com De-Stresser extension described in
| the post.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Some of these patterns are now illegal.
|
| https://techpulse.be/nieuws/268825/booking-com-mag-klanten-m...
| ape4 wrote:
| These persuasion messages seem untrue - which makes me not trust
| other parts of the website.
| agluszak wrote:
| In my company we use TravelPerk for booking business trip related
| flights, train tickets and hotel stays. I was shocked by how much
| more user-friendly it was than Booking.com or any other similar
| website. Unfortunately, afaik TP is available only for business
| clients, not individual customers.
|
| Disclaimer: That's not really a praise of TP, because I think
| that every website should be FORCED to have that level of
| usability (EU, please save us). User-hostile design should be
| banned.
| paws wrote:
| Not sure if this is common knowledge, but I learned booking.com
| does not necessarily integrate with hotel backends in the way you
| might expect given their name. Turns out they (at least
| sometimes?) just lie to you in the UI.
|
| I know that because my dad used booking.com last year, but when
| he presented the booking.com printout at the front desk - 'Sorry
| sir, we can't recognize that.' He wasn't late or anything. Pretty
| sure he prepaid too. Total nightmare - you had one job,
| booking.com, GTFO.
|
| Personally given the blatant deception, plus the way they took
| UK/Netherlands pandemic money and laid workers off anyway [1][2]
| I don't think I'll ever use it. Also, Barry Diller thinks working
| from home is a crock [3]. I'll take my business elsewhere, GL
| with that Barry.
|
| [1] https://hospitality-on.com/en/concept/booking-holdings-
| repor...
|
| [2] https://skift.com/2022/02/11/booking-com-to-
| eliminate-2700-c...
|
| [3] https://viewfromthewing.com/expedia-boss-trashes-his-
| employe...
| splonk wrote:
| This is more likely to be the hotel's fault than Booking's.
| You'd likely have the same issue with any third party
| aggregator. Many hotels (much like airlines) regularly overbook
| as a business decision, and third parties don't really have any
| visibility into this kind of thing. It's less likely (but not
| impossible) for this to happen to you if you book direct, and
| it's helpful to inform the hotel if you're going to be arriving
| late.
|
| Plenty of reasons to dislike Booking, but this particular one
| is more of a systematic issue.
| pingec wrote:
| Carlton City Hotel Singapore, I arrived there in the middle of
| the night with a printout from booking.com of my (already-paid-
| for) reservation.
|
| The staff said they don't have my reservation, told them to
| check booking.com, they replied they do not have access to
| booking.com, a third party manages that for them which was
| unavailable at night. In that moment I realized I was putting
| way too much trust in that website. I was able to pay for a new
| reservation and later got the booking.com payment refunded.
| Luckily the hotel was not fully booked...
| usr1106 wrote:
| > they replied they do not have access to booking.com, a
| third party manages that for them which was unavailable at
| night.
|
| I guess that's primarily the hotel's fault. They should not
| give rooms to weird third parties. But with the market shares
| of the big booking sites that would cause them significant
| loss of bookings.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Yes, I am also surprised about the original author
| characterizing any message as helpful. I am pretty sure the "x
| rooms left" and similar messages can never be really trusted.
|
| First of all hotels juggle between portals and selling locally.
| So they don't give all their rooms to a single portal and wait
| until they are sold. They add a couple of rooms to every portal
| and more once they are sold out. It has also happened to me
| (with booking.com) that a hotel had overbooked. Probably not
| intentionally, but they made a mistake in their juggling. Not a
| problem for me, they sent me to a more expensive room in a
| hotel 3 minutes away. So the numbers on booking.com cannot be
| reliable even without their direct fault.
|
| Additionally I have the strong feeling booking.com are crooks.
| I would not trust their numbers and messages even if they got
| perfect information from the hotels. I have no proof for that,
| but unethical practices reported above and the questionable
| work conditions you hear about them seem to be in line with my
| suspicion.
| newhotelowner wrote:
| We (hotel owners/employees) hate booking dot com and their
| guests.
|
| Remember that if you book with booking dot com, you are their
| guest. Not ours.
|
| ---
|
| At the end of the month, hotel has 6 days to reconicle all the
| reservations. If we miss it they will charge us commission for
| the guest who did no shows, cancelled or CC declined. You can
| only dispute that twice.
|
| They made UI so bad. If the guest card fails, marking CC
| invalid is not enough. They will still charge us commission. We
| also have to mark that we are charging 0 for no shows.
|
| 75% of the our no-shows are booking dot com guest.
|
| Booking dot com guest are the worst too. They pay 2 star rate,
| and expect 5 star hotel service.
| epups wrote:
| Genuinely curious, if that's the case, why do you keep using
| it then? Is it simply that too many customers come through it
| and you have no choice?
| telesilla wrote:
| It's the best aggregator out at the moment. I call hotels
| before booking and ask for the same rate or similar perk.
| Most are happy to oblige and avoid booking.com fees.
| manojlds wrote:
| "Booking dot com and customers too bad but I still allow them
| out of generosity of my heart."
| ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote:
| Do you feel that way about all the aggregators (and their
| guests) or is Booking.com especially bad?
|
| Just curious - I used Expedia recently to book a hotel/car
| package for a much better rate than I was able to get
| anywhere else, and it all worked out. I did feel like I was
| put in a pretty unimpressive room though. Not sure if the
| hotel was just a bit less nice than I expected or if the
| hotel figured "let's put the cheapo from Expedia in the
| shabbiest room".
| returningfory2 wrote:
| This looks awesome!
|
| 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!
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| 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.
| netsharc wrote:
| "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"!
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Plot twist, they're referring to room #1, which is the last one
| ti be rented out.
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