3 ms·
No this is ridiculously far from the truth. They make an awfull lot of money selling actual room nights (think Google-scale a lot, per employee, although the m
by rixed 9y ago
No this is ridiculously far from the truth.
They make an awfull lot of money selling actual room nights (think Google-scale a lot, per employee, although the money culture in both firms are opposite to each other), and actually do cancel bookings and even sometime refund non cancelable ones.
They are definitively harsh on the business side, especially when negotiating commissions with hotels, especially since it's always easy to justify ("that's for our users"). But this is not a scam.
You might have had a bad experience. No amount of money spent on customer care will ever balance out a big firm being 100% money driven as opposed to reputation driven, and fundamentally not caring for an individual user. So yes when you are that one user who felt through the cracks it feels bad indeed.
- dyu- 9y ago```No this is ridiculously far from the truth.``` Easy to say for someone who haven't experienced their deception first hand. GP is correct. That is part of their scheme to extract more revenue.
- raverbashing 9y agoI had zero issues cancelling bookings that were free to cancel (within a time limit - usually 24h before the arrival date). But some aren't and are explicitly marked as such
- rixed 9y agoI had actually. Once, because of their website insisting on showing dates for which there are availabilities, I ended up booking for the wrong days, something that I could not cancel. At the time I though I made the mistake so didn't complain. Only later did I realize that's how the website works (they force a date in the web session because it converts better). Had I given them a call at the time, chances are that they would have refund me, but this also I learnt only later. I've also been "stolen" a car booking on rentalcars once, another company belonging to Priceline. I'm not as familiar with rentalcars as I am with booking so can't be as confident but even in that case I doubt the business plan is based on such erroneous bookings. For sure, the incentive to fight fraud they are victim of is bigger than the incentive to fix the UX dark patterns that are causing the erroneous bookings and eventually bring them some extra profit. Also, let's not forget that companies abusing dark patterns or being slow to fix "bugs" when they convert well, are not merely soulless organisations driven by profit. They are made of teams driven by OKRs, which are made of individuals driven by their desire to fit in the culture (or their perception of it).