38 ms·

How Booking.com manipulates users

583 points by bogomipz 9y ago

warrenm 9y ago
IOW - how more or less every e-commerce (especially aggregation services) site tries to get you to spend your money there
- bogomipz 9y ago
  Using Amazon as an example of an e-commerce company - when buying an item on Amazon neither the gaming of ratings and reviews or the annoying and manufactured "sense of urgency" as stated in the post, seem to be part of the experience. The booking.com experience feels like doing business with a sleazy used car salesman.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
    Yes, Amazon may get flak for other reasons but I have found the experience of shopping on them to be very clean and pleasant. To be clear, I am talking about the experience of finding a product and proceeding to checkout and payment, not about any potential issues about fake products and such.
    - bogomipz 9y ago
      Agreed, that's pretty much what I meant. Although even the few times when I received questionable products the issue was resolved pretty quickly and painlessly with either the merchant or Amazon.com Contrast that with booking.com where all communications between you and the merchant(hotel) have to filter through booking.com and take 24 hours at a minimum to get a response.
- tyingq 9y ago
  Booking.com is, though, more aggressive than their peers. More in the same category as event ticket sellers. Lots of "not quite lies" in the interface to generate false urgency where none actually exists. Like showing you how many other people "looked at this property", but not saying the timeframe...in the last hour? Day? Week? The idea is to close the deal because you think someone else will snap it up. They are also crazy arrogant and condescending if you ever have to deal with them as a partner.
edejong 9y ago
This is what A/B testing does to a popular site. You test for immediate customer engagement but cannot (easily) test long-term customer loyalty. This is why booking.com has become the largest online hotel booking site in several continents. Nevertheless, I think it will eventually be their downfall.
- sturgill 9y ago
  "Frankly, I don’t think I am going to stop using Booking.com. I am not aware of any other service with a comparable number of properties and reviews." It's hard to quantify negative impact of future dealings, but it's even harder to say Booking.com should change their methods when the people aware enough to be annoyed continue to give them money. It's like complaining about Google following you around the web and using GMail. Either the alternatives just aren't good enough or the negative externalities not severe enough to change consumer behavior. Either of those considerations could change, but until they do it's hard to argue Booking.com should reduce current earnings. Not when people who book a room above a bar that plays music into the early morning blame themselves for not reading the fine print...
  - johansch 9y ago
    A suggestion for people who are upset with this behavior: Use Booking.com (and Google, Expedia, etc) as a showroom, after you have found a certain hotel, find their web site or phone and arrange a booking directly.
    - zpr 9y ago
      Sometimes the direct prices are actually more. Your best bet for sticking it to them might be to use an alternative booking service.
      - johansch 9y ago
        Perhaps calling the hotel to ask if they'll match the online price will work?
hw 9y ago
I've always wondered if some of these tactics are kosher and legal. Especially the ones that say 'someone just booked this' or the notifications on ecommerce sites that say 'X bought this in the last hour'. Most of the ecommerce ones are just fake data meant to entice the shopper into buying into urgency.
- tyingq 9y ago
  There's probably a case for it being illegal, but the US laws are fairly high level and vague. So, you have to catch someone's attention to get the FTC after you. They tend to go on industry specific hunts once public opinion goes a certain direction. Happened with diet pills, cryptocoin hardware, airlines not showing all in costs, etc. Booking.com will probably eventually get their turn in the barrel. Could be a while though.
- stephengillie 9y ago
  Some television commercials even have a pre-recorded countdown to create urgency.
  - tehwebguy 9y ago
    I think they get away with it by saying, "order in the next 15 minutes and you'll get this", but the truth is if you order after the next 15 minutes you also get it. They're not explicitly saying you won't get it if you don't order in the next 15 minutes, but they're implying it. Telebrands is the company that's been running that game for like forever. Pretty shady!
    - jorvi 9y ago
      That's a tactic used across many industries. There is a Dutch insurance company (Promovendum) that actively advertises as 'the insurance company for the higher educated' (in NL this means college or university). It is illegal to discriminate on this, so they do in fact accept anyone, they just don't say so.
- troydavis 9y ago
tmulc18 9y ago
That's why you gotta use Expedia or Google
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
  Expedia does "n people booked this location" and "price of this flight expected to rise by x%" ALL the time.
  - goialoq 9y ago
    neither one of those is misleading or harmful if true.
- dawnerd 9y ago
  Pretty much all of Expedia owned sites do this too. Hard to avoid when Expedia/Priceline own most of them.
  - deleted 9y ago
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colmvp 9y ago
I noticed Udemy also manipulates users by saying that x course is 80-90% off but only for one more day!!!!... until you realize it's been that exact same price for weeks/months. I understand it's not new to have the retail price be higher than the 'sale' price (for example, clothes and furniture), but even at clearance outlets, the price difference while large is rarely as dramatic nor as prolonged.
- zodPod 9y ago
  Udemy is also huge for having a "One time $10/$15 coupon!" that "expires in 3 days" and will immediately be replaced by another one. All you really have to do is google "Udemy coupon" to get any class on the site for $10 or $15 depending on what the current coupon is. This also works for the craft store chain Michael's but to a lesser extent. They almost ALWAYS have a 40-50% off coupon in their weekly ad. So if you find something that you want but it's expensive, you can usually get it for half off. It's pretty awesome!
  - sturgill 9y ago
    Hi/Lo pricing is great that way. Harbor Freight always sends 20% off coupons. It's a wonderful technique for running price discrimination. The frequency of running offers, and which offers to run, are just business details that can be tested and optimized. Some firms are a lot better at it than others. But at its core it's not fundamentally different than coupon mailers or rebate offers. If you ever buy furniture for sticker price you're doing something wrong...
    - deleted 9y ago
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  - vijayr 9y ago
    Not saying this is a nice thing to do, but they do it because it works, no? Didn't someone (JC Penny?) try getting rid of this constant "on sale/coupon" crap but that had a negative effect on their business? If something is constantly "70% off" (especially non digital goods and services), shouldn't consumers stop for a second and think how this makes sense?
smtpserver 9y ago
Review scores are also a bit offset. I have tried to give the absolute lowest to every metric booking.com gave me to rate and the resulting score was 2.5-ish. I was thinking about making a browser extension that rescales the values accordingly but I just made a mental note that a score 7 hotel is in fact a score 6. With this scaling the scores on the lower end gain more as a 3.3 score becomes a 5. Take this into account if you opt for the lower-middle end.
- johansch 9y ago
  What the.. That, unlike all of those dark UX patterns they are masters of, actually seems deeply deceptive and potentially illegal, depending on your locale. If this is true they have stepped across a line.
- SilasX 9y ago
  I remember a similar thing with Zocdoc. Something like, the appointment was on time (5/5), but my experience was horrible (1/5), so my review "averages to 2.5". Reminds me of the thing about "it either will happen, or it won't, so that's a 50/50 chance".
- dpwm 9y ago
  Thank you for highlighting this. I used booking.com a few years back when I stayed in London on a budget. I realised something about the site had made the review scores feel really useless but I never realised why until I read your comment. In the end I just compared on worst reviews until I found a hotel where the bad reviews were about really unimportant things to me. The hotel I stayed in actually had one of the lowest review scores of all the ones I had considered but the lowest-scored reviews described an experience I could enjoy far more than the worst experiences at comparable hotels.
- KGIII 9y ago
  Notably, many review sites don't let you score a zero. This will make the resulting number higher and many people are pretty bad at math. They see that it averages a 4 rating and think it can't be that bad, but it's because nobody could rate it a zero. On the plus side, I learned a new phrase from HN today. I now know what 'dark pattern' means.
jasonrhaas 9y ago
viagogo.com is a great example of user manipulation. They take what booking.com has done and 10x it. I've bought tickets on there (and got ripped off because they told me the wrong pickup location), and its a total shit show. They make it seem like there are all these real time updates going on, and really pushing you to BUY NOW, but I'm pretty sure its all a scam to urge you to buy as quickly as possible.
Osmium 9y ago
To anyone from Booking.com reading this: I'll go elsewhere next time I need to book a room. Dark patterns may help profits in the short-term, but they're terrible for your brand. Just ask TicketMaster. It isn't just tech-savvy users that will catch on to this either. If an everyday user uses Booking.com, reads reviews and thinks their room will be great, but then has a bad experience, they're going to stop trusting Booking.com's reviews, and stop trusting their brand. It will only take a few bad experiences to go elsewhere.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
  Unfortunately for us (and fortunately for TicketMaster), there usually is no alternative to them. That doesn't hold true for Booking.com
  - hervature 9y ago
    Do people not Google for alternatives? I can think of at least 5 competitors to Ticket Master. There's even one that only charges 5% seller fee and no buyer fee.
    - zavulon 9y ago
      For most events (at least in the US), you can only get tickets via TicketMaster. Venues sign an agreement with TM that forbids them selling tickets elsewhere. TM controls venue's entire ticket sale workflow, including inventory, printing and sending tickets, etc. Going with another vendor is a gigantic undertaking, you would need to overhaul most of your processes. Most venues don't have the resources/bandwidth to pull that off. And that's how TM stays a monopoly. Source: used to work for a large venue.
      - bogomipz 9y ago
        Sure and it's the same on the artist side. If you want to tour you can not avoid Ticketmaster. Remember Perl Jam at the height of their popularity and powers tried to take them on and lost: http://ultimateclassicrock.com/pearl-jam-sues-ticketmaster/ http://ultimateclassicrock.com/pearl-jam-sues-ticketmaster/
aembleton 9y ago
I just block a lot of this booking.com noise with uBlock. These are my filters so far: www.booking.com##.sr_rooms_left_wrap.only_x_left www.booking.com##.sr-booked-x-times.clearfix.lbsr www.booking.com##.soldout_property
- bdemirkir 9y ago
  Here's a little bit more: www.booking.com##.soldout_property www.booking.com##.sr_rooms_left_wrap.only_x_left www.booking.com##.lastbooking www.booking.com##.sr--x-times-booked www.booking.com##.in-high-demand-not-scarce www.booking.com##.top_scarcity www.booking.com##.hp-rt-just-booked www.booking.com##.cheapest_banner_content > * www.booking.com##.hp-social_proof www.booking.com##.fe_banner__red.fe_banner__w-icon.fe_banner__scale_small.fe_banner www.booking.com##.urgency_message_x_people.urgency_message_red www.booking.com##.rackrate www.booking.com##.urgency_message_red.altHotels_most_recent_booking www.booking.com##.fe_banner__w-icon-large.fe_banner__w-icon.fe_banner www.booking.com##.smaller-low-av-msg_wrapper www.booking.com##.small_warning.wxp-sr-banner.js-wxp-sr-banner
SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
This and the recent Ticketmaster expose make me wonder: is it possible to objectively identify dark UI patterns like this via a browser extension? Usually I can try to see through them, but something that flags stuff like this with a non-obtrusive warning would be nice to add to the list of extensions I automatically throw on new installs for family members (that list currently includes PrivacyBadger and uBlock Origin)
- arkitaip 9y ago
  There are a couple of safety and privacy browser plugins, e.g. WOT, that could crowd source this data gathering from their users who already help id scummy sites.
- bogomipz 9y ago
  What was the Ticketmaster expose? Not that I would be the least surprised by any kind of scandal from those thugs but I haven't heard anything recently.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
    There was a HN thread that was linked to an article about it a month or so ago, but I can't find it now. You can also check out the top comments on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13312629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13312629 The time ticker "feature" is what was referenced in the other HN article from a month ago.
drstewart 9y ago
Airbnb does this too. No matter where or when you search for, you'll see a notification saying something like: "Only 13% of listings are left for these dates. We recommend booking a place soon." As a random example, apparently Kamloops, BC is filling up fast for Dec 3-6 (midweek in the middle of winter). And so is Flint, MI on Feb 19th, a Tuesday.
- gnicholas 9y ago
  Strangely, Airbnb has another problem that is the exact opposite. My wife started to book a unit, got to a point where it said she had 9 hours left to complete the booking, and then someone else booked it first. She was so angry because it seemed to clearly indicate that she had X time left to complete the booking. She messaged the host again to find out what happened; apparently this can only occur when instant booking is available (and the host cannot deny another potential guest in order to keep days open for a pending guest). Having seen dark patterns described/decried on HN, I thought it was funny that Airbnb apparently has accidentally-light patterns.
- tsycho 9y ago
  My biggest problem with Airbnb is opaque pricing at the search page. They will claim a room is say $250/night, but after fees, taxes and cleaning charges, it might be $400/night. Cleaning charges in particular can vary widely. Even though Airbnb knows the exact travel dates and hence the exact amount, they still choose to show the lower daily price rather than the actual. I consider this a dark pattern too.
  - 4ad 9y ago
    Yeah. Just like in the US they don't show taxes (which vary!) on products in retail shops. It's obnoxious, and I don't understand how this is legal, even in the US.
    - Frank2312 9y ago
      The difference here is that you can easily calculate taxes based on the price you can see since taxes don't vary in the same state/province (because this also applies to Canada...). On Airbnb, it's up to the property owner to decide cleaning fees and such, and there isn't any rule about what that includes (that I know of).
bkohlmann 9y ago
One of the most useful business school classes I took was entitled "Consumer Behavior" which was a deep dive into behavioral psychology and all the techniques used by marketers / websites to grab our attention. Booking.com rather overtly hits on all the techniques we discussed in detail. I used to think these techniques were "dirty." But humanity evolved to be responsive to this type of manipulation. It seems the web has accelerated this process with the ability to A/B test on a massive scale. All the big websites exploit cognitive biases to drive engagement - facebook, google, twitter, instagram, netflix, youtube. This is one of the reasons I'm convinced knowledge of behavioral economics is one of the most critical pieces of knowledge to have in the early 21st century - not only can you use it to drive engagement on your own platforms, but you can learn what tell-tales you are biased to react to, and resist accordingly.
- arkitaip 9y ago
  Not sure I understand your logic. Are you saying that these tactics aren't "dirty" because as human beings we are very susceptible to them? One would argue they are unethical precisely because of this. Or do you mean it's ok because everyone else does it?
  - nonsequ 9y ago
    Well he’s calling for more education and awareness. It’s like Big Food. The entire CPG industry has been stuffing people with sugar, salt, and fat for decades, exploiting human nature. We are finally seeing society resist this as we have become educated about the dangers of sugar and salt consumption. Meantime, putting ethics aside, all the major food and beverage companies made hay for a long time until recently. What is ethical and what is money-making can be at odds for a long time before they converge (if ever).
  - bkohlmann 9y ago
    As someone who stove to be "rational" in everything I did, and dismissed the power of emotions in human decision making, coming face to face with the effectiveness of persuasion made me realize that winning friends and influencing people was about speaking a language that resonated with actual humans. The way people behave and respond has been studied for generations - and the best salespeople in all realms either intuitively or deliberately have discovered what makes people lean one way or another. It's a huge mistake to dismiss the biases that define us, but rather we should embrace and understand their impact.
toomanybeersies 9y ago
Briscoes (a homeware shop in New Zealand http://www.briscoes.co.nz/ http://www.briscoes.co.nz/), does this. Just looking at their website today, everything in store is 30-60% off sticker price. Seems great, until you realise that literally almost every day, they have a similar sale. There's always massive discounts for something in store. I have literally never paid full price, or anything close to it.
feelin_googley 9y ago
What if the manpulation was easily avoidable? The last time this website came up on HN (same issue), I conducted an experiment. The annoyances and manipulation described by the blogger sounded like it relied on Javascript and graphics. I wanted to see how far I could get without using a graphical browser. I was able to 1. search hotels, 2. return a list of properties in CSV/JSON/TXT, 3. return prices and 4. book. It required only a shell script of 107 lines, 308 characters, 2934 bytes. This could be further reduced. I used only a command line http client, sed and tmux send-key (optional). Further optional: Fully customized HTTP headers, including randomized User-Agent if desired. I had to store a session cookie for getting price or booking but no cookies were required for searching. I used no Javascript. I was able to eliminate all the annoyances and manipulation cited by the blogger. Conclusion: At least for booking.com all these annoyances can easily be avoided by choosing the right browser. (I did occasionally see the "Only ___ rooms left" message as this is returned in plain text. I did not however see the number change over repeated searches for the same hotel. In any event, I just deleted that line in the output, assuming it is untruthful.)
- xcasperx 9y ago
  Can you post your code?
- taytus 9y ago
  >It required only a shell script of 107 lines, 308 characters, 2934 bytes. This could be further reduced. Yeah, totally common for average people to do this.
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- emrekzd 9y ago
  > all these annoyances can easily be avoided by choosing the right browser. The right browser == non-graphical browser. Good joke. You can achieve the same by installing a simple browser extension for managing cookies & randomizing browser footprint. Firefox has some.
deleted 9y ago
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TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
On the subject of fake reviews, I've recently started using Fakespot [0] with Amazon and Yelp. Sometimes making a decision for which goods to buy can be tricky, so it's really helpful to filter out a few shady options. Although, honestly, I don't think it makes much difference in most cases. Are there any trusted review services for travel locations? Something like Consumer Report, but for travel. Although I don't know where their quality levels stand nowadays, I know my parents used to swear by em 10 to 20 years ago. [0] https://www.fakespot.com https://www.fakespot.com
- phil248 9y ago
  I use TripAdvisor and Google Maps. I don't know how people feel about their reputations, and I worry about TripAdvisor because they are pivoting more towards being like Booking.com. But when I was in Havana, we wandered in to a string of terrible bars, cafes and restaurants over the first couple days. So we went to a hotspot and downloaded the offline TripAdvisor. We wouldn't go to a place unless TripAdvisor gave it a decent rating. After that, we had nothing but great experiences.
  - codermobile 9y ago
    I completely agree. I plan my full trip with TripAdvisor. I only had minor problems. Also, those restaurants and hotels do care about their reputation so you get a better service
- bogomipz 9y ago
  On Amazon I usually just make sure they are a verified purchaser of the product before considering a review. Does Fakepost offer something beyond that for Amazon? Yelp I understand though as I don't think there is anything like a "verified diner."
  - TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
    It helps filter down the initial list of items you evaluate. For example, you might see two items with 1000 reviews and similar scores, but one of the items might have an inflated score due to review farming.
dawnerd 9y ago
I've just been booking directly from hotels I trust because of this. Used to use hotels.com but they've gotten really bad recently. Can costs a bit more from the hotel but most of the time price is on par. End up getting more room upgrades when booking directly anyways - at least with hilton.
- nlh 9y ago
  Me too -- this is a very important point. Often the hotel's direct rate will be the same as advertised on hotels.com. Of course you lose the ~10% rebate by not getting rewards points, but since the hotel is effectively earning 30% more from you, they're much more likely to give you a complimentary or discounted upgrade. So if that sort of thing matters to you, I can also strongly suggest booking direct. (Note: You do generally have to ask, but I've had good experiences. Do it on-site @ checkin, and I basically say the above -- "Hey I booked direct so you earned 30% more from me. Can you offer me an upgrade to an un-used room since I'm here now?")
- theak 9y ago
  My experience directly booking from hotel websites has been really bad. I usually end up using a service like Booking/Priceline/Kayak/Google, just because the UI is nicer than booking directly from hotels, even if it means having to deal with stuff like this.
- bogomipz 9y ago
  Agreed. A couple of months ago as an experiment, when I was quoted 100 Euros a night from booking.com for a modest hotel in a small town in Austria that I had stayed at previously for much less. I didn't make the booking through booking.com but walked over to the hotel when I get to town for an the spot booking and got the same room with breakfast included or 75 Euros a night.
kristianc 9y ago
Wow - the New Union. I live in Manchester and the place is literally right at the top end of one of Manchester's main clubbing districts (the gay village). "Lively and central" is an understatement. It has a ropey reputation locally as a pub, but you couldn't pay me to stay there. I can see why he's pissed. I will caveat that I've had some excellent experiences with Booking, but always with very careful cross-referencing with other sites.
beefsack 9y ago
Some airline ticket booking sites still track you and increase the ticket price on return visits, optimised to certain intervals. Many in the industry call it "dynamic pricing." It made the news a few years back[1] but you can still see it sometimes in a few different industries. You can get into arguments with people about whether marketing as a whole is an enterprise built on manipulation, but this is quite clearly manipulative. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2010/aug/07/computer-cookies-booking-online https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2010/aug/07/computer-...
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- isolli 9y ago
  It's interesting that Amazon tried this in its very first years, but had to give up due to customer backlash. I wonder why the practice survives in travel services.
quickben 9y ago
Wow, things got shady at booking.com since I last visited the site last year.
myoffe 9y ago
I absolutely loath Booking.com's UX. Whenever it's possible, I use something else, like HostelWorld. Their interface is clean, to the point, and the reviews and ratings can actually be trusted. I'm happy someone did this website. I just came back from a long trip and every time somebody asked me why I hate Booking.com, I pointed exactly to some of the points that were made there. The fake sense of urgency, the cluttered UI. And the cherry on top: The fact they display the "total cost of all nights" in the results, instead of the per-night cost. That's not a misleading UX, it's just a bad UX decision. But because of it's popularity amongst accommodation owners and travelers, its fall is unlikely.
- waf 9y ago
  > The fact they display the "total cost of all nights" in the results, instead of the per-night cost. That's not a misleading UX, it's just a bad UX decision. I prefer the total cost in the results, since that's what I'll ultimately pay. Why do you prefer per night? Doesn't that make you do the multiplication in your head?
  - lucaspiller 9y ago
    I agree it’s better to display the “total cost of stay” in the search results, however that isn’t what Booking.com displays. As OP said they display the “total cost of all nights” which excludes taxes and cleaning/service fees. A few weeks ago I stayed in an apartment in Austria which was €49 for one night, with a €45 cleaning fee... I thought that seemed a bit crazy (ok there were 7 of us, so still pretty good), but clicking through other results I saw all the properties in this area had similar fees. One had the same price per night and a €70 cleaning fee! I guess it’s a way to avoid taxes or such.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      45€ doesn't sound like much. For a complete apartment cleanup, including bed linen and etc, you need at least three or four hours, so that's around 11-15€/hour. Seems quite reasonable for Austria.
wyck 9y ago
The downsides of A/B testing. Unless of course you have confidence in your brand and decision making to not always trust users and the short term bottom line.
rgrieselhuber 9y ago
This post has some decent points about reviews and the fine print, but the rest comes off as a bit precious. I travel a lot and have used Booking.com to save myself quite a bit of money over the years. I still regularly compare their prices with other sites and they are pretty consistently cheaper than competing sites. The "hurry" parts of their site do induce a little anxiety but I tend to also appreciate the real time information so I know I get the room I want.
- lozenge 9y ago
  The real time information includes bookings made months away from your desired dates.
jen729w 9y ago
I just spent 3 weeks travelling the USA and we used Booking.com to see what was around. But then we went directly to the hotel's site to make the booking and you know what? Same price, if not slightly cheaper in some (not all) instances.
- aglavine 9y ago
  The hotel's site may well be a facade and you're still buying through booking.com
  - jen729w 9y ago
    Reference?
superasn 9y ago
They similarly totally lie about matching the lowest price. Had the misfortune of booking through them once, then I found the same hotel for a much lower price on another site (makemytrip) so I sent a screenshot to the support. After a day they outright DENIED to honor this "Lowest Price Guarantee" with some lame excuse. When I told them that I'll go to the small claims court I never heard back from them. Don't believe a word on this site.
- nradov 9y ago
  Did you pay for the room with a credit card charge to Booking.com? If so it would be easier to dispute part of the charge with your card issuer instead of going to small claims court.
  - superasn 9y ago
    Yes i did pay with a credit card. Unfortunately unlike US, disputing a cc charge here isn't that easy either. At that time the policy was to take a printout and then go to the bank and submit it there in person (same reason i never went to small claims court too). Seemed like too much hassle. I instead wowed to never book another hotel on their site (using agoda ever since) and telling friends and posting on forums (it was on the frontpage on reddit india for 1 day) about how they cheated me. I think that must have costed them more money than they cheated me out by not honoring their guarantee.
methodin 9y ago
I thought the service was great at first - no hassle reservations with easy cancellation. That is until they billed for me a hotel I never stayed at. Ended up having to go through Amex and chargeback the charge since I had clearly cancelled it months before. It's a shame.
djsumdog 9y ago
I thought about interviewing for them in Amsterdam. The recruiter put me in touch with one of their people and she explained to me everything was in Perl, there were little to no automated tests and developers often pushed straight to production. I said I had only worked in perl shops that were migrating from it to Scala or Python. She said, "Well we have no intention of moving." Like I say with all recruiters, I said I was interested. I thought about it and everything was a red flag. Sure I'd get to live in Amsterdam and stay in Europe with my girlfriend, but ... that sounds like the ultimate shit job. I'd have to endure that until I worked out whatever visa contract they'd have or find someone else to sponsor me with a non-shit job. So I just ignore the recruiter when he calls .. and ignore him .. and ignore him. Dude calls every fucking day for like four weeks straight; after I had already moved back to America. Most recruiters would take the hint after three failed calls. I can't imagine how desperate they must be. Then I heard from a former co-worker one of our other buddies, a Kiwi, had taken a job with them .. leaving NZ to go work there. He's still there ... hope it's not shit.
- ToxicCorgi 9y ago
  I saw new job postings from Booking quite frequently in 2013/14 when I was first applying for jobs in Europe. Figured they were growing very quickly and applied for a few but never got a reply from them. And reading this thread and your post today, I'm glad I didn't. I'd be interested to know how your buddy's doing there. Seems like they still post a lot on job websites, and their growth isn't exactly mindboggling, so it would seem they have really high turnover and/or trouble filling positions to begin with.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Did you ask about the tests and the deployment process? While the answers are certainly not good, I respect the recruiter for even knowing about it. Most I've talked to would have no idea.
- stingraycharles 9y ago
  This is true. It might make it a bit better knowing that they’re hiring a few of the top Perl people in the world (Yves, Rafael, Ævar), but indeed, everything is Perl. They’re managing to hire quite a lot of people, by the way, but the compensation is a lot higher than what’s normal in NL. With regards to their testing procedures, the way I understand it is that they’re focusing on mitigation using clever monitoring/automated rollbacks. They pride themselves in their data analytics abilities, and this is part of that. Source: live/work in Amsterdam and know many people that work/worked there.
quadrangle 9y ago
I can't imagine recognizing all that shit and then concluding with an expectation to keep using a service like that. Wow
uladzislau 9y ago
I don't get it why people complain all the time and still use it? Even their parent company Priceline UX is much better, then there's Expedia and other sites. I would never book anything on Booking because it's plain ugly and keeps design from 1998, even Craigslist looks modern in comparison. Their hiring and interview process, at least in product management - it looked like they are fishing for fresh ideas on what to A/B test on their website. All the talk was focused around it. Answering the questions they didn't give a single direct answer only extremely vague ones. Red flags all around.
erikb 9y ago
Being a little disillusioned about the world these days I would assume this has a purpose. My guess is this: Booking.com already knows that they are fighting a losing battle against AirBnB. So instead of trying to win it seriously, they go to make the biggest profit they can out of their situation by strongly focussing on the idiots. With idiots you have two advantages: (a) they stay anyways no matter how shitty you treat them. They have different reasons but one of them is that they are simply used to your service and don't want to learn a new one. (b) they believe at least some of the stuff you put on these websites. (c) in exchange for not feeling like a total loser for a moment they are willing to pay more. For an observant booker this website is really less and less useful. For once you can try the alternative and get a much better experience, and on the other you can often just book a room on-site after you arrive. When Booking.com just hands out a reserveration without prepayment don't think the hotel wouldn't give your room to someone else if enough customers arrive at their desk first. Money now is better than (maybe) money later. The only exception may be when you go to the big fair of your industry and the whole town is booked out.
- dazc 9y ago
  > "My guess is this: Booking.com already knows that they are fighting a losing battle against AirBnB." For a two or three day trip AirBnB isn't practical, and it's not as if AirBnB is perfect either. At least with a hotel I know there is a basic minimum standard and I have some level of consumer protection. I go direct to the Hotel's own site wherever possible but often they don't have a facility to book online easily and, where they do, the price is often the same anyway. Chain hotels are the exception but you often need to book and pay well in advance to get any real saving.
- flexie 9y ago
  In Europe, I would say the opposite is happening. AirBnB is being pushed out of or held down in many cities by local authorities. In the last two years I have stayed 50 nights or so in rooms booked through Bookings.com or Hotels.com and only 2 nights in rooms booked through AirBnB, and it's now almost two years ago. I had a good stay in the ArBnB booked apartment but the only reason I used AirBnB in the first place was that I couldn't find a hotel in the city since all hotels were booked. Most people I know have never or only once used AirBnB. AirBnB is fun to try but I wouldn't rely on someones apartment for my vacation.
mitul_45 9y ago
Well, I am joining Booking.com as frontend engineer this November and this makes me a bit worried. The only reason I chose to join Booking was Amsterdam (I wanted to live/work outside India for a couple of years). I have also heard the tech stack is kind of old and so learning-wise it might be an issue. Any tips on surviving and keeping the learning curve straight from a current/former employee?
- Bharath1234 9y ago
  Hey! Congrats! I'm just curious about interview process in Booking.com. Are they same as typical data structures and algorithms oriented interviews? Did they let you know about their tech stack?
  - mitul_45 9y ago
    Yeah, questions were pretty much same you found on the internet. About the tech stack, they do let us know a little but mostly it depends on the team you land on.
- akdumbagdum 9y ago
  Congrats first of all. However did you tell Booking about your motivation to join them - "The only reason I chose to join Booking was Amsterdam (I wanted to live/work outside India for a couple of years)". Its pretty standard for companies to ask that question.
  - mitul_45 9y ago
    Nah. That's one of the major reasons. Others being - working with a diverse culture, working on a big scale such as theirs, and building things based on data rather than opinions.
- devdas 9y ago
  The tech stack is Perl+MySQL. Ancillary tech is Go, Rust, Java, C. Lots of Javascript. Very high delivery velocity (You will be expected to roll out code in your first week).
TeeWEE 9y ago
Booking.com 's website is awful. They are still stick in 1995. They do product development solely based on A/B tests. That's how the product is so crap. But they have a Monopoly (almost). So that's why people keep using them.
soreq 9y ago
Anyone have stats on their user-base/ geographic breakdown? Thanks.
odiroot 9y ago
There should be some browser extension or set of filters for uBlock to hide these shady parts of Booking.
jhgyukhjikoh 9y ago
What good alternatives with prices as low?
known 9y ago
I regularly use booking.com and I think what they're doing is rational,not manipulation.
WA 9y ago
Oh it's not only booking.com The newest scam is: flight comparison websites show you a low price, but only if you pay with a VISA. Switch to MasterCard and it's an additional 20-30€. But then you invested in the whole booking process already. Amazon Prime: Try to cancel it. They make it sound as if you lose Prime right away. There's an option "remind me 3 days before next payment" that suggests you should think more about your decision. Only after you cancelled, they tell you that you lose your benefits only after your Prime subscription expires.
- zmb_ 9y ago
  I booked with AMOMA (another hotel site) and now they email me a "10% off" voucher every week. The only thing is that to claim it I need to follow a link in the email. When I follow the link, the prices of all the rooms increase, and the room price I already had open in another tab suddenly becomes "unavailable". I've also clicked the link to remove me from their mailing list half a dozen times, but they never remove me.
- falsedan 9y ago
  > They make it sound as if you lose Prime right away. That might be the victim of taking phrasing from different markets. In the US and UK, when I've cancelled Prime, I immediately lose the benefits + get a pro-rata refund for the remainder of my subscription.
etairaz 9y ago
You seriously had to book a shitty hotel in order to understand that you're being manipulated? Let me give you the short version of how to book on booking, which is BTW an excellent site for travel arrangements: 1) Ignore anything that makes it sound like you're in a competition. Cheapest price, someone is looking, etc. You're trying to book a hotel room that suits you, not win a race. 2) Any hotel ranked below 9+ has problems. You just need to figure out what the problems are, and those will appear in the reviews section. Don't be lazy - you need to read dozens of reviews. The good news is that you can skip the good reviews - they won't contain what you're looking for. If you book any hotel that has a less than 9 average, make sure you understand what people didn't like about it. If it's over 9, everyone liked it, and you will too.
- puranjay 9y ago
  Despite knowing all about dark patterns, I let myself be manipulated into paying $120/night for a room (expensive by Sri Lanka standards). Because of the repeated "only 1 room left!" messages and I didn't want to mess up my anniversary holiday A few days later, I checked again and the room was going for $50 I mailed them about it. They agreed to refund me $50, so that was nice of them
  - etairaz 9y ago
    That's actually nice of them... Do not take part in the race :)
- Joeri 9y ago
  I booked an 8.9 and only found out afterwards some of the rooms aren’t cleaned if you book through booking, because those rooms aren’t actually from the hotel but a private owner renting out their rooms. I contacted booking about it, they did nothing. The private owner also put a hold on my credit card, as did the hotel, with the sum of both being high enough i bumped into my card’s limit before the end of my stay. Oh, and the very low rate of booking.ccom turned out to be the same price as booking direct once all the semi-hidden charges were added. Lesson learned: always book directly with the hotel.
fakalaka 9y ago
Lots of complains, but people underestimate how much money, time and effort the company spends on a customer service. It's a war out there, traveloka raising half a billion dollars, "old" companies must fight back. Not only their prices are usually the lowest, but they also offer matching prices. The room was not as advertised? Booking would at least offer a coupon for next booking. Hotel was overbooked? They would find you a room of no lower standard, in similar location, and they cover the difference. It happens that if there's a big event in the city, they might cover your 5* hotel if you booked a shitty 2* room. Many small properties have shady businesses, booking.com protects you from this. They might not use the shiniest tech, but their customer service (which is biggest portion of the work force) is top notch. Source: shared bed with one of the cs agents
- javabean22 9y ago
  Oh really? Good customer service? How about this: https://medium.com/@ilyadoroshin/bad-ux-how-booking-com-deceives-clients-5dc9e9485f32 https://medium.com/@ilyadoroshin/bad-ux-how-booking-com-dece... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15152155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15152155
sklivvz1971 9y ago
Seems more of a rant on marketing and dark patterns, but somehow blames Booking.com for things that happens everywhere in the industry.
synthecypher 9y ago
Using this information you could probably make a browser extension to make the website more honest.
LeonM 9y ago
I tried scraping booking.com once, it quickly became obvious that they use many 'dark patterns' in tricking visitors into booking quickly. Not using cookies was the most efficient method in discovering the 'real' price of an accomodation. But is not just booking.com, 99% of airline ticket sites use the same techniques. Basically what they do is raising the price on each subsequent visit, sometimes also lowering the amount of 'available' tickets. This creates a sense of urgency. My advise is always: shop for the hotel/ticket/whatever you like, then open that URL in a new private/incognito tab, so you get a lower price.
- devdas 9y ago
  Nah, hotels are now manipulating prices like airlines, with computers responding in near real-time to perceived demand. As demand increases, so does price. Multiple searches show a rise in demand, so the price goes up, even if there really was just one person searching.
codermobile 9y ago
TripAdvisor supports booking on hotels and they show all of the comments. Plus, there are much more ratings and comments than anywhere else.
- bogomipz 9y ago
  TripAdvisor also supports fake and unverified reviews: https://www.forbes.com/sites/avaseave/2014/01/27/when-online-reviews-are-fake-researchers-identify-which-hotels-have-incentive-to-manipulate/#3c71e36d710b https://www.forbes.com/sites/avaseave/2014/01/27/when-online...
  - philjohn 9y ago
    There are merits to both systems (reviews from anyone vs you have to have booked through booking.com), the biggest one is that if you visited somewhere but booked directly, or through another OTA, you can still leave your opinion. More here: https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/vpages/review_mod_fraud_detect.html https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/vpages/review_mod_fraud_detect...
jvannistelrooy 9y ago
I travel regularly and Booking.com is my place to go for hotel reservations. It had to "learn" how to use Booking.com in a comfortable way. For example, I learned to ignore the continuous push for urgency, I sort hotels based on user rating instead of Bookings choice, and I check TripAdvisor for reviews instead of Booking.com itself. So why would I even use Booking.com? Apart from it having one of the largest offerings, it just love that the whole process of booking, paying, and checking in is so simple and consistent, no matter where in the world I book a hotel or for what purpose (business or leisure). That is what makes me come back to Booking.com, and that's what I wish Booking.com would spend most of their time on.
biztos 9y ago
I'm not surprised that they use all manner of "hey! buy this now!" tactics, like many other travel and shopping sites. I am surprised that people use a single website to choose where they're going to stay. I never book an unknown hotel without checking reviews on a few different sites (usually TripAdvisor, yay pics, and if in the US then Yelp, yay complainers). And I always check prices at least on the hotel's own site so I know what a discount is and what's not. For me the likes of Booking, Hotels, and Kayak are for map-search and the actual purchase experience. And for the latter I'm pretty happy with Booking, I use them often. If the message here is that the travel business gets sleazier the higher you climb up the aggregation pyramid, then yes, true, and I can't remember it ever not being thus.
Keloran 9y ago
these rules apply to all PriceLine sites, its not just booking, but because booking either applied them first (and booking is one of the most profitable priceline companies) or they made the most money off them, all the others follow suit and add them to theirs I used to work for RentalCars and as soon as booking put the "someone just booked" on the site, RentalCars had to follow suit even if the last car booked was 3 days ago
- isolli 9y ago
  I knew it, thanks for confirming. I use RentalCars a lot and I'm happy with the service, but the "someone just booked" just felt fake. The weird part is that, even though I was convinced it was fake, it still had an impact on me.
ckastner 9y ago
I look at a number of sites when researching hotels, but the final straw for me was when the prices on Booking.com's page were actually higher than the prices offered by the hotels directly. I repeatedly verified this on numerous dates, with numerous hotels -- Booking.com's super-exceptional "deals" were occasionally up to 20% more expensive than a direct booking with the hotel, for the exact same room type. Has anybody else seen this?
FearNotDaniel 9y ago
Guy books the cheapest hotel he can find, smack in the middle of the "vibrant gay village". Unsuprisingly, it's noisy and he doesn't get any sleep. Blames the UX of the booking website, because somehow the website forced him into trying to sleep in the middle of a permanent Mardi Gras. Suck it up, snowflake.
- rovek 9y ago
  Does the author's motivation have any bearing on the facts of Booking.com's website behaviour?
madshiva 9y ago
I only using these sites of booking for getting information. After I double check on the website of the hotel, price, go to the location with Google map to see what is nearby, never had a problem. Nice analyse I would like them more.
eugenijusr 9y ago
Also a couple of years ago we discovered that Booking shows different prices from different locations and different devices. Prices are higher at some hotels for Mac/iPhone users and Western Europe/US customers. Not sure if they're still doing it, but it's easily testable if someone wants to investigate.
- welcomebrand 9y ago
  Showed me the same results (price wise, order was different) in Chrome Incognito on Win 10 desktop and Android.
  - eugenijusr 9y ago
    They're still doing it. Screenshots taken literally seconds apart refreshed multiple times to make sure it's still the same: http://eugene.lt/booking/1.png http://eugene.lt/booking/1.png macOS on a MacBook Pro from New York, NY (via a DigitalOcean droplet VPN) http://eugene.lt/booking/2.png http://eugene.lt/booking/2.png Fresh Windows 10 VM from Vilnius, Lithuania
    - daemin 9y ago
      I think you've got the links the wrong way around. But this is basic market segmentation, just based on the person buying and not on the product being sold. Hence why it seems more scummy.
      - eugenijusr 9y ago
        Thanks, fixed it.
muse900 9y ago
I was a vast user of Booking.com (as I travel a lot). My advice: go to booking.com, find the hotel you want to stay at. Search their phone number or email, contact the hotel directly and you'll get a much better price (15% is booking.com fee). Downside to this is if you are not booking standard 5 star hotels etc that are meant to have some level of professionalism etc, you might end up getting treated worse just because smaller hotels etc do care a lot about their booking.com rating so they tend to treat booking.com customers better than others (my wife owns 3 hotels, 2 of them happen to be of a smaller size and in reality when they have a booking from booking.com they tend to do anything to please them as opposed to bookings directly from their website).
baybal2 9y ago
>YouTube autoplays more videos to keep us from leaving. The sole purpose of doing so is to get more ad shows. See, a person leaves his computer with YT running or mutes it in the background, and returns half an hour later while google already sold 10 or so ad shows. When autoplay is on, yt tend to put shorter videos into your view que
fatman13gg 9y ago
Wonder if there is a potential block-chain based business opportunity for reviewing stuff, where all information would be transparent.
cooervo 9y ago
I had a dev friend take a job at booking.com he hates it. I suppose the company is shitty at all levels.
Yizahi 9y ago
I recently discovered (literally) an apart hotel that had bed linen excluded and could be added for 10 euro per bed. This was a first time on Booking with this trick (common on Airbnb) and they did notify me about it in they dark depths of popups and expand to see more.
- jpl56 9y ago
  That what I hate most about Booking : you expect an hotel room with private bathroom and they propose a rental flat or a bed in a dormitory. I often visit the tourist-office website to find an hotel.
Sagarkumar 9y ago
Hayday game hack how please help
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
once_upon 9y ago
Greasemonkey This. var count_removed = 0; var active = true; var elements_that_suck = [ "sr--x-times-booked", "raf-promo-block", "msg_low_avail_block", "sr_no_desc_users", "free-cancel-persuasion", "sr-badges__row", "fe_banner__sr_soldout_property", "only_x_left", "in-high-demand-not-scarce", "soldout_property", "sr_room_reinforcement", "sr-booked-x-times", "b-form__booker-type", "mltt mlttd", "vpm_3rfte-container", "fe_banner", "ribbon", "save-percentage-wrapper", "urgency_message_red", "cheapest_banner_content", "sr_no_desc_users", "sr_compset", "payment-method-filter-banner", "b_tt_holder_4", "lbsr", "only_x_left", "-scarcity_indicator-pss_scarcity_1_left", "hp-description--property-name-top-ranked", "thisRoomAvailabilityNew", "green_condition", "hp-rt-just-booked", "urgency_message_red", "usp-hotelpage--chains", "hp-blue-sans-rack-rate", "crossedout-price-icon", "-genius-full-logo", "hp-description-sub-header", "hp-availability-block-usp", "hp_sidebar_usp_box", "public_transport", "non_refundable_nr_blue", "genius_block_brand", "hp-lists-reserve", "js-hp-wl-sidebar", "listticker", "hp-social_proof-quote_author" ]; var index_page_elements = [ "specialsblock", "latest-reviews-stream", "sb-searchbox__subtitle-text", "sh-postcard-content-title", "index-nav_container" ]; var genius_elements = [ "ge-search-first ge-search-first-www", "genius-sort-icon", "ge-iconfont-extended", "genius_member_text" ]; var businessbookers_elements = [ "bbtool-index-teaser-banner" ]; var raf_elements = [ "raf-promo-banner", "js-raf-center-bar-link", "sidebar-raf-widget__container" ]; var search_page_elements = [ "all-inclusive-ribbon", "preferred-program-icon", "mouse_hover_general_rackrate", "-scarcity_indicator-pss_scarcity_1_left", "-scarcity_indicator-pss_scarcity_2_left", "-scarcity_indicator-pss_scarcity_3_left", "-scarcity_indicator-pss_scarcity_4_left", "-scarcity_indicator-pss_scarcity_5_left", "-scarcity_indicator-pss_scarcity_6_left", "-scarcity_indicator-pss_scarcity_7_left", "vpm_nd_links", "similar_destination", "footerconstraint-inner", "try_another_search_3", "cheaper-than-average", "district_link visited_link", "pub_trans" ]; var hotel_page_elements = [ "d-deal__dod-countdown", "d-deal", "d-deal-b", "hp-low_sidebar_to_content", "hp_cs_back_to_search", "althotels_fullwidth", "recent_property_reviews_block", "hp_useful_links_header", "hp-description--property-expectation", "hp-good-segment-facility-score", "hp_facilities_score_hl", "bpg_logo", "pp_bpg_tooltip_holder", "wrap-hotelpage-top__book top-book-form", "best-review-score" ]; var elements_to_remove = []; elements_to_remove.push( genius_elements ); elements_to_remove.push( raf_elements ); elements_to_remove.push( elements_that_suck ); elements_to_remove.push( index_page_elements ); elements_to_remove.push( businessbookers_elements ); elements_to_remove.push( search_page_elements ); elements_to_remove.push( hotel_page_elements ); setInterval( function() { if( active) { elements_to_remove.forEach( function( element_group, idx, arr) { element_group.forEach( function (el, idx, arr) { remove_elements_by_classname( el ); }); }); } console.log("Removed " + count_removed); }, 1000); function remove_elements_by_classname( name ) { var elements_with_class = document.getElementsByClassName( name ); count_removed += elements_with_class.length; for( var i=0; i<elements_with_class.length; i++ ) { elements_with_class[i].style.display = "none"; } } var prices = document.getElementsByClassName("rooms-table-room-price"); for(var i=0; i<prices.length; i++){ prices[i].style.color = "deepskyblue"; } prices = document.getElementsByClassName("red-actual-rack-rate"); for(var i=0; i<prices.length; i++){ prices[i].style.color = "skyblue"; }
smashu 9y ago
I work in the travel industry as a developer and my current task is to make our booking engine more "bookingcom-like" (yes, this is exactly how the requirements were formulated by product management). To achieve this task I did a small research of other travel web sites and I realised that most of them added such psychological elements lately. Today I found this gold article and forwarded it to the product managers, hehe :)
kbjrk 9y ago
There is a counter-movement emerging. During the techfestival in Copenhagen 150 people (Charles Adler, Peter Sunde, Jerry Michalsky to name a few) got together to formulate the Copenhagen Letter on Tech - read it here: https://copenhagenletter.org/ https://copenhagenletter.org/
andraganescu 9y ago
Would anyone pay a monthly fee for some dev to maintain some chrome/ff/safari ext that simply cleans up booking.com?
- andraganescu 9y ago
  I am actually thinking of having an online directory of specific website cleanup extensions which power users of said websites should be more than happy to pay for :)
yellowapple 9y ago
"I am not aware of any other service with a comparable number of properties and reviews." Trivago?

583 points by bogomipz 9y ago

IOW - how more or less every e-commerce (especially aggregation services) site tries to get you to spend your money there

bogomipz 9y ago
Using Amazon as an example of an e-commerce company - when buying an item on Amazon neither the gaming of ratings and reviews or the annoying and manufactured "sense of urgency" as stated in the post, seem to be part of the experience. The booking.com experience feels like doing business with a sleazy used car salesman.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
  Yes, Amazon may get flak for other reasons but I have found the experience of shopping on them to be very clean and pleasant. To be clear, I am talking about the experience of finding a product and proceeding to checkout and payment, not about any potential issues about fake products and such.
  - bogomipz 9y ago
    Agreed, that's pretty much what I meant. Although even the few times when I received questionable products the issue was resolved pretty quickly and painlessly with either the merchant or Amazon.com Contrast that with booking.com where all communications between you and the merchant(hotel) have to filter through booking.com and take 24 hours at a minimum to get a response.
tyingq 9y ago
Booking.com is, though, more aggressive than their peers. More in the same category as event ticket sellers. Lots of "not quite lies" in the interface to generate false urgency where none actually exists. Like showing you how many other people "looked at this property", but not saying the timeframe...in the last hour? Day? Week? The idea is to close the deal because you think someone else will snap it up. They are also crazy arrogant and condescending if you ever have to deal with them as a partner.

edejong 9y ago

This is what A/B testing does to a popular site. You test for immediate customer engagement but cannot (easily) test long-term customer loyalty. This is why booking.com has become the largest online hotel booking site in several continents. Nevertheless, I think it will eventually be their downfall.

sturgill 9y ago
"Frankly, I don’t think I am going to stop using Booking.com. I am not aware of any other service with a comparable number of properties and reviews." It's hard to quantify negative impact of future dealings, but it's even harder to say Booking.com should change their methods when the people aware enough to be annoyed continue to give them money. It's like complaining about Google following you around the web and using GMail. Either the alternatives just aren't good enough or the negative externalities not severe enough to change consumer behavior. Either of those considerations could change, but until they do it's hard to argue Booking.com should reduce current earnings. Not when people who book a room above a bar that plays music into the early morning blame themselves for not reading the fine print...
- johansch 9y ago
  A suggestion for people who are upset with this behavior: Use Booking.com (and Google, Expedia, etc) as a showroom, after you have found a certain hotel, find their web site or phone and arrange a booking directly.
  - zpr 9y ago
    Sometimes the direct prices are actually more. Your best bet for sticking it to them might be to use an alternative booking service.
    - johansch 9y ago
      Perhaps calling the hotel to ask if they'll match the online price will work?

hw 9y ago

I've always wondered if some of these tactics are kosher and legal. Especially the ones that say 'someone just booked this' or the notifications on ecommerce sites that say 'X bought this in the last hour'. Most of the ecommerce ones are just fake data meant to entice the shopper into buying into urgency.

tyingq 9y ago
There's probably a case for it being illegal, but the US laws are fairly high level and vague. So, you have to catch someone's attention to get the FTC after you. They tend to go on industry specific hunts once public opinion goes a certain direction. Happened with diet pills, cryptocoin hardware, airlines not showing all in costs, etc. Booking.com will probably eventually get their turn in the barrel. Could be a while though.
stephengillie 9y ago
Some television commercials even have a pre-recorded countdown to create urgency.
- tehwebguy 9y ago
  I think they get away with it by saying, "order in the next 15 minutes and you'll get this", but the truth is if you order after the next 15 minutes you also get it. They're not explicitly saying you won't get it if you don't order in the next 15 minutes, but they're implying it. Telebrands is the company that's been running that game for like forever. Pretty shady!
  - jorvi 9y ago
    That's a tactic used across many industries. There is a Dutch insurance company (Promovendum) that actively advertises as 'the insurance company for the higher educated' (in NL this means college or university). It is illegal to discriminate on this, so they do in fact accept anyone, they just don't say so.
troydavis 9y ago

tmulc18 9y ago

That's why you gotta use Expedia or Google

kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
Expedia does "n people booked this location" and "price of this flight expected to rise by x%" ALL the time.
- goialoq 9y ago
  neither one of those is misleading or harmful if true.
dawnerd 9y ago
Pretty much all of Expedia owned sites do this too. Hard to avoid when Expedia/Priceline own most of them.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

colmvp 9y ago

I noticed Udemy also manipulates users by saying that x course is 80-90% off but only for one more day!!!!... until you realize it's been that exact same price for weeks/months. I understand it's not new to have the retail price be higher than the 'sale' price (for example, clothes and furniture), but even at clearance outlets, the price difference while large is rarely as dramatic nor as prolonged.

zodPod 9y ago
Udemy is also huge for having a "One time $10/$15 coupon!" that "expires in 3 days" and will immediately be replaced by another one. All you really have to do is google "Udemy coupon" to get any class on the site for $10 or $15 depending on what the current coupon is. This also works for the craft store chain Michael's but to a lesser extent. They almost ALWAYS have a 40-50% off coupon in their weekly ad. So if you find something that you want but it's expensive, you can usually get it for half off. It's pretty awesome!
- sturgill 9y ago
  Hi/Lo pricing is great that way. Harbor Freight always sends 20% off coupons. It's a wonderful technique for running price discrimination. The frequency of running offers, and which offers to run, are just business details that can be tested and optimized. Some firms are a lot better at it than others. But at its core it's not fundamentally different than coupon mailers or rebate offers. If you ever buy furniture for sticker price you're doing something wrong...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- vijayr 9y ago
  Not saying this is a nice thing to do, but they do it because it works, no? Didn't someone (JC Penny?) try getting rid of this constant "on sale/coupon" crap but that had a negative effect on their business? If something is constantly "70% off" (especially non digital goods and services), shouldn't consumers stop for a second and think how this makes sense?

smtpserver 9y ago

Review scores are also a bit offset. I have tried to give the absolute lowest to every metric booking.com gave me to rate and the resulting score was 2.5-ish. I was thinking about making a browser extension that rescales the values accordingly but I just made a mental note that a score 7 hotel is in fact a score 6. With this scaling the scores on the lower end gain more as a 3.3 score becomes a 5. Take this into account if you opt for the lower-middle end.

johansch 9y ago
What the.. That, unlike all of those dark UX patterns they are masters of, actually seems deeply deceptive and potentially illegal, depending on your locale. If this is true they have stepped across a line.
SilasX 9y ago
I remember a similar thing with Zocdoc. Something like, the appointment was on time (5/5), but my experience was horrible (1/5), so my review "averages to 2.5". Reminds me of the thing about "it either will happen, or it won't, so that's a 50/50 chance".
dpwm 9y ago
Thank you for highlighting this. I used booking.com a few years back when I stayed in London on a budget. I realised something about the site had made the review scores feel really useless but I never realised why until I read your comment. In the end I just compared on worst reviews until I found a hotel where the bad reviews were about really unimportant things to me. The hotel I stayed in actually had one of the lowest review scores of all the ones I had considered but the lowest-scored reviews described an experience I could enjoy far more than the worst experiences at comparable hotels.
KGIII 9y ago
Notably, many review sites don't let you score a zero. This will make the resulting number higher and many people are pretty bad at math. They see that it averages a 4 rating and think it can't be that bad, but it's because nobody could rate it a zero. On the plus side, I learned a new phrase from HN today. I now know what 'dark pattern' means.

jasonrhaas 9y ago

viagogo.com is a great example of user manipulation. They take what booking.com has done and 10x it. I've bought tickets on there (and got ripped off because they told me the wrong pickup location), and its a total shit show. They make it seem like there are all these real time updates going on, and really pushing you to BUY NOW, but I'm pretty sure its all a scam to urge you to buy as quickly as possible.

Osmium 9y ago

To anyone from Booking.com reading this: I'll go elsewhere next time I need to book a room. Dark patterns may help profits in the short-term, but they're terrible for your brand. Just ask TicketMaster. It isn't just tech-savvy users that will catch on to this either. If an everyday user uses Booking.com, reads reviews and thinks their room will be great, but then has a bad experience, they're going to stop trusting Booking.com's reviews, and stop trusting their brand. It will only take a few bad experiences to go elsewhere.

kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
Unfortunately for us (and fortunately for TicketMaster), there usually is no alternative to them. That doesn't hold true for Booking.com
- hervature 9y ago
  Do people not Google for alternatives? I can think of at least 5 competitors to Ticket Master. There's even one that only charges 5% seller fee and no buyer fee.
  - zavulon 9y ago
    For most events (at least in the US), you can only get tickets via TicketMaster. Venues sign an agreement with TM that forbids them selling tickets elsewhere. TM controls venue's entire ticket sale workflow, including inventory, printing and sending tickets, etc. Going with another vendor is a gigantic undertaking, you would need to overhaul most of your processes. Most venues don't have the resources/bandwidth to pull that off. And that's how TM stays a monopoly. Source: used to work for a large venue.
    - bogomipz 9y ago
      Sure and it's the same on the artist side. If you want to tour you can not avoid Ticketmaster. Remember Perl Jam at the height of their popularity and powers tried to take them on and lost: http://ultimateclassicrock.com/pearl-jam-sues-ticketmaster/ http://ultimateclassicrock.com/pearl-jam-sues-ticketmaster/

aembleton 9y ago

I just block a lot of this booking.com noise with uBlock. These are my filters so far: www.booking.com##.sr_rooms_left_wrap.only_x_left www.booking.com##.sr-booked-x-times.clearfix.lbsr www.booking.com##.soldout_property

bdemirkir 9y ago
Here's a little bit more: www.booking.com##.soldout_property www.booking.com##.sr_rooms_left_wrap.only_x_left www.booking.com##.lastbooking www.booking.com##.sr--x-times-booked www.booking.com##.in-high-demand-not-scarce www.booking.com##.top_scarcity www.booking.com##.hp-rt-just-booked www.booking.com##.cheapest_banner_content > * www.booking.com##.hp-social_proof www.booking.com##.fe_banner__red.fe_banner__w-icon.fe_banner__scale_small.fe_banner www.booking.com##.urgency_message_x_people.urgency_message_red www.booking.com##.rackrate www.booking.com##.urgency_message_red.altHotels_most_recent_booking www.booking.com##.fe_banner__w-icon-large.fe_banner__w-icon.fe_banner www.booking.com##.smaller-low-av-msg_wrapper www.booking.com##.small_warning.wxp-sr-banner.js-wxp-sr-banner

SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago

This and the recent Ticketmaster expose make me wonder: is it possible to objectively identify dark UI patterns like this via a browser extension? Usually I can try to see through them, but something that flags stuff like this with a non-obtrusive warning would be nice to add to the list of extensions I automatically throw on new installs for family members (that list currently includes PrivacyBadger and uBlock Origin)

arkitaip 9y ago
There are a couple of safety and privacy browser plugins, e.g. WOT, that could crowd source this data gathering from their users who already help id scummy sites.
bogomipz 9y ago
What was the Ticketmaster expose? Not that I would be the least surprised by any kind of scandal from those thugs but I haven't heard anything recently.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
  There was a HN thread that was linked to an article about it a month or so ago, but I can't find it now. You can also check out the top comments on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13312629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13312629 The time ticker "feature" is what was referenced in the other HN article from a month ago.

drstewart 9y ago

Airbnb does this too. No matter where or when you search for, you'll see a notification saying something like: "Only 13% of listings are left for these dates. We recommend booking a place soon." As a random example, apparently Kamloops, BC is filling up fast for Dec 3-6 (midweek in the middle of winter). And so is Flint, MI on Feb 19th, a Tuesday.

gnicholas 9y ago
Strangely, Airbnb has another problem that is the exact opposite. My wife started to book a unit, got to a point where it said she had 9 hours left to complete the booking, and then someone else booked it first. She was so angry because it seemed to clearly indicate that she had X time left to complete the booking. She messaged the host again to find out what happened; apparently this can only occur when instant booking is available (and the host cannot deny another potential guest in order to keep days open for a pending guest). Having seen dark patterns described/decried on HN, I thought it was funny that Airbnb apparently has accidentally-light patterns.
tsycho 9y ago
My biggest problem with Airbnb is opaque pricing at the search page. They will claim a room is say $250/night, but after fees, taxes and cleaning charges, it might be $400/night. Cleaning charges in particular can vary widely. Even though Airbnb knows the exact travel dates and hence the exact amount, they still choose to show the lower daily price rather than the actual. I consider this a dark pattern too.
- 4ad 9y ago
  Yeah. Just like in the US they don't show taxes (which vary!) on products in retail shops. It's obnoxious, and I don't understand how this is legal, even in the US.
  - Frank2312 9y ago
    The difference here is that you can easily calculate taxes based on the price you can see since taxes don't vary in the same state/province (because this also applies to Canada...). On Airbnb, it's up to the property owner to decide cleaning fees and such, and there isn't any rule about what that includes (that I know of).

bkohlmann 9y ago

One of the most useful business school classes I took was entitled "Consumer Behavior" which was a deep dive into behavioral psychology and all the techniques used by marketers / websites to grab our attention. Booking.com rather overtly hits on all the techniques we discussed in detail. I used to think these techniques were "dirty." But humanity evolved to be responsive to this type of manipulation. It seems the web has accelerated this process with the ability to A/B test on a massive scale. All the big websites exploit cognitive biases to drive engagement - facebook, google, twitter, instagram, netflix, youtube. This is one of the reasons I'm convinced knowledge of behavioral economics is one of the most critical pieces of knowledge to have in the early 21st century - not only can you use it to drive engagement on your own platforms, but you can learn what tell-tales you are biased to react to, and resist accordingly.

arkitaip 9y ago
Not sure I understand your logic. Are you saying that these tactics aren't "dirty" because as human beings we are very susceptible to them? One would argue they are unethical precisely because of this. Or do you mean it's ok because everyone else does it?
- nonsequ 9y ago
  Well he’s calling for more education and awareness. It’s like Big Food. The entire CPG industry has been stuffing people with sugar, salt, and fat for decades, exploiting human nature. We are finally seeing society resist this as we have become educated about the dangers of sugar and salt consumption. Meantime, putting ethics aside, all the major food and beverage companies made hay for a long time until recently. What is ethical and what is money-making can be at odds for a long time before they converge (if ever).
- bkohlmann 9y ago
  As someone who stove to be "rational" in everything I did, and dismissed the power of emotions in human decision making, coming face to face with the effectiveness of persuasion made me realize that winning friends and influencing people was about speaking a language that resonated with actual humans. The way people behave and respond has been studied for generations - and the best salespeople in all realms either intuitively or deliberately have discovered what makes people lean one way or another. It's a huge mistake to dismiss the biases that define us, but rather we should embrace and understand their impact.

toomanybeersies 9y ago

Briscoes (a homeware shop in New Zealand http://www.briscoes.co.nz/ http://www.briscoes.co.nz/), does this. Just looking at their website today, everything in store is 30-60% off sticker price. Seems great, until you realise that literally almost every day, they have a similar sale. There's always massive discounts for something in store. I have literally never paid full price, or anything close to it.

feelin_googley 9y ago

What if the manpulation was easily avoidable? The last time this website came up on HN (same issue), I conducted an experiment. The annoyances and manipulation described by the blogger sounded like it relied on Javascript and graphics. I wanted to see how far I could get without using a graphical browser. I was able to 1. search hotels, 2. return a list of properties in CSV/JSON/TXT, 3. return prices and 4. book. It required only a shell script of 107 lines, 308 characters, 2934 bytes. This could be further reduced. I used only a command line http client, sed and tmux send-key (optional). Further optional: Fully customized HTTP headers, including randomized User-Agent if desired. I had to store a session cookie for getting price or booking but no cookies were required for searching. I used no Javascript. I was able to eliminate all the annoyances and manipulation cited by the blogger. Conclusion: At least for booking.com all these annoyances can easily be avoided by choosing the right browser. (I did occasionally see the "Only ___ rooms left" message as this is returned in plain text. I did not however see the number change over repeated searches for the same hotel. In any event, I just deleted that line in the output, assuming it is untruthful.)

xcasperx 9y ago
Can you post your code?
taytus 9y ago
>It required only a shell script of 107 lines, 308 characters, 2934 bytes. This could be further reduced. Yeah, totally common for average people to do this.
- deleted 9y ago
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emrekzd 9y ago
> all these annoyances can easily be avoided by choosing the right browser. The right browser == non-graphical browser. Good joke. You can achieve the same by installing a simple browser extension for managing cookies & randomizing browser footprint. Firefox has some.

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TheAceOfHearts 9y ago

On the subject of fake reviews, I've recently started using Fakespot [0] with Amazon and Yelp. Sometimes making a decision for which goods to buy can be tricky, so it's really helpful to filter out a few shady options. Although, honestly, I don't think it makes much difference in most cases. Are there any trusted review services for travel locations? Something like Consumer Report, but for travel. Although I don't know where their quality levels stand nowadays, I know my parents used to swear by em 10 to 20 years ago. [0] https://www.fakespot.com https://www.fakespot.com

phil248 9y ago
I use TripAdvisor and Google Maps. I don't know how people feel about their reputations, and I worry about TripAdvisor because they are pivoting more towards being like Booking.com. But when I was in Havana, we wandered in to a string of terrible bars, cafes and restaurants over the first couple days. So we went to a hotspot and downloaded the offline TripAdvisor. We wouldn't go to a place unless TripAdvisor gave it a decent rating. After that, we had nothing but great experiences.
- codermobile 9y ago
  I completely agree. I plan my full trip with TripAdvisor. I only had minor problems. Also, those restaurants and hotels do care about their reputation so you get a better service
bogomipz 9y ago
On Amazon I usually just make sure they are a verified purchaser of the product before considering a review. Does Fakepost offer something beyond that for Amazon? Yelp I understand though as I don't think there is anything like a "verified diner."
- TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
  It helps filter down the initial list of items you evaluate. For example, you might see two items with 1000 reviews and similar scores, but one of the items might have an inflated score due to review farming.

dawnerd 9y ago

I've just been booking directly from hotels I trust because of this. Used to use hotels.com but they've gotten really bad recently. Can costs a bit more from the hotel but most of the time price is on par. End up getting more room upgrades when booking directly anyways - at least with hilton.

nlh 9y ago
Me too -- this is a very important point. Often the hotel's direct rate will be the same as advertised on hotels.com. Of course you lose the ~10% rebate by not getting rewards points, but since the hotel is effectively earning 30% more from you, they're much more likely to give you a complimentary or discounted upgrade. So if that sort of thing matters to you, I can also strongly suggest booking direct. (Note: You do generally have to ask, but I've had good experiences. Do it on-site @ checkin, and I basically say the above -- "Hey I booked direct so you earned 30% more from me. Can you offer me an upgrade to an un-used room since I'm here now?")
theak 9y ago
My experience directly booking from hotel websites has been really bad. I usually end up using a service like Booking/Priceline/Kayak/Google, just because the UI is nicer than booking directly from hotels, even if it means having to deal with stuff like this.
bogomipz 9y ago
Agreed. A couple of months ago as an experiment, when I was quoted 100 Euros a night from booking.com for a modest hotel in a small town in Austria that I had stayed at previously for much less. I didn't make the booking through booking.com but walked over to the hotel when I get to town for an the spot booking and got the same room with breakfast included or 75 Euros a night.

kristianc 9y ago

Wow - the New Union. I live in Manchester and the place is literally right at the top end of one of Manchester's main clubbing districts (the gay village). "Lively and central" is an understatement. It has a ropey reputation locally as a pub, but you couldn't pay me to stay there. I can see why he's pissed. I will caveat that I've had some excellent experiences with Booking, but always with very careful cross-referencing with other sites.

beefsack 9y ago

Some airline ticket booking sites still track you and increase the ticket price on return visits, optimised to certain intervals. Many in the industry call it "dynamic pricing." It made the news a few years back[1] but you can still see it sometimes in a few different industries. You can get into arguments with people about whether marketing as a whole is an enterprise built on manipulation, but this is quite clearly manipulative. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2010/aug/07/computer-cookies-booking-online https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2010/aug/07/computer-...

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isolli 9y ago
It's interesting that Amazon tried this in its very first years, but had to give up due to customer backlash. I wonder why the practice survives in travel services.

quickben 9y ago

Wow, things got shady at booking.com since I last visited the site last year.

myoffe 9y ago

I absolutely loath Booking.com's UX. Whenever it's possible, I use something else, like HostelWorld. Their interface is clean, to the point, and the reviews and ratings can actually be trusted. I'm happy someone did this website. I just came back from a long trip and every time somebody asked me why I hate Booking.com, I pointed exactly to some of the points that were made there. The fake sense of urgency, the cluttered UI. And the cherry on top: The fact they display the "total cost of all nights" in the results, instead of the per-night cost. That's not a misleading UX, it's just a bad UX decision. But because of it's popularity amongst accommodation owners and travelers, its fall is unlikely.

waf 9y ago
> The fact they display the "total cost of all nights" in the results, instead of the per-night cost. That's not a misleading UX, it's just a bad UX decision. I prefer the total cost in the results, since that's what I'll ultimately pay. Why do you prefer per night? Doesn't that make you do the multiplication in your head?
- lucaspiller 9y ago
  I agree it’s better to display the “total cost of stay” in the search results, however that isn’t what Booking.com displays. As OP said they display the “total cost of all nights” which excludes taxes and cleaning/service fees. A few weeks ago I stayed in an apartment in Austria which was €49 for one night, with a €45 cleaning fee... I thought that seemed a bit crazy (ok there were 7 of us, so still pretty good), but clicking through other results I saw all the properties in this area had similar fees. One had the same price per night and a €70 cleaning fee! I guess it’s a way to avoid taxes or such.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    45€ doesn't sound like much. For a complete apartment cleanup, including bed linen and etc, you need at least three or four hours, so that's around 11-15€/hour. Seems quite reasonable for Austria.

wyck 9y ago

The downsides of A/B testing. Unless of course you have confidence in your brand and decision making to not always trust users and the short term bottom line.

rgrieselhuber 9y ago

This post has some decent points about reviews and the fine print, but the rest comes off as a bit precious. I travel a lot and have used Booking.com to save myself quite a bit of money over the years. I still regularly compare their prices with other sites and they are pretty consistently cheaper than competing sites. The "hurry" parts of their site do induce a little anxiety but I tend to also appreciate the real time information so I know I get the room I want.

lozenge 9y ago
The real time information includes bookings made months away from your desired dates.

jen729w 9y ago

I just spent 3 weeks travelling the USA and we used Booking.com to see what was around. But then we went directly to the hotel's site to make the booking and you know what? Same price, if not slightly cheaper in some (not all) instances.

aglavine 9y ago
The hotel's site may well be a facade and you're still buying through booking.com
- jen729w 9y ago
  Reference?

superasn 9y ago

They similarly totally lie about matching the lowest price. Had the misfortune of booking through them once, then I found the same hotel for a much lower price on another site (makemytrip) so I sent a screenshot to the support. After a day they outright DENIED to honor this "Lowest Price Guarantee" with some lame excuse. When I told them that I'll go to the small claims court I never heard back from them. Don't believe a word on this site.

nradov 9y ago
Did you pay for the room with a credit card charge to Booking.com? If so it would be easier to dispute part of the charge with your card issuer instead of going to small claims court.
- superasn 9y ago
  Yes i did pay with a credit card. Unfortunately unlike US, disputing a cc charge here isn't that easy either. At that time the policy was to take a printout and then go to the bank and submit it there in person (same reason i never went to small claims court too). Seemed like too much hassle. I instead wowed to never book another hotel on their site (using agoda ever since) and telling friends and posting on forums (it was on the frontpage on reddit india for 1 day) about how they cheated me. I think that must have costed them more money than they cheated me out by not honoring their guarantee.

methodin 9y ago

I thought the service was great at first - no hassle reservations with easy cancellation. That is until they billed for me a hotel I never stayed at. Ended up having to go through Amex and chargeback the charge since I had clearly cancelled it months before. It's a shame.

djsumdog 9y ago

I thought about interviewing for them in Amsterdam. The recruiter put me in touch with one of their people and she explained to me everything was in Perl, there were little to no automated tests and developers often pushed straight to production. I said I had only worked in perl shops that were migrating from it to Scala or Python. She said, "Well we have no intention of moving." Like I say with all recruiters, I said I was interested. I thought about it and everything was a red flag. Sure I'd get to live in Amsterdam and stay in Europe with my girlfriend, but ... that sounds like the ultimate shit job. I'd have to endure that until I worked out whatever visa contract they'd have or find someone else to sponsor me with a non-shit job. So I just ignore the recruiter when he calls .. and ignore him .. and ignore him. Dude calls every fucking day for like four weeks straight; after I had already moved back to America. Most recruiters would take the hint after three failed calls. I can't imagine how desperate they must be. Then I heard from a former co-worker one of our other buddies, a Kiwi, had taken a job with them .. leaving NZ to go work there. He's still there ... hope it's not shit.

ToxicCorgi 9y ago
I saw new job postings from Booking quite frequently in 2013/14 when I was first applying for jobs in Europe. Figured they were growing very quickly and applied for a few but never got a reply from them. And reading this thread and your post today, I'm glad I didn't. I'd be interested to know how your buddy's doing there. Seems like they still post a lot on job websites, and their growth isn't exactly mindboggling, so it would seem they have really high turnover and/or trouble filling positions to begin with.
icebraining 9y ago
Did you ask about the tests and the deployment process? While the answers are certainly not good, I respect the recruiter for even knowing about it. Most I've talked to would have no idea.
stingraycharles 9y ago
This is true. It might make it a bit better knowing that they’re hiring a few of the top Perl people in the world (Yves, Rafael, Ævar), but indeed, everything is Perl. They’re managing to hire quite a lot of people, by the way, but the compensation is a lot higher than what’s normal in NL. With regards to their testing procedures, the way I understand it is that they’re focusing on mitigation using clever monitoring/automated rollbacks. They pride themselves in their data analytics abilities, and this is part of that. Source: live/work in Amsterdam and know many people that work/worked there.

quadrangle 9y ago

I can't imagine recognizing all that shit and then concluding with an expectation to keep using a service like that. Wow

uladzislau 9y ago

I don't get it why people complain all the time and still use it? Even their parent company Priceline UX is much better, then there's Expedia and other sites. I would never book anything on Booking because it's plain ugly and keeps design from 1998, even Craigslist looks modern in comparison. Their hiring and interview process, at least in product management - it looked like they are fishing for fresh ideas on what to A/B test on their website. All the talk was focused around it. Answering the questions they didn't give a single direct answer only extremely vague ones. Red flags all around.

erikb 9y ago

Being a little disillusioned about the world these days I would assume this has a purpose. My guess is this: Booking.com already knows that they are fighting a losing battle against AirBnB. So instead of trying to win it seriously, they go to make the biggest profit they can out of their situation by strongly focussing on the idiots. With idiots you have two advantages: (a) they stay anyways no matter how shitty you treat them. They have different reasons but one of them is that they are simply used to your service and don't want to learn a new one. (b) they believe at least some of the stuff you put on these websites. (c) in exchange for not feeling like a total loser for a moment they are willing to pay more. For an observant booker this website is really less and less useful. For once you can try the alternative and get a much better experience, and on the other you can often just book a room on-site after you arrive. When Booking.com just hands out a reserveration without prepayment don't think the hotel wouldn't give your room to someone else if enough customers arrive at their desk first. Money now is better than (maybe) money later. The only exception may be when you go to the big fair of your industry and the whole town is booked out.

dazc 9y ago
> "My guess is this: Booking.com already knows that they are fighting a losing battle against AirBnB." For a two or three day trip AirBnB isn't practical, and it's not as if AirBnB is perfect either. At least with a hotel I know there is a basic minimum standard and I have some level of consumer protection. I go direct to the Hotel's own site wherever possible but often they don't have a facility to book online easily and, where they do, the price is often the same anyway. Chain hotels are the exception but you often need to book and pay well in advance to get any real saving.
flexie 9y ago
In Europe, I would say the opposite is happening. AirBnB is being pushed out of or held down in many cities by local authorities. In the last two years I have stayed 50 nights or so in rooms booked through Bookings.com or Hotels.com and only 2 nights in rooms booked through AirBnB, and it's now almost two years ago. I had a good stay in the ArBnB booked apartment but the only reason I used AirBnB in the first place was that I couldn't find a hotel in the city since all hotels were booked. Most people I know have never or only once used AirBnB. AirBnB is fun to try but I wouldn't rely on someones apartment for my vacation.

mitul_45 9y ago

Well, I am joining Booking.com as frontend engineer this November and this makes me a bit worried. The only reason I chose to join Booking was Amsterdam (I wanted to live/work outside India for a couple of years). I have also heard the tech stack is kind of old and so learning-wise it might be an issue. Any tips on surviving and keeping the learning curve straight from a current/former employee?

Bharath1234 9y ago
Hey! Congrats! I'm just curious about interview process in Booking.com. Are they same as typical data structures and algorithms oriented interviews? Did they let you know about their tech stack?
- mitul_45 9y ago
  Yeah, questions were pretty much same you found on the internet. About the tech stack, they do let us know a little but mostly it depends on the team you land on.
akdumbagdum 9y ago
Congrats first of all. However did you tell Booking about your motivation to join them - "The only reason I chose to join Booking was Amsterdam (I wanted to live/work outside India for a couple of years)". Its pretty standard for companies to ask that question.
- mitul_45 9y ago
  Nah. That's one of the major reasons. Others being - working with a diverse culture, working on a big scale such as theirs, and building things based on data rather than opinions.
devdas 9y ago
The tech stack is Perl+MySQL. Ancillary tech is Go, Rust, Java, C. Lots of Javascript. Very high delivery velocity (You will be expected to roll out code in your first week).

TeeWEE 9y ago

Booking.com 's website is awful. They are still stick in 1995. They do product development solely based on A/B tests. That's how the product is so crap. But they have a Monopoly (almost). So that's why people keep using them.

soreq 9y ago

Anyone have stats on their user-base/ geographic breakdown? Thanks.

odiroot 9y ago

There should be some browser extension or set of filters for uBlock to hide these shady parts of Booking.

jhgyukhjikoh 9y ago

What good alternatives with prices as low?

known 9y ago

I regularly use booking.com and I think what they're doing is rational,not manipulation.

WA 9y ago

Oh it's not only booking.com The newest scam is: flight comparison websites show you a low price, but only if you pay with a VISA. Switch to MasterCard and it's an additional 20-30€. But then you invested in the whole booking process already. Amazon Prime: Try to cancel it. They make it sound as if you lose Prime right away. There's an option "remind me 3 days before next payment" that suggests you should think more about your decision. Only after you cancelled, they tell you that you lose your benefits only after your Prime subscription expires.

zmb_ 9y ago
I booked with AMOMA (another hotel site) and now they email me a "10% off" voucher every week. The only thing is that to claim it I need to follow a link in the email. When I follow the link, the prices of all the rooms increase, and the room price I already had open in another tab suddenly becomes "unavailable". I've also clicked the link to remove me from their mailing list half a dozen times, but they never remove me.
falsedan 9y ago
> They make it sound as if you lose Prime right away. That might be the victim of taking phrasing from different markets. In the US and UK, when I've cancelled Prime, I immediately lose the benefits + get a pro-rata refund for the remainder of my subscription.

etairaz 9y ago

You seriously had to book a shitty hotel in order to understand that you're being manipulated? Let me give you the short version of how to book on booking, which is BTW an excellent site for travel arrangements: 1) Ignore anything that makes it sound like you're in a competition. Cheapest price, someone is looking, etc. You're trying to book a hotel room that suits you, not win a race. 2) Any hotel ranked below 9+ has problems. You just need to figure out what the problems are, and those will appear in the reviews section. Don't be lazy - you need to read dozens of reviews. The good news is that you can skip the good reviews - they won't contain what you're looking for. If you book any hotel that has a less than 9 average, make sure you understand what people didn't like about it. If it's over 9, everyone liked it, and you will too.

puranjay 9y ago
Despite knowing all about dark patterns, I let myself be manipulated into paying $120/night for a room (expensive by Sri Lanka standards). Because of the repeated "only 1 room left!" messages and I didn't want to mess up my anniversary holiday A few days later, I checked again and the room was going for $50 I mailed them about it. They agreed to refund me $50, so that was nice of them
- etairaz 9y ago
  That's actually nice of them... Do not take part in the race :)
Joeri 9y ago
I booked an 8.9 and only found out afterwards some of the rooms aren’t cleaned if you book through booking, because those rooms aren’t actually from the hotel but a private owner renting out their rooms. I contacted booking about it, they did nothing. The private owner also put a hold on my credit card, as did the hotel, with the sum of both being high enough i bumped into my card’s limit before the end of my stay. Oh, and the very low rate of booking.ccom turned out to be the same price as booking direct once all the semi-hidden charges were added. Lesson learned: always book directly with the hotel.

fakalaka 9y ago

Lots of complains, but people underestimate how much money, time and effort the company spends on a customer service. It's a war out there, traveloka raising half a billion dollars, "old" companies must fight back. Not only their prices are usually the lowest, but they also offer matching prices. The room was not as advertised? Booking would at least offer a coupon for next booking. Hotel was overbooked? They would find you a room of no lower standard, in similar location, and they cover the difference. It happens that if there's a big event in the city, they might cover your 5* hotel if you booked a shitty 2* room. Many small properties have shady businesses, booking.com protects you from this. They might not use the shiniest tech, but their customer service (which is biggest portion of the work force) is top notch. Source: shared bed with one of the cs agents

javabean22 9y ago
Oh really? Good customer service? How about this: https://medium.com/@ilyadoroshin/bad-ux-how-booking-com-deceives-clients-5dc9e9485f32 https://medium.com/@ilyadoroshin/bad-ux-how-booking-com-dece... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15152155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15152155

sklivvz1971 9y ago

Seems more of a rant on marketing and dark patterns, but somehow blames Booking.com for things that happens everywhere in the industry.

synthecypher 9y ago

Using this information you could probably make a browser extension to make the website more honest.

LeonM 9y ago

I tried scraping booking.com once, it quickly became obvious that they use many 'dark patterns' in tricking visitors into booking quickly. Not using cookies was the most efficient method in discovering the 'real' price of an accomodation. But is not just booking.com, 99% of airline ticket sites use the same techniques. Basically what they do is raising the price on each subsequent visit, sometimes also lowering the amount of 'available' tickets. This creates a sense of urgency. My advise is always: shop for the hotel/ticket/whatever you like, then open that URL in a new private/incognito tab, so you get a lower price.

devdas 9y ago
Nah, hotels are now manipulating prices like airlines, with computers responding in near real-time to perceived demand. As demand increases, so does price. Multiple searches show a rise in demand, so the price goes up, even if there really was just one person searching.

codermobile 9y ago

TripAdvisor supports booking on hotels and they show all of the comments. Plus, there are much more ratings and comments than anywhere else.

bogomipz 9y ago
TripAdvisor also supports fake and unverified reviews: https://www.forbes.com/sites/avaseave/2014/01/27/when-online-reviews-are-fake-researchers-identify-which-hotels-have-incentive-to-manipulate/#3c71e36d710b https://www.forbes.com/sites/avaseave/2014/01/27/when-online...
- philjohn 9y ago
  There are merits to both systems (reviews from anyone vs you have to have booked through booking.com), the biggest one is that if you visited somewhere but booked directly, or through another OTA, you can still leave your opinion. More here: https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/vpages/review_mod_fraud_detect.html https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/vpages/review_mod_fraud_detect...

jvannistelrooy 9y ago

I travel regularly and Booking.com is my place to go for hotel reservations. It had to "learn" how to use Booking.com in a comfortable way. For example, I learned to ignore the continuous push for urgency, I sort hotels based on user rating instead of Bookings choice, and I check TripAdvisor for reviews instead of Booking.com itself. So why would I even use Booking.com? Apart from it having one of the largest offerings, it just love that the whole process of booking, paying, and checking in is so simple and consistent, no matter where in the world I book a hotel or for what purpose (business or leisure). That is what makes me come back to Booking.com, and that's what I wish Booking.com would spend most of their time on.

biztos 9y ago

I'm not surprised that they use all manner of "hey! buy this now!" tactics, like many other travel and shopping sites. I am surprised that people use a single website to choose where they're going to stay. I never book an unknown hotel without checking reviews on a few different sites (usually TripAdvisor, yay pics, and if in the US then Yelp, yay complainers). And I always check prices at least on the hotel's own site so I know what a discount is and what's not. For me the likes of Booking, Hotels, and Kayak are for map-search and the actual purchase experience. And for the latter I'm pretty happy with Booking, I use them often. If the message here is that the travel business gets sleazier the higher you climb up the aggregation pyramid, then yes, true, and I can't remember it ever not being thus.

Keloran 9y ago

these rules apply to all PriceLine sites, its not just booking, but because booking either applied them first (and booking is one of the most profitable priceline companies) or they made the most money off them, all the others follow suit and add them to theirs I used to work for RentalCars and as soon as booking put the "someone just booked" on the site, RentalCars had to follow suit even if the last car booked was 3 days ago

isolli 9y ago
I knew it, thanks for confirming. I use RentalCars a lot and I'm happy with the service, but the "someone just booked" just felt fake. The weird part is that, even though I was convinced it was fake, it still had an impact on me.

ckastner 9y ago

I look at a number of sites when researching hotels, but the final straw for me was when the prices on Booking.com's page were actually higher than the prices offered by the hotels directly. I repeatedly verified this on numerous dates, with numerous hotels -- Booking.com's super-exceptional "deals" were occasionally up to 20% more expensive than a direct booking with the hotel, for the exact same room type. Has anybody else seen this?

FearNotDaniel 9y ago

Guy books the cheapest hotel he can find, smack in the middle of the "vibrant gay village". Unsuprisingly, it's noisy and he doesn't get any sleep. Blames the UX of the booking website, because somehow the website forced him into trying to sleep in the middle of a permanent Mardi Gras. Suck it up, snowflake.

rovek 9y ago
Does the author's motivation have any bearing on the facts of Booking.com's website behaviour?

madshiva 9y ago

I only using these sites of booking for getting information. After I double check on the website of the hotel, price, go to the location with Google map to see what is nearby, never had a problem. Nice analyse I would like them more.

eugenijusr 9y ago

Also a couple of years ago we discovered that Booking shows different prices from different locations and different devices. Prices are higher at some hotels for Mac/iPhone users and Western Europe/US customers. Not sure if they're still doing it, but it's easily testable if someone wants to investigate.

welcomebrand 9y ago
Showed me the same results (price wise, order was different) in Chrome Incognito on Win 10 desktop and Android.
- eugenijusr 9y ago
  They're still doing it. Screenshots taken literally seconds apart refreshed multiple times to make sure it's still the same: http://eugene.lt/booking/1.png http://eugene.lt/booking/1.png macOS on a MacBook Pro from New York, NY (via a DigitalOcean droplet VPN) http://eugene.lt/booking/2.png http://eugene.lt/booking/2.png Fresh Windows 10 VM from Vilnius, Lithuania
  - daemin 9y ago
    I think you've got the links the wrong way around. But this is basic market segmentation, just based on the person buying and not on the product being sold. Hence why it seems more scummy.
    - eugenijusr 9y ago
      Thanks, fixed it.

muse900 9y ago

I was a vast user of Booking.com (as I travel a lot). My advice: go to booking.com, find the hotel you want to stay at. Search their phone number or email, contact the hotel directly and you'll get a much better price (15% is booking.com fee). Downside to this is if you are not booking standard 5 star hotels etc that are meant to have some level of professionalism etc, you might end up getting treated worse just because smaller hotels etc do care a lot about their booking.com rating so they tend to treat booking.com customers better than others (my wife owns 3 hotels, 2 of them happen to be of a smaller size and in reality when they have a booking from booking.com they tend to do anything to please them as opposed to bookings directly from their website).

baybal2 9y ago

>YouTube autoplays more videos to keep us from leaving. The sole purpose of doing so is to get more ad shows. See, a person leaves his computer with YT running or mutes it in the background, and returns half an hour later while google already sold 10 or so ad shows. When autoplay is on, yt tend to put shorter videos into your view que

fatman13gg 9y ago

Wonder if there is a potential block-chain based business opportunity for reviewing stuff, where all information would be transparent.

cooervo 9y ago

I had a dev friend take a job at booking.com he hates it. I suppose the company is shitty at all levels.

Yizahi 9y ago

I recently discovered (literally) an apart hotel that had bed linen excluded and could be added for 10 euro per bed. This was a first time on Booking with this trick (common on Airbnb) and they did notify me about it in they dark depths of popups and expand to see more.

jpl56 9y ago
That what I hate most about Booking : you expect an hotel room with private bathroom and they propose a rental flat or a bed in a dormitory. I often visit the tourist-office website to find an hotel.

Sagarkumar 9y ago

Hayday game hack how please help

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

once_upon 9y ago

Greasemonkey This. var count_removed = 0; var active = true; var elements_that_suck = [ "sr--x-times-booked", "raf-promo-block", "msg_low_avail_block", "sr_no_desc_users", "free-cancel-persuasion", "sr-badges__row", "fe_banner__sr_soldout_property", "only_x_left", "in-high-demand-not-scarce", "soldout_property", "sr_room_reinforcement", "sr-booked-x-times", "b-form__booker-type", "mltt mlttd", "vpm_3rfte-container", "fe_banner", "ribbon", "save-percentage-wrapper", "urgency_message_red", "cheapest_banner_content", "sr_no_desc_users", "sr_compset", "payment-method-filter-banner", "b_tt_holder_4", "lbsr", "only_x_left", "-scarcity_indicator-pss_scarcity_1_left", "hp-description--property-name-top-ranked", "thisRoomAvailabilityNew", "green_condition", "hp-rt-just-booked", "urgency_message_red", "usp-hotelpage--chains", "hp-blue-sans-rack-rate", "crossedout-price-icon", "-genius-full-logo", "hp-description-sub-header", "hp-availability-block-usp", "hp_sidebar_usp_box", "public_transport", "non_refundable_nr_blue", "genius_block_brand", "hp-lists-reserve", "js-hp-wl-sidebar", "listticker", "hp-social_proof-quote_author" ]; var index_page_elements = [ "specialsblock", "latest-reviews-stream", "sb-searchbox__subtitle-text", "sh-postcard-content-title", "index-nav_container" ]; var genius_elements = [ "ge-search-first ge-search-first-www", "genius-sort-icon", "ge-iconfont-extended", "genius_member_text" ]; var businessbookers_elements = [ "bbtool-index-teaser-banner" ]; var raf_elements = [ "raf-promo-banner", "js-raf-center-bar-link", "sidebar-raf-widget__container" ]; var search_page_elements = [ "all-inclusive-ribbon", "preferred-program-icon", "mouse_hover_general_rackrate", "-scarcity_indicator-pss_scarcity_1_left", "-scarcity_indicator-pss_scarcity_2_left", "-scarcity_indicator-pss_scarcity_3_left", "-scarcity_indicator-pss_scarcity_4_left", "-scarcity_indicator-pss_scarcity_5_left", "-scarcity_indicator-pss_scarcity_6_left", "-scarcity_indicator-pss_scarcity_7_left", "vpm_nd_links", "similar_destination", "footerconstraint-inner", "try_another_search_3", "cheaper-than-average", "district_link visited_link", "pub_trans" ]; var hotel_page_elements = [ "d-deal__dod-countdown", "d-deal", "d-deal-b", "hp-low_sidebar_to_content", "hp_cs_back_to_search", "althotels_fullwidth", "recent_property_reviews_block", "hp_useful_links_header", "hp-description--property-expectation", "hp-good-segment-facility-score", "hp_facilities_score_hl", "bpg_logo", "pp_bpg_tooltip_holder", "wrap-hotelpage-top__book top-book-form", "best-review-score" ]; var elements_to_remove = []; elements_to_remove.push( genius_elements ); elements_to_remove.push( raf_elements ); elements_to_remove.push( elements_that_suck ); elements_to_remove.push( index_page_elements ); elements_to_remove.push( businessbookers_elements ); elements_to_remove.push( search_page_elements ); elements_to_remove.push( hotel_page_elements ); setInterval( function() { if( active) { elements_to_remove.forEach( function( element_group, idx, arr) { element_group.forEach( function (el, idx, arr) { remove_elements_by_classname( el ); }); }); } console.log("Removed " + count_removed); }, 1000); function remove_elements_by_classname( name ) { var elements_with_class = document.getElementsByClassName( name ); count_removed += elements_with_class.length; for( var i=0; i<elements_with_class.length; i++ ) { elements_with_class[i].style.display = "none"; } } var prices = document.getElementsByClassName("rooms-table-room-price"); for(var i=0; i<prices.length; i++){ prices[i].style.color = "deepskyblue"; } prices = document.getElementsByClassName("red-actual-rack-rate"); for(var i=0; i<prices.length; i++){ prices[i].style.color = "skyblue"; }

smashu 9y ago

I work in the travel industry as a developer and my current task is to make our booking engine more "bookingcom-like" (yes, this is exactly how the requirements were formulated by product management). To achieve this task I did a small research of other travel web sites and I realised that most of them added such psychological elements lately. Today I found this gold article and forwarded it to the product managers, hehe :)

kbjrk 9y ago

There is a counter-movement emerging. During the techfestival in Copenhagen 150 people (Charles Adler, Peter Sunde, Jerry Michalsky to name a few) got together to formulate the Copenhagen Letter on Tech - read it here: https://copenhagenletter.org/ https://copenhagenletter.org/

andraganescu 9y ago

Would anyone pay a monthly fee for some dev to maintain some chrome/ff/safari ext that simply cleans up booking.com?

andraganescu 9y ago
I am actually thinking of having an online directory of specific website cleanup extensions which power users of said websites should be more than happy to pay for :)

yellowapple 9y ago

"I am not aware of any other service with a comparable number of properties and reviews." Trivago?