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my favorite part about Booking is that it will tell me how many other people are currently looking at the last available room i'm looking it. Let's me know if i
by pastor_elm 8y ago
my favorite part about Booking is that it will tell me how many other people are currently looking at the last available room i'm looking it. Let's me know if i have to swoop it up quickly!
- gruez 8y agoA/B testing at work
- dorian-graph 8y agoI question the accuracy, and that's as someone who has worked in the industry.
- cmod 8y agoThis is nothing if not a dark pattern, and I would be very suspicious of what metric triggers "looking at the room"
- bertil 8y agoThere are several copies, and one is explicitly that: they have loaded the same page recently. There are other copies, like rooms remaining, the recent slope of bookings is steep and will hit zero soon, etc. All are reasonably true.
- pvdebbe 8y agoThey just say that, because the sense of urgency on the customer's side is the seller's greatest asset.
- pjc50 8y agoI'd always assumed that was a lie. To me, the most useful feature of Booking is the refundability of most of their reservations, so I don't have to book hotel and flights simultaneously.
- smueller1234 8y agoIt's not a lie. Booking has received tremendous regulatory/legal scrutiny on that group of features and they wouldn't be caught red handed doing something indefensible in that space. That being said, there are clearly some decisions to be made about what "currently looking at" means: As engineers, we all know that nothing is tracking user eyeballs (thankfully), so in reality these things are necessarily implemented as a rolling sum of non-bot page views within X minutes. Whether or not the information is correct, of course, doesn't mean anybody has to like the feature. I personally really don't like it, but acknowledge that it was a feature with shockingly significant business impact when first released. Source: Used to work there. Read the respective code at the time (~2015/2016 or so).
- pjc50 8y agoGood to have an authoritative answer on this! Thanks.
- bertil 8y agoI can confirm (like smueller1234) that it is a real number (within reason on data flowing and estimates) which is actually a surprisingly hard engineering feat to achieve. I have heard several other sites where the number is a lot more… interpretative.