There are very few, if any at all, large companies that are honest with their customers on this stuff. I did a contract a couple of years ago with an online ho

There are very few, if any at all, large companies that are honest with their customers on this stuff. I did a contract a couple of years ago with an online home rental company. I strongly suspect the "only X left in this area" and "viewed Y times" were often completely fictitious. (The latter could be easily gamed by including it in any search results page, anyway...) Since I was the PM for the product, I know for certain that 100% of the properties they featured in their weekly emails touting getaway destinations were already booked and never available. To my knowledge, they never promoted a property that was actually available the entire time I was there. And I strongly suspect there was something fishy about the advertised rates, too, since they were always ridiculously attractive properties that they knew couldn't be booked.