5 ms·
The Twitter thread pointed to a BBC article [1] that certainly suggests that the UK’s regulators don’t think this is okay. I’ve found that Booking.com legitimat
by boulos 7y ago
The Twitter thread pointed to a BBC article [1] that certainly suggests that the UK’s regulators don’t think this is okay. I’ve found that Booking.com legitimately treats independent rooms as “only one left” (e.g., the B&B has named rooms, so there’s always just one of a kind for each) but I suspect any investigation into most of these sites leads to “this is full of misleading dark patterns”.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49740143 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49740143
- Insanity 7y agoBooking.com is horrible to use in my opinion. It is handy but you need to ignore the dark patterns on every. Single. Page. Honestly it makes me want to use the website less, and does not urge me to buy.
- Gibbon1 7y agoI wonder about an app that just has phone numbers and a short description of hotels. If there are 50,000 hotels in the US, and you store 1K worth of data, that's only 50M. You could keep that on a phone no problem.
- Kliment 7y agoSadly that list doesn't answer the most important questions - do they have availability for a particular date, and at what price
- lotsofpulp 7y agoRoomkey.com has that information for all the major hotel brands, and it’s owned by the hotel brands themselves.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoI recognize roomkey.com from various Clojure related blog posts and interesting tech talks iirc. https://cognitect.com/roomkey-case-study.html https://cognitect.com/roomkey-case-study.html https://techblog.roomkey.com https://techblog.roomkey.com
- Gibbon1 7y agoHotels have this thing where you can call and a human will pick up and you can ask them questions. Like do they have a room available.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoImagine being able to go to one website, entering a location and dates, and seeing availability and prices all in the one place.
- Gibbon1 7y agoImagine much of it is dark patterns and bullshit.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoYou might have a point there ;) So you ring the hotel and the person who answers, if they’re worth their salt, tells you there’s only one room left / there’s a big convention on in town / everywhere else is likely fully booked out, and closes the sale.
- Gibbon1 7y agoI've called, been told no rooms, and then told that some other hotel has a room. Or told that someone canceled 15 minutes ago.
- rrrazdan 7y agoDo you frequently book hotels or travel? Just wondering because the app that you describe is so woefully short of even reasonable expectations, let alone what we have right now.
- krungthep 7y agoOnce I checked Agoda to get an idea of the room prices in the area I was visiting, but decided to get the room directly from reception assuming that the price would be the one I saw on Agoda minus their commision. I was wrong, the price was about 15% more expensive at reception and it didn't include breakfast. I pointed to them that I could get the room cheaper from Agoda and they told me to get it from Agoda then. I sat in the lobby and booked the room online.
- Lucadg 7y agoYes. This happens a lot. Often it's because the Hotels don't have an proper direct booking procedure in place and getting a direct booking is a hassle for them. In many countries though they are not even allowed by Booking to give a cheaper price which shows the power they have.
- tomc1985 7y ago> getting a direct booking is a hassle for them. You'd think they'd be a bit more willing to take peoples' money
- wila 7y agoBeen there, done that. There's another difference if you book your Thai hotelroom in Thai versus in English.
- djsumdog 7y agoLast time I had a phone screening with the, I learned their entire codebase was in Perl, with no plans on migration to anything else. There were almost no unit tests anywhere. Most developers could push directly to production. Everything the girl on the phone said was horrifying and I decided not to continue. Their recruiter kept trying to call me over Skype though, and they offer more than most other companies of that size in the EU, so I suspect they're pretty desperate. This was back in 2015 so maybe it's changed, but it sounds like a terrible place as far as technology and tech debt goes.
- kbenson 7y ago> their entire codebase was in Perl, with no plans on migration to anything else. There were almost no unit tests anywhere. Most developers could push directly to production. One of these things is not like the others. Not liking Perl is a valid personal choice, but doesn't say much about the codebase. The others are telling though. More so if it's true given that Perl has a very heavy culture of testing (the TAP protocol comes from Perl, and Perl is known for being very test heavy in its module ecossytem), which means they would be going against that culture to have no unit tests. That said, I'm not sure if we should consider "the girl on the phone" doing the screening as knowledgeable about the process. That description doesn't convey that you thought very highly of her, so I'm not sure why we should take her word as authoritative...
- riffraff 7y agoThe third hand knowledge I have of booking.com was that lack of unit tests was an explicit choice. I.e. they felt it was more efficient to just catch bugs in production and be quick to fix them than spend time in unit tests that got obsolete fast and add friction. I didn't buy in the narrative, but it was an interesting perspective.
- kbenson 7y agoI agree, that sounds like management being afraid to deal with the technical debt they've accrued.
- woutr_be 7y agoI still use booking.com quite frequently, but the dark patterns are starting to annoy me. I wish there was a better alternative tho, yes, I could book from hotels directly, but I still need to find those hotels, that's why I use something like booking.com. I've had hotels outright tell me to just book through a third-party booking website, since they didn't have their own booking form.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- donkeyd 7y agoBest thing to do is find a hotel through booking and then book directly. Many hotels give you a discount for it too, because they don't need to pay Booking.com.
- mcv 7y agoI recently had to book a hotel in Essen during the Spiel! game fair this week, during which nearly all hotels are sold out. Using Booking.com, I could only find hotels that were too expensive or too far away. Using a different site, I found a really affordable one near the Oberhausen railway station, at half an hour from the Messe in Essen. So Booking isn't even all that convenient. Yes, they have a lot, but they're also missing a lot. It pays to shop around.
- flukus 7y agoA lot of hotels will also spread their stock over a lot of sites to limit overbooking and micro management. They'll put 5 rooms on booking.com, 5 on expedia, and 5 spread around a dozen other places. There's no confirmation step like with deliveroo because the industry evolved with much less real time communication. So as far as booking.com knows there is only a few left. At least that was the case >10 years ago when I worked on automating this stuff.