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Wow, that's surprising. I would have bet heavily on those messages being straight out false. I have seen the "3 other guests are looking" message in hotels in q

Wow, that's surprising. I would have bet heavily on those messages being straight out false. I have seen the "3 other guests are looking" message in hotels in quite off-track places and seasons, when booking well in advance. If that message is true, I guess I just underestimate the size of the market and/or the number of hotels that people will browse before booking.

Jaygles 7y ago
I wonder if some of those "guests" are website scrapers or other automated systems from competitors that are looking to get pricing info.
- GordonS 7y ago
  I wonder if some of these automated systems are ran by booking.com, or someone contracted to run them? Too cynical?
  - paranoidrobot 7y ago
    I worked for a competitor, and the amount of time+money we spent blocking scrapers was insane. The reason we spent all that time+money? It affected the metrics on which we were paid, AND consumed a huge amount of compute resources of ourselves and partners. It's also (at least in part) why places are doing the "Sign up to see special offers" thing - because the offer isn't for display on the open site, and they don't want that value to appear on scrapers. So... logged in users only, and validate that user isn't doing scraping.
    - wolco 7y ago
      Why not offer a public api? Logging in seems like a small hurdle for a bot but enough of a hassel that customers lose interest.
      - rocqua 7y ago
        Login with re-captcha, and banning of accounts that are obviously scraping could be quite effective I guess.
      - paranoidrobot 7y ago
        We did have an API, but it wasn't public - because search traffic is expensive. Both, as mentioned, in compute resources, but also in pissing off and/or outright crashing vendors. Logging in - requiring an email validation loop - would be simple for bots, but again, anti-bot tech stops them from doing it en-masse.
    - GordonS 7y ago
      > AND consumed a huge amount of compute resources of ourselves and partners Wow, I'm interested to know more here! How much bot/scraper traffic was there that it cost you big on compute?
      - paranoidrobot 7y ago
        I don't want to give away too much detail - Company IP, self identifying, etc. However, lets just say that if normal peak traffic is 1X, then bot traffic can come in at 100-10000X. And in most cases it's not a smooth rise, it'll be a case of suddenly all this new traffic came in, no warning, no rise. How many non-trivially complex sites do you know that can suddenly take 100-10000X their normal peak in under a minute? Those that do - are their managers happy about spending on idle infrastructure? How fast do you think even services like AWS can scale? (hint: it's not fast enough). Normal traffic is, in aggregate, quite predictable in load. Outside of very unusual situations, you don't get hundreds of thousands of people suddenly hitting your site. Plus, because that traffic is nice and predictable, you can have decent caching rules, reducing the cost of the traffic again. Along comes Mr Botnet and they want to scrape everything: every hotel in every city, every checkin/out tuple for stays of 1-7 days for the next 12 months, and a bunch of room configurations. Kiss your caching goodbye, because now not only is your cache hit ratio for their searches going to be effectively zero, but now it's being filled with other shit that nobody else wants. And this is just our infrastructure. There's the third party OTAs that we hit, and they have the same issue, often with smaller and less experienced teams running on crappier infrastructure. So, you get angry calls from them that their shared hosting provider is cutting them off and you're ruining their business. Because of course, this shared hosting is not only hosting their room availability search API, but their hotel check-in and sales applications - so nobody in 30 hotels can check-in/out.
        GordonS 7y ago
        Thanks for the detail. It's just mind-boggling to me that you could have a peak of (for example) 1K requests per second, then a bot rises that to 10M requests per second. If nothing else, it seems incredible that bot authors would be so willfully harmful - they must know that kind of behaviour is going to prompt a reaction
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      > Sign up to see special offers Another reason why they do that is because their partners require they don't advertise special pricing to the world at large, they're contractually forbidden from doing so.
- smueller1234 7y ago
  As you might intuitively conclude, Booking and its competitors invest quite heavily into detecting real vs. bot traffic. Often, sites will block bot traffic or degrade the content. Booking is very torn on that because they don't want an arms race. When I worked on the experiment tooling, we very much preferred to have more, but tagged bot traffic than less and undiscovered. That's because for the experiment analysis, the undiscovered bot traffic was poison.
- eggie5 7y ago
  True the are lots of booking scrapers like trivago
jorblumesea 7y ago
There's actually many things that I hated about travel sites, and then I worked at a "travel tech" company and it changed by perception of the industry as a whole. Part of the issue is the suppliers themselves. Bcom, Expedia, Kayak etc are all at the mercy of what individual hoteliers and airlines report. I've seen data issues where hotels will report little/no inventory, and we investigated the issue and it was on their end (user error, oops). Or, a huge party booked up the hotel, but users were angry because just 24 hours before, we showed N open rooms, and now we have almost nothing. Issues like this happen all the time, and the debate always centered around messaging. We would love to tell users why something is unbookable, but trying to figure out the details with suppliers ended up being near impossible. That being said, OTAs do have their own set of issues to answer for, including misleading messaging, scummy sales tactics, etc.
- dvtrn 7y ago
  I’ve recently joined travel/hospitality tech company adjacent to but not exactly the same as the core booking segment. What you said about investigating a lack of vacancy coming from the Hotelier/user error I would suspect has to do with poor PMS integration. You probably know some of the same vendor names that I do. For those unfamiliar, think of a Hotel’s PMS system like an ERP platform but for hotel operations and associating guest services with guest billing info. Buy the high-speed WiFi instead of using the slow free WiFi? That goes to the PMS and tells the hotel to bill you for it (if they don’t farm that out to a third-party who bills and remits on their behalf). Anyhow. I’ve come to learn, without naming any of my clients publicly that technology integration in hospitality (I specifically refer to household name hotel brands, not necessarily brands associated with ordering reservations like Expedia and Booking.com) ranges from exceptional but difficult to horrifying but trivial, and a common source of my personal frustrations as a product manager for our specific services (which require integration to these PMS platforms) is incomplete or inaccurate data produced by the property or hotel brand THEMSELVES I feel your frustration.
  - jorblumesea 7y ago
    Totally! I agree with everything you've said, their relatively lack of tech sophistication a huge PIA and it causes us daily headaches. In addition, I've noticed that their hardware and software is often terrible, non-performant or buggy. So when we try to interface with them, we need to do hacks like severe rate limiting and long term caching of inventory (sometimes 24+ hours), simply because if we wanted to run at the TPS we run at, they would tip over. This leads to stale inventory on our end, and customer anger. We would love to do everything live (with short term caching), but the suppliers just can't take the load. Just about the only direct call made is the booking one, everything else is stale by some amount. Monitoring/logging is often non-existent, so when you say "hey we're seeing latency" they have no idea how to diagnose or fix. Often, they don't have metrics in place and are unaware that there is latency to begin with. > incomplete or inaccurate data produced by the property or hotel brand THEMSELVES I believe it's largely because the RPC soap calls that many of these integrations use are stateful, so making the same call over and over again can lead to different results. Much of their tech stack is stuck in the 90s/early 2000s, and it shows.
paranoidrobot 7y ago
I can confirm it was also true for a competitor.
devdas 7y ago
It doesn't say anything about when they are looking for. It's a lie by omission.
atmosx 7y ago
I believe the alerts false, statistically speaking, these alerts don't make sense. Every room you click is in an end-of-world situation where you have to book now otherwise "who knows" and 5 days later the same amount of rooms is available and the same exact scenario is presented for all rooms/hotels. ps. What I usually do, is look at booking.com for hotels at cheaper prices and then head to the hotel's website. They usually have more categories of available rooms and at a cheaper price.
- Lucadg 7y ago
  I guess this heavily depends on markets. I'm often frustrated by the hotel's reply: book on booking.com

Jaygles 7y ago

I wonder if some of those "guests" are website scrapers or other automated systems from competitors that are looking to get pricing info.

GordonS 7y ago
I wonder if some of these automated systems are ran by booking.com, or someone contracted to run them? Too cynical?
- paranoidrobot 7y ago
  I worked for a competitor, and the amount of time+money we spent blocking scrapers was insane. The reason we spent all that time+money? It affected the metrics on which we were paid, AND consumed a huge amount of compute resources of ourselves and partners. It's also (at least in part) why places are doing the "Sign up to see special offers" thing - because the offer isn't for display on the open site, and they don't want that value to appear on scrapers. So... logged in users only, and validate that user isn't doing scraping.
  - wolco 7y ago
    Why not offer a public api? Logging in seems like a small hurdle for a bot but enough of a hassel that customers lose interest.
    - rocqua 7y ago
      Login with re-captcha, and banning of accounts that are obviously scraping could be quite effective I guess.
    - paranoidrobot 7y ago
      We did have an API, but it wasn't public - because search traffic is expensive. Both, as mentioned, in compute resources, but also in pissing off and/or outright crashing vendors. Logging in - requiring an email validation loop - would be simple for bots, but again, anti-bot tech stops them from doing it en-masse.
  - GordonS 7y ago
    > AND consumed a huge amount of compute resources of ourselves and partners Wow, I'm interested to know more here! How much bot/scraper traffic was there that it cost you big on compute?
    - paranoidrobot 7y ago
      I don't want to give away too much detail - Company IP, self identifying, etc. However, lets just say that if normal peak traffic is 1X, then bot traffic can come in at 100-10000X. And in most cases it's not a smooth rise, it'll be a case of suddenly all this new traffic came in, no warning, no rise. How many non-trivially complex sites do you know that can suddenly take 100-10000X their normal peak in under a minute? Those that do - are their managers happy about spending on idle infrastructure? How fast do you think even services like AWS can scale? (hint: it's not fast enough). Normal traffic is, in aggregate, quite predictable in load. Outside of very unusual situations, you don't get hundreds of thousands of people suddenly hitting your site. Plus, because that traffic is nice and predictable, you can have decent caching rules, reducing the cost of the traffic again. Along comes Mr Botnet and they want to scrape everything: every hotel in every city, every checkin/out tuple for stays of 1-7 days for the next 12 months, and a bunch of room configurations. Kiss your caching goodbye, because now not only is your cache hit ratio for their searches going to be effectively zero, but now it's being filled with other shit that nobody else wants. And this is just our infrastructure. There's the third party OTAs that we hit, and they have the same issue, often with smaller and less experienced teams running on crappier infrastructure. So, you get angry calls from them that their shared hosting provider is cutting them off and you're ruining their business. Because of course, this shared hosting is not only hosting their room availability search API, but their hotel check-in and sales applications - so nobody in 30 hotels can check-in/out.
      - GordonS 7y ago
        Thanks for the detail. It's just mind-boggling to me that you could have a peak of (for example) 1K requests per second, then a bot rises that to 10M requests per second. If nothing else, it seems incredible that bot authors would be so willfully harmful - they must know that kind of behaviour is going to prompt a reaction
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    > Sign up to see special offers Another reason why they do that is because their partners require they don't advertise special pricing to the world at large, they're contractually forbidden from doing so.
smueller1234 7y ago
As you might intuitively conclude, Booking and its competitors invest quite heavily into detecting real vs. bot traffic. Often, sites will block bot traffic or degrade the content. Booking is very torn on that because they don't want an arms race. When I worked on the experiment tooling, we very much preferred to have more, but tagged bot traffic than less and undiscovered. That's because for the experiment analysis, the undiscovered bot traffic was poison.
eggie5 7y ago
True the are lots of booking scrapers like trivago

jorblumesea 7y ago

There's actually many things that I hated about travel sites, and then I worked at a "travel tech" company and it changed by perception of the industry as a whole. Part of the issue is the suppliers themselves. Bcom, Expedia, Kayak etc are all at the mercy of what individual hoteliers and airlines report. I've seen data issues where hotels will report little/no inventory, and we investigated the issue and it was on their end (user error, oops). Or, a huge party booked up the hotel, but users were angry because just 24 hours before, we showed N open rooms, and now we have almost nothing. Issues like this happen all the time, and the debate always centered around messaging. We would love to tell users why something is unbookable, but trying to figure out the details with suppliers ended up being near impossible. That being said, OTAs do have their own set of issues to answer for, including misleading messaging, scummy sales tactics, etc.

dvtrn 7y ago
I’ve recently joined travel/hospitality tech company adjacent to but not exactly the same as the core booking segment. What you said about investigating a lack of vacancy coming from the Hotelier/user error I would suspect has to do with poor PMS integration. You probably know some of the same vendor names that I do. For those unfamiliar, think of a Hotel’s PMS system like an ERP platform but for hotel operations and associating guest services with guest billing info. Buy the high-speed WiFi instead of using the slow free WiFi? That goes to the PMS and tells the hotel to bill you for it (if they don’t farm that out to a third-party who bills and remits on their behalf). Anyhow. I’ve come to learn, without naming any of my clients publicly that technology integration in hospitality (I specifically refer to household name hotel brands, not necessarily brands associated with ordering reservations like Expedia and Booking.com) ranges from exceptional but difficult to horrifying but trivial, and a common source of my personal frustrations as a product manager for our specific services (which require integration to these PMS platforms) is incomplete or inaccurate data produced by the property or hotel brand THEMSELVES I feel your frustration.
- jorblumesea 7y ago
  Totally! I agree with everything you've said, their relatively lack of tech sophistication a huge PIA and it causes us daily headaches. In addition, I've noticed that their hardware and software is often terrible, non-performant or buggy. So when we try to interface with them, we need to do hacks like severe rate limiting and long term caching of inventory (sometimes 24+ hours), simply because if we wanted to run at the TPS we run at, they would tip over. This leads to stale inventory on our end, and customer anger. We would love to do everything live (with short term caching), but the suppliers just can't take the load. Just about the only direct call made is the booking one, everything else is stale by some amount. Monitoring/logging is often non-existent, so when you say "hey we're seeing latency" they have no idea how to diagnose or fix. Often, they don't have metrics in place and are unaware that there is latency to begin with. > incomplete or inaccurate data produced by the property or hotel brand THEMSELVES I believe it's largely because the RPC soap calls that many of these integrations use are stateful, so making the same call over and over again can lead to different results. Much of their tech stack is stuck in the 90s/early 2000s, and it shows.

paranoidrobot 7y ago

I can confirm it was also true for a competitor.

devdas 7y ago

It doesn't say anything about when they are looking for. It's a lie by omission.

atmosx 7y ago

I believe the alerts false, statistically speaking, these alerts don't make sense. Every room you click is in an end-of-world situation where you have to book now otherwise "who knows" and 5 days later the same amount of rooms is available and the same exact scenario is presented for all rooms/hotels. ps. What I usually do, is look at booking.com for hotels at cheaper prices and then head to the hotel's website. They usually have more categories of available rooms and at a cheaper price.

Lucadg 7y ago
I guess this heavily depends on markets. I'm often frustrated by the hotel's reply: book on booking.com