16 ms·

The first time we booked a place on Booking.com, we were anxious the entire afternoon. Not sure if things have changed, but at that time they made it feel like

The first time we booked a place on Booking.com, we were anxious the entire afternoon. Not sure if things have changed, but at that time they made it feel like a racing game, flashy countdowns, everything but THAT place sold out in the area, OTHER PEOPLE WERE LOOKING AT IT, several email notifications in the span of hours because we haven't decided yet, and now it might be TOO LATE if we refresh the page. I wouldn't want to shop on that site ever again, they have no respect for their users.

shp0ngle 5y ago
I will give you a tip. * search hotel at booking.com * find that hotel at google * call them directly, by actual phone You will get a lower price always. Of course, you need to actually manually call them, which people don't want to do; but it always worked for me.
- lentil_soup 5y ago
  sometimes they even have their own website so no need to call! Quite often I get a lower price or free goodies (ie. a bottle of wine) because I skipped booking.com
  - Anthony-G 5y ago
    I always try the hotel’s own website but often the prices are higher. I have previously got cheaper prices by talking directly to the owner or hotel management when deciding to extend my stay.
- skocznymroczny 5y ago
  Might work in the US, but it's not always that easy. Some people do not like to talk over the phone in general. Also, if booking a stay abroad, the owner might not speak English.
- LudwigNagasena 5y ago
  * Search a hotel at booking.com * Find them at Google * Call them directly * Get a super expensive price and a tip to book online
  - brandall10 5y ago
    This has been my experience the few times I’ve tried it. I had a gf who was able to get a different experience but it always seemed she had to get the manager on the line to do so.
- jaclaz 5y ago
  I would add something (disclaimer I am involved in the management of a small hotel, this comes from my experience): 1) you will talk to a human 2) you will be able to talk about particular requests (like - say - higher or lower floor, an additional bed for your child, room with balcony, non standard breakfast, etc.) 3) the dates/times of your arrival and departure will be double checked interactively with the hotel clerk [0] 4) the rate will be double checked and confirmed [1] (besides very likely being lower, particularly if you are going to stay mmore than one or two days) [0] it is not extremely rare that people make mistakes with the dates, when/if you arrive one day earlier it is usually not a problem (unless the hotel has no vacancies) but if you arrive one day later, that is a "no show", your money cannot be recovered [1] it happens often enough that people books a double room ( but for one person) by mistake and then is surprised that the hotel asks for a supplement for the second person
- kmarc 5y ago
  This might work in the US, but the rest 80% of the world... I am aware of booking's dirty tools to make you feel you have to book NOW! However, after around 100+ booking.com booking all around the world (including small villages in Amazonia or Laos) I am eternally grateful that for that extra 1$/night or so I get instant support with whatever probleem I had.
  - techcode 5y ago
    Thanks ♡ And imagine that our mission is to have everyone feel that same way. Obviously as middle man you take some part of the pie - though idea is that it's worth for everyone. BTW - it's not that common to meet customer with 100+ reservations. So excuse me for asking - what do you think of the changes in the account area (My Trips)?
    - kmarc 5y ago
      Sorry my bad, on booking.com I only have around 50 (private), the rest are company booking systems. (felt much more!) Currently I only have the android app (well, traveling again) and I am mostly satisfied with it. However the web version I always found a disaster. Especially since I had a linked business account too, and the SSO just craps itself into a redirect loop when I try to logout from it. Everything else seems to be very user-oriented and I am satisfied in general. (ha, I also happen to know the storage system behind the backend ;-) )
  - shp0ngle 5y ago
    ...I am living in Vietnam, part of the "80%", and doing this every time. It always works. When speaking Vietnamese, you get an extra discount.
ratww 5y ago
Booking.com is a terrible company in pretty much every regard. I've had a reservation to a hotel that was pretty full according to the website scare tactics, but when I got there I was the only person to come in weeks. Also, their support is abysmal. Often when hotels fail to provide rooms as advertised, they play a "not my fault" game with the hotels, where the hotels claim they can't refund because the money is stuck with Booking.com while Booking.com claim the money is in the hotels account. Then they give you a "20% refund" that you can use on your next purchase there. It also happened twice to me that they "double charges" me, with a pre-charge (that is deleted in a few weeks) and then with a real pay, which might leave you without money in your credit card if you have a small credit limit.
- thrdbndndn 5y ago
  I agree with all your points. However, last time I travel for a extended time (hotel everyday at different place for a month), I found Booking has the best UI after some comparison between all the major players (keep in mind lots of them are from the same company), I still used it. Would like a recommandation about what to use instead.
  - Reason077 5y ago
    As you point out, the vast majority of hotel booking platforms in the US and Europe are controlled by either Booking Holdings or Expedia Group. Whatever website you use, chances are it's really of one of these conglomerates. But some notable exceptions include: Trip.com Tripadvisor Lastminute (Trivago used to be another major independent, but Expedia Group now owns the majority of it's shares)
  - ratww 5y ago
    I still use their UI but I just call the hotels directly. When I can't find anything, I use AirBnB.
- dessant 5y ago
  After snatching that alleged last apartment in a 3 story cabin, we ended up being the only guests, and the owner was snoring in the attic.
throwaway47292 5y ago
The way the pay-per-click machine works, is you pay like 3$ for 'hotels in amsterdam', their average (public info) commission is 15%. Looking at booking.com/amsterdam you can see vague idea about average price, lets say most bookings are 2 nights, then you can get ballpark average reservation of around 200$, 15% of that is 30$. So for each room they sell they can buy 10 clicks on 'hotels in amsterdam'. This is super ballpark estimates, could be order of magnitude different, but the idea is that there is enormous incentive to push people to book, its the same as the example in the article, pushing people to buy. Purely because the pay-per-click is so expensive, you need ROI > 1 to survive. Those companies are in survivor mode, and anything that is even remotely legal, or can be defended in court, is allowed and encouraged. Thing like 70% off on pair of shoes, that just had their price increased by 90% for 1 minute, just so there was a record in the database that they actually had higher price, nobody cares that they never sold at the high price. Companies constantly push the legal boundary.
- iso1631 5y ago
  Presumably the majority of clients are happy, and go back to booking.com after their first visit, thus costing $0
  - throwaway47292 5y ago
    yes, loyalty just reduces the cost per click, but the math is the same, so they buy 100 people instead of 10 people with one reservation, but the game is the same. EDIT: also think about how many times people book per year, maybe 4-5 times in the upper quantiles? so if booking pays 3$ for you, it will take a couple of months until your next booking so they can reinvest your 15% commission to buy other people.
    - kofejnik 5y ago
      A a freelance consultant, Pre COVID I was easily booking 50 times/year
      - 5y ago
phiresky 5y ago
This only got better (at least here) because booking.com had to change their practices after legal action from the EU consumer protection commission. > As a market leader, it is vital that companies like Booking.com meet their responsibilities in this area, ensuring that online accommodation reservation systems are free from manipulative techniques such as hiding sponsoring in ranking, unduly putting time pressure on users or misrepresenting rebates. > Booking.com has committed to make the following changes to their practices by 16 June 2020 at the latest: * Make clear to consumers that any statement such as “last room available!” refers only to the offer on the Booking.com platform; * Not present an offer as being time-limited if the same price will still be available afterwards; * Clarify how results are ranked and, whether payments made by the accommodation provider to Booking.com have influenced its position in the list of results; * Ensure that it is clear when a price comparison is based on different circumstances (e.g. stay dates) and not present that comparison as a discount; * Ensure that price comparisons presented as discounts represent genuine savings, e.g. by providing details about the Standard Rate price taken as a reference; * Display the total price that the consumers will have to pay (including all unavoidable charges, fees and taxes that can reasonably be calculated in advance) in a clear and prominent way; https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/es/ip_19_6812 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/es/ip_19_...
jevoten 5y ago
At what point does this become fraud? If they were selling stocks, and making it appear they had more buy orders than in reality, they'd be in jail. But sell hotel reservations, and you can lie about the state of the market with impunity?
jankotek 5y ago
Perhaps it is just travel anxiety? I book hotels a few hours in advance and stats like "only 2 rooms left", are usually correct when I check with hotel reception. At least in Europe booking.com is much better than competition. It has loyalty discounts, transparent pricing and consistent experience. Reviews and descriptions are actually useful, not BS. Emails I get are usually "place you looked at become 30% cheaper".
- dessant 5y ago
  > Perhaps it is just travel anxiety? It was just an illegal consumer practice. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_19_6812 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_19_...
  - techcode 5y ago
    Not sure what illegal consumer practice are you talking about. Reading through the points from the page you posted - I think internally only actions related to that were basically to add more info (e.g. popup/hover or just "on our site") to clarify to people that same as every other marketplace on the Internet ... coughAmazoncough ... Things we show are just things we know about and have in our "inventory". And actually after some of those changes - I believe some customers started to complain that reminding them how "X other people are looking at {name of hotel} for your dates" felt much creepier than "X other people are looking at {name of hotel}" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ --- PS. Only reason I wrote a quoted "inventory" is that unlike physical goods with real stock. When you're renting accommodation - on top of physical rooms, there's extra dimensions due to different dates, meals (because in many hotels restaurant can't support everyone having breakfast, half/full board/meals) ...etc.
    - dessant 5y ago
      > Not sure what illegal consumer practice are you talking about. > I was part of "Consumer Psychology Team" at Booking.com for years. That team was/is one way or another involved in pretty much every functionality you mentioned You were part of a team that cooked up new ways to harm consumers. Playing the same word games here too is a bit tasteless. When your company is forced to "align practices presenting offers and prices with EU law following EU action", that means you've done something illegal, and you were caught. Nothing else matters.
AussieWog93 5y ago
>I wouldn't want to shop on that site ever again, they have no respect for their users. Perhaps this may the case for you (it's one of the reasons I refuse to use food delivery apps), but across the general population these dodgy tactics do seem to work. In my eBay business, at times we've seen a >100% increase in sales during the last 24 hours of a promotion, when the site starts showing ticking red countdown timers.
PMan74 5y ago
"Hate Selling" is the term coined by one of the industry magazines https://skift.com/2015/08/10/travel-brands-stop-hate-selling-to-your-customers/ https://skift.com/2015/08/10/travel-brands-stop-hate-selling...
techcode 5y ago
I was part of "Consumer Psychology Team" at Booking.com for years. That team was/is one way or another involved in pretty much every functionality you mentioned (among other things I did in particular latest version/implementation of "X other people looking at this") and TL;DR: All of it is real - and majority of people don't find it as annoying as you, many even find it helpful --- While I can't really give too many details (BTW I still work at Booking - just moved teams). I did the real time (it's a stream so technically that's "near real time") processing back-end which collects all the "views events", uses anonymous unique user identifiers to make sure it's truly not counting duplicates, bots are also excluded ...etc. And result is a reverse index of sorts. On the FE side (technically still BE so think backend for frontend) as part of producing message (or not) we literally do a real-time query on that reversed index to be sure that even if looking only at count it's "1" - we want to be sure that it's not you. As of things like "Only X left" - that's literally how many rooms we've got left to offer to you for the dates you've entered. --- And speaking generally. Booking.com being 25+ years old global company, one can imagine that company is basically constantly under microscope of various regulators and consumer protection agencies. So even if there was someone that wanted to fake this type of stuff (and that would be going against what they've learned in various mandatory ethics, privacy, legal ... training). Well something like that would've been very short lived. And with so much money on the line - companies (at least those that don't have walled garden ecosystems and such) actually do look into long term effect of things like Marketing/Sales/Persuasion - because they don't want to annoy potential customers so much that they never come back.
ransom1538 5y ago
Here is what I do. Find the hotel on booking.com. Call the hotel directly. Tell them the price is what you found online - per night on booking.com. EVERY time they give me that rate over the phone. The end. Done.
neya 5y ago
I booked a hotel room with them and when I arrived there, the hotel said they had no such record of my booking. I showed the receipts and all, but the hotel washed their hands off saying the server was down, etc. I contacted booking.com, but it was useless. I literally spent 2 hours in the hotel lobby trying to figure out what was going on and how I could get my money back. Their support is almost non-existent, especially for money related matters. The unhelpful thing their agent told me was "Oh, if you were wrongly charged, the amount would be credited back to your account in X days". I was so pissed off that I filed a chargeback with my credit card provider that very moment with all the evidence and then booked a room in a different hotel for the night for twice the budget I had. 4 business days later, I get spam calls from random numbers and guess who it was? Booking.com "We apologize, we will give you this credit into your account, bla bla" something along those lines. Chargeback is the real way to fight such scammy companies. Because, they lose more money than they will make from you. Hit them where it hurts. Lesson learnt. Now, I ALWAYS use my credit card for booking anything online.

shp0ngle 5y ago

I will give you a tip. * search hotel at booking.com * find that hotel at google * call them directly, by actual phone You will get a lower price always. Of course, you need to actually manually call them, which people don't want to do; but it always worked for me.

lentil_soup 5y ago
sometimes they even have their own website so no need to call! Quite often I get a lower price or free goodies (ie. a bottle of wine) because I skipped booking.com
- Anthony-G 5y ago
  I always try the hotel’s own website but often the prices are higher. I have previously got cheaper prices by talking directly to the owner or hotel management when deciding to extend my stay.
skocznymroczny 5y ago
Might work in the US, but it's not always that easy. Some people do not like to talk over the phone in general. Also, if booking a stay abroad, the owner might not speak English.
LudwigNagasena 5y ago
* Search a hotel at booking.com * Find them at Google * Call them directly * Get a super expensive price and a tip to book online
- brandall10 5y ago
  This has been my experience the few times I’ve tried it. I had a gf who was able to get a different experience but it always seemed she had to get the manager on the line to do so.
jaclaz 5y ago
I would add something (disclaimer I am involved in the management of a small hotel, this comes from my experience): 1) you will talk to a human 2) you will be able to talk about particular requests (like - say - higher or lower floor, an additional bed for your child, room with balcony, non standard breakfast, etc.) 3) the dates/times of your arrival and departure will be double checked interactively with the hotel clerk [0] 4) the rate will be double checked and confirmed [1] (besides very likely being lower, particularly if you are going to stay mmore than one or two days) [0] it is not extremely rare that people make mistakes with the dates, when/if you arrive one day earlier it is usually not a problem (unless the hotel has no vacancies) but if you arrive one day later, that is a "no show", your money cannot be recovered [1] it happens often enough that people books a double room ( but for one person) by mistake and then is surprised that the hotel asks for a supplement for the second person
kmarc 5y ago
This might work in the US, but the rest 80% of the world... I am aware of booking's dirty tools to make you feel you have to book NOW! However, after around 100+ booking.com booking all around the world (including small villages in Amazonia or Laos) I am eternally grateful that for that extra 1$/night or so I get instant support with whatever probleem I had.
- techcode 5y ago
  Thanks ♡ And imagine that our mission is to have everyone feel that same way. Obviously as middle man you take some part of the pie - though idea is that it's worth for everyone. BTW - it's not that common to meet customer with 100+ reservations. So excuse me for asking - what do you think of the changes in the account area (My Trips)?
  - kmarc 5y ago
    Sorry my bad, on booking.com I only have around 50 (private), the rest are company booking systems. (felt much more!) Currently I only have the android app (well, traveling again) and I am mostly satisfied with it. However the web version I always found a disaster. Especially since I had a linked business account too, and the SSO just craps itself into a redirect loop when I try to logout from it. Everything else seems to be very user-oriented and I am satisfied in general. (ha, I also happen to know the storage system behind the backend ;-) )
- shp0ngle 5y ago
  ...I am living in Vietnam, part of the "80%", and doing this every time. It always works. When speaking Vietnamese, you get an extra discount.

ratww 5y ago

Booking.com is a terrible company in pretty much every regard. I've had a reservation to a hotel that was pretty full according to the website scare tactics, but when I got there I was the only person to come in weeks. Also, their support is abysmal. Often when hotels fail to provide rooms as advertised, they play a "not my fault" game with the hotels, where the hotels claim they can't refund because the money is stuck with Booking.com while Booking.com claim the money is in the hotels account. Then they give you a "20% refund" that you can use on your next purchase there. It also happened twice to me that they "double charges" me, with a pre-charge (that is deleted in a few weeks) and then with a real pay, which might leave you without money in your credit card if you have a small credit limit.

thrdbndndn 5y ago
I agree with all your points. However, last time I travel for a extended time (hotel everyday at different place for a month), I found Booking has the best UI after some comparison between all the major players (keep in mind lots of them are from the same company), I still used it. Would like a recommandation about what to use instead.
- Reason077 5y ago
  As you point out, the vast majority of hotel booking platforms in the US and Europe are controlled by either Booking Holdings or Expedia Group. Whatever website you use, chances are it's really of one of these conglomerates. But some notable exceptions include: Trip.com Tripadvisor Lastminute (Trivago used to be another major independent, but Expedia Group now owns the majority of it's shares)
- ratww 5y ago
  I still use their UI but I just call the hotels directly. When I can't find anything, I use AirBnB.
dessant 5y ago
After snatching that alleged last apartment in a 3 story cabin, we ended up being the only guests, and the owner was snoring in the attic.

throwaway47292 5y ago

The way the pay-per-click machine works, is you pay like 3$ for 'hotels in amsterdam', their average (public info) commission is 15%. Looking at booking.com/amsterdam you can see vague idea about average price, lets say most bookings are 2 nights, then you can get ballpark average reservation of around 200$, 15% of that is 30$. So for each room they sell they can buy 10 clicks on 'hotels in amsterdam'. This is super ballpark estimates, could be order of magnitude different, but the idea is that there is enormous incentive to push people to book, its the same as the example in the article, pushing people to buy. Purely because the pay-per-click is so expensive, you need ROI > 1 to survive. Those companies are in survivor mode, and anything that is even remotely legal, or can be defended in court, is allowed and encouraged. Thing like 70% off on pair of shoes, that just had their price increased by 90% for 1 minute, just so there was a record in the database that they actually had higher price, nobody cares that they never sold at the high price. Companies constantly push the legal boundary.

iso1631 5y ago
Presumably the majority of clients are happy, and go back to booking.com after their first visit, thus costing $0
- throwaway47292 5y ago
  yes, loyalty just reduces the cost per click, but the math is the same, so they buy 100 people instead of 10 people with one reservation, but the game is the same. EDIT: also think about how many times people book per year, maybe 4-5 times in the upper quantiles? so if booking pays 3$ for you, it will take a couple of months until your next booking so they can reinvest your 15% commission to buy other people.
  - kofejnik 5y ago
    A a freelance consultant, Pre COVID I was easily booking 50 times/year
    - 5y ago

phiresky 5y ago

This only got better (at least here) because booking.com had to change their practices after legal action from the EU consumer protection commission. > As a market leader, it is vital that companies like Booking.com meet their responsibilities in this area, ensuring that online accommodation reservation systems are free from manipulative techniques such as hiding sponsoring in ranking, unduly putting time pressure on users or misrepresenting rebates. > Booking.com has committed to make the following changes to their practices by 16 June 2020 at the latest: * Make clear to consumers that any statement such as “last room available!” refers only to the offer on the Booking.com platform; * Not present an offer as being time-limited if the same price will still be available afterwards; * Clarify how results are ranked and, whether payments made by the accommodation provider to Booking.com have influenced its position in the list of results; * Ensure that it is clear when a price comparison is based on different circumstances (e.g. stay dates) and not present that comparison as a discount; * Ensure that price comparisons presented as discounts represent genuine savings, e.g. by providing details about the Standard Rate price taken as a reference; * Display the total price that the consumers will have to pay (including all unavoidable charges, fees and taxes that can reasonably be calculated in advance) in a clear and prominent way; https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/es/ip_19_6812 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/es/ip_19_...

jevoten 5y ago

At what point does this become fraud? If they were selling stocks, and making it appear they had more buy orders than in reality, they'd be in jail. But sell hotel reservations, and you can lie about the state of the market with impunity?

jankotek 5y ago

Perhaps it is just travel anxiety? I book hotels a few hours in advance and stats like "only 2 rooms left", are usually correct when I check with hotel reception. At least in Europe booking.com is much better than competition. It has loyalty discounts, transparent pricing and consistent experience. Reviews and descriptions are actually useful, not BS. Emails I get are usually "place you looked at become 30% cheaper".

dessant 5y ago
> Perhaps it is just travel anxiety? It was just an illegal consumer practice. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_19_6812 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_19_...
- techcode 5y ago
  Not sure what illegal consumer practice are you talking about. Reading through the points from the page you posted - I think internally only actions related to that were basically to add more info (e.g. popup/hover or just "on our site") to clarify to people that same as every other marketplace on the Internet ... coughAmazoncough ... Things we show are just things we know about and have in our "inventory". And actually after some of those changes - I believe some customers started to complain that reminding them how "X other people are looking at {name of hotel} for your dates" felt much creepier than "X other people are looking at {name of hotel}" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ --- PS. Only reason I wrote a quoted "inventory" is that unlike physical goods with real stock. When you're renting accommodation - on top of physical rooms, there's extra dimensions due to different dates, meals (because in many hotels restaurant can't support everyone having breakfast, half/full board/meals) ...etc.
  - dessant 5y ago
    > Not sure what illegal consumer practice are you talking about. > I was part of "Consumer Psychology Team" at Booking.com for years. That team was/is one way or another involved in pretty much every functionality you mentioned You were part of a team that cooked up new ways to harm consumers. Playing the same word games here too is a bit tasteless. When your company is forced to "align practices presenting offers and prices with EU law following EU action", that means you've done something illegal, and you were caught. Nothing else matters.

AussieWog93 5y ago

>I wouldn't want to shop on that site ever again, they have no respect for their users. Perhaps this may the case for you (it's one of the reasons I refuse to use food delivery apps), but across the general population these dodgy tactics do seem to work. In my eBay business, at times we've seen a >100% increase in sales during the last 24 hours of a promotion, when the site starts showing ticking red countdown timers.

PMan74 5y ago

"Hate Selling" is the term coined by one of the industry magazines https://skift.com/2015/08/10/travel-brands-stop-hate-selling-to-your-customers/ https://skift.com/2015/08/10/travel-brands-stop-hate-selling...

techcode 5y ago

I was part of "Consumer Psychology Team" at Booking.com for years. That team was/is one way or another involved in pretty much every functionality you mentioned (among other things I did in particular latest version/implementation of "X other people looking at this") and TL;DR: All of it is real - and majority of people don't find it as annoying as you, many even find it helpful --- While I can't really give too many details (BTW I still work at Booking - just moved teams). I did the real time (it's a stream so technically that's "near real time") processing back-end which collects all the "views events", uses anonymous unique user identifiers to make sure it's truly not counting duplicates, bots are also excluded ...etc. And result is a reverse index of sorts. On the FE side (technically still BE so think backend for frontend) as part of producing message (or not) we literally do a real-time query on that reversed index to be sure that even if looking only at count it's "1" - we want to be sure that it's not you. As of things like "Only X left" - that's literally how many rooms we've got left to offer to you for the dates you've entered. --- And speaking generally. Booking.com being 25+ years old global company, one can imagine that company is basically constantly under microscope of various regulators and consumer protection agencies. So even if there was someone that wanted to fake this type of stuff (and that would be going against what they've learned in various mandatory ethics, privacy, legal ... training). Well something like that would've been very short lived. And with so much money on the line - companies (at least those that don't have walled garden ecosystems and such) actually do look into long term effect of things like Marketing/Sales/Persuasion - because they don't want to annoy potential customers so much that they never come back.

ransom1538 5y ago

Here is what I do. Find the hotel on booking.com. Call the hotel directly. Tell them the price is what you found online - per night on booking.com. EVERY time they give me that rate over the phone. The end. Done.

neya 5y ago

I booked a hotel room with them and when I arrived there, the hotel said they had no such record of my booking. I showed the receipts and all, but the hotel washed their hands off saying the server was down, etc. I contacted booking.com, but it was useless. I literally spent 2 hours in the hotel lobby trying to figure out what was going on and how I could get my money back. Their support is almost non-existent, especially for money related matters. The unhelpful thing their agent told me was "Oh, if you were wrongly charged, the amount would be credited back to your account in X days". I was so pissed off that I filed a chargeback with my credit card provider that very moment with all the evidence and then booked a room in a different hotel for the night for twice the budget I had. 4 business days later, I get spam calls from random numbers and guess who it was? Booking.com "We apologize, we will give you this credit into your account, bla bla" something along those lines. Chargeback is the real way to fight such scammy companies. Because, they lose more money than they will make from you. Hit them where it hurts. Lesson learnt. Now, I ALWAYS use my credit card for booking anything online.