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I worked at booking until late 2017. I was responsible for all their infrastructure and tooling development until the start of that year. We all hated the urge

I worked at booking until late 2017. I was responsible for all their infrastructure and tooling development until the start of that year. We all hated the urgency messaging internally. Hated it. We felt bad. Many of us were reasonably proud of our product and felt this tarnished our ability to deliver value to customers. We argued with the product org and the CPO on a regular basis. The reality is that the urgency messaging drove significant incremental business that they felt they could not afford to pass up. The logic that the CPO applied at the time was some pretty sporty mental gymnastics: "we optimize for conversion (looker to booker) because that's a proxy to actually delivering value to the customer." The idea was that if a customer books and stays, it means they found what they were looking for. Being stuck in a perpetual, frustrating decision paralysis sucks after all. While I didn't agree with that framing, it's a touch less preposterous than it sounds. At the time, almost all bookings were fully refundable. So if you booked and stayed (you could have cancelled any time before the day at no cost, for most bookings), there's indeed something that went sort of right. Of course we also tried to measure CSAT in a number of ways (like net promoter scores) but those measurements are tricky at best. In any case, one of the counter proposals, which I tried to co-champion unsuccessfully, was to add a checkbox to the account area to opt out of urgent messaging. The idea was that if you were annoyed enough by them to find that flag (or to be told where to find it) then surely it would also be better for the company to give you that and retain you as a customer? It was IIRC never tried. I was sad. It would've been a tricky to measure experiment, that would have had to be run for a long time. Loyalty measurement is hard.

teekert 3y ago
Am I the only one that sees such urgency messages and then thinks: Well ok, then not? I'm orienting, looking at options, I'm just annoyed if my final list contains options that are gone by the time I feel ready to make a choice. The whole thing just makes me annoyed and look for other options. I had the same with a guy that wanted to sell us a mortgage, he said: "Better decide now, interest rates are probably going up next week." one day later he calls again: "You need to decide soon." So I tell him, "Ok, thank you we will not be going with your service then, I prefer to take time and I don't like this pressure." The guy was almost speechless. So I guess he expects people to be persuaded. Another example: The parents of a friend had their whole kitchen drawn and an offer on the table. So they want to take it home to think it over. The seller tells them: "What? No! I have to ask my manager if I am allowed to let you go like this, we went through a whole process!" So they actually sign! Same thing happened to friends, they told the seller: "What, this is not a prison, are you crazy!"... and they left. I guess most people are in the "I will allow myself to be pressured into stuff I don't want"-camp. I guess those are the people that also cave under pressure when being social engineered for access to their credit card. Maybe we can do something with this knowledge? Booking.com knows who the people are that will cave, to a degree I guess. Well it would be difficult to separate them from the people that just decide fast.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  > The parents of a friend had their whole kitchen drawn and an offer on the table. So they want to take it home to think it over. While I'm completely with you for not letting sellers try to stress you into buying, I understand that they can't let the parents take the kitchen drawings home. The company put in bespoke work into planning the kitchen, and can't let the customer just take the plans for free and go hire another company for doing the work.
  - teekert 3y ago
    Around here it is pretty standard practice for kitchen shops to draw the whole thing as a sort of "visual offer", their price is determined by all the stuff you drag into the 3D tool. All shops have that, it is really fast. Besides, I can just take all the ideas and not the drawing and achieve a similar result somewhere else. It's just the risk the shops take, that their effort is for nothing.
- lesuorac 3y ago
  > I guess most people are in the "I will allow myself to be pressured into stuff I don't want"-camp. I guess those are the people that also cave under pressure when being social engineered for access to their credit card. Yes, this is why a lot of US states have laws allowing you to undo a transaction within 24h and sometimes 7days if the buyer is over 55. I think a lot of the durations go up for items typically sold by a sales person (i.e. furniture, windows, etc).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
I hope the feedback I provided on the CSAT form (worst possible score, more or less stating that I will actively switch to any competitor that doesn't totally suck as soon as I find one, specifically because of the urgency crap) helped support the position of the people opposing this crap.
draven 3y ago
I worked for a sister company. These features were A/B tested, their effect on bookings measured, and the numbers affected the bonuses of POs. They were thus incentivized to try these kinds of annoying tricks, because ultimately they work, or at least they do when their effect is observed only in terms of bookings. I asked several times if we somehow measured customer retention, as we kept adding stuff I thought would have a negative effect in the long term (a customer would go through the whole booking process, only to never return because the experience was too bad.) We didn't. I guess it's difficult, I have no idea how this kind of metric would be computed. The checkbox is a nice idea, it could help retain customers on the verge of leaving. It wouldn't work for customers who visit once and get so annoyed they never come back. Also: a good portion of the traffic was affiliate traffic, like from Google Maps. I guess people booking from a Google Map listing care less since they land on the hotel page ? They won't be looking for hotels through the site UI, so they get fewer annoying pop-ups and messages.
- smueller1234 3y ago
  So one thing we did was for (a/b style) experiments to continue to collect data even after taking a decision to enable or disable[1]. No new sessions/devices would be added to the experiment, but those already exposed would still be reflected. So if everyone who decided to book because of an experiment ends up cancelling or consistently providing more negative feedback over the months that follow, our automation could still flag that. Whatever we may say about the company and its practices, the engineering team working on the experimentation tooling had their heart in the right place. They worked extremely hard and with tremendous care on trying to make sure the data presented would cause the best possible decisions. [1] Caveat: if an experiment was disabled fully (doesn't work or buggy) or enabled fully, obviously the experiment measurement is now no longer clean because folks in one variant will now see the other. But for trailing metrics like anything that affected past booking decisions, this type of analysis may not be perfect but still carries some meaning as a health check. Edit: formatting fix
jwr 3y ago
Thanks for sharing! That is what I suspected. I also suspect that while this does increase revenue in the short term, it might backfire in the future. I hate this messaging so much, that I now dislike booking.com overall and I actively look for other options (such as booking directly with hotels). Searching for a place to stay on Booking is no longer fun: it is an anxiety-inducing chore that I hate and try to avoid. And that's from a Genius level 2 customer. I guess this works for now, but as soon as a viable competitor appears…

teekert 3y ago

Am I the only one that sees such urgency messages and then thinks: Well ok, then not? I'm orienting, looking at options, I'm just annoyed if my final list contains options that are gone by the time I feel ready to make a choice. The whole thing just makes me annoyed and look for other options. I had the same with a guy that wanted to sell us a mortgage, he said: "Better decide now, interest rates are probably going up next week." one day later he calls again: "You need to decide soon." So I tell him, "Ok, thank you we will not be going with your service then, I prefer to take time and I don't like this pressure." The guy was almost speechless. So I guess he expects people to be persuaded. Another example: The parents of a friend had their whole kitchen drawn and an offer on the table. So they want to take it home to think it over. The seller tells them: "What? No! I have to ask my manager if I am allowed to let you go like this, we went through a whole process!" So they actually sign! Same thing happened to friends, they told the seller: "What, this is not a prison, are you crazy!"... and they left. I guess most people are in the "I will allow myself to be pressured into stuff I don't want"-camp. I guess those are the people that also cave under pressure when being social engineered for access to their credit card. Maybe we can do something with this knowledge? Booking.com knows who the people are that will cave, to a degree I guess. Well it would be difficult to separate them from the people that just decide fast.

carlosjobim 3y ago
> The parents of a friend had their whole kitchen drawn and an offer on the table. So they want to take it home to think it over. While I'm completely with you for not letting sellers try to stress you into buying, I understand that they can't let the parents take the kitchen drawings home. The company put in bespoke work into planning the kitchen, and can't let the customer just take the plans for free and go hire another company for doing the work.
- teekert 3y ago
  Around here it is pretty standard practice for kitchen shops to draw the whole thing as a sort of "visual offer", their price is determined by all the stuff you drag into the 3D tool. All shops have that, it is really fast. Besides, I can just take all the ideas and not the drawing and achieve a similar result somewhere else. It's just the risk the shops take, that their effort is for nothing.
lesuorac 3y ago
> I guess most people are in the "I will allow myself to be pressured into stuff I don't want"-camp. I guess those are the people that also cave under pressure when being social engineered for access to their credit card. Yes, this is why a lot of US states have laws allowing you to undo a transaction within 24h and sometimes 7days if the buyer is over 55. I think a lot of the durations go up for items typically sold by a sales person (i.e. furniture, windows, etc).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago

I hope the feedback I provided on the CSAT form (worst possible score, more or less stating that I will actively switch to any competitor that doesn't totally suck as soon as I find one, specifically because of the urgency crap) helped support the position of the people opposing this crap.

draven 3y ago

I worked for a sister company. These features were A/B tested, their effect on bookings measured, and the numbers affected the bonuses of POs. They were thus incentivized to try these kinds of annoying tricks, because ultimately they work, or at least they do when their effect is observed only in terms of bookings. I asked several times if we somehow measured customer retention, as we kept adding stuff I thought would have a negative effect in the long term (a customer would go through the whole booking process, only to never return because the experience was too bad.) We didn't. I guess it's difficult, I have no idea how this kind of metric would be computed. The checkbox is a nice idea, it could help retain customers on the verge of leaving. It wouldn't work for customers who visit once and get so annoyed they never come back. Also: a good portion of the traffic was affiliate traffic, like from Google Maps. I guess people booking from a Google Map listing care less since they land on the hotel page ? They won't be looking for hotels through the site UI, so they get fewer annoying pop-ups and messages.

smueller1234 3y ago
So one thing we did was for (a/b style) experiments to continue to collect data even after taking a decision to enable or disable[1]. No new sessions/devices would be added to the experiment, but those already exposed would still be reflected. So if everyone who decided to book because of an experiment ends up cancelling or consistently providing more negative feedback over the months that follow, our automation could still flag that. Whatever we may say about the company and its practices, the engineering team working on the experimentation tooling had their heart in the right place. They worked extremely hard and with tremendous care on trying to make sure the data presented would cause the best possible decisions. [1] Caveat: if an experiment was disabled fully (doesn't work or buggy) or enabled fully, obviously the experiment measurement is now no longer clean because folks in one variant will now see the other. But for trailing metrics like anything that affected past booking decisions, this type of analysis may not be perfect but still carries some meaning as a health check. Edit: formatting fix

jwr 3y ago

Thanks for sharing! That is what I suspected. I also suspect that while this does increase revenue in the short term, it might backfire in the future. I hate this messaging so much, that I now dislike booking.com overall and I actively look for other options (such as booking directly with hotels). Searching for a place to stay on Booking is no longer fun: it is an anxiety-inducing chore that I hate and try to avoid. And that's from a Genius level 2 customer. I guess this works for now, but as soon as a viable competitor appears…