Bad UX: How Booking.com deceives clients
medium.com
medium.com
Red texts hurrying you to make a reservation in virtually every <div> on the page ("only 2 rooms left", "someone just made a booking", "12 people looking", "Booked N times today", "You're lucky to see this room, normally it's booked!", "You're lucky to see it for $50, normally it's more expensive" etc.).
All of those texts are flashing/animating so there's a lot of moving things on the page.
When you're idle for a while and switch the tab in the browser, after coming back you get a popup urging you to make a reservation. Basically you're sweaty after the process.
I reserved my hotel lately with Booking and I will actively try to avoid in the future if possible.
Sometimes you're even wondering if it's not just the same website with another branding.
Priceline Group: priceline.com, agoda.com, booking.com, cheapflights.com, ctrip.com, KAYAK, Momondo.com, Opentable.com, rentalcars.com, Rocketmiles
Expedia, Inc.: Expedia.com, Carrentals.com, Classic Vacations, eLong.com, HomeAway, Hotels.com, Hotwire, Orbitz Worldwide, Travelocity, Traveldoo, Trivago, Venere, Wotif Group
In case of Priceline Group, it depends on the market. E.g. in China Agoda seems to be just another front-end for booking.com. All bookings are actually made through booking.com. But e.g. in Malaysia Agoda lists some Hotels which I could not find on Booking.com.
The Flight search engines seem to have major differences, e.g. in Southeast Asia Momondo lists a lot more local agents and more airline websites directly than Kayak.
I am a bit shocked though, that Momondo is owned by Kayak. For me, Momondo has so far been the best alternative. And Skyscanner is owned by Ctrip, which has a strategic partnership with the priceline group...
On a marginally related note, what made you decide to create an account just to engage in discussion in this thread?
Booking.com sometimes has more info (e.g. hotel website doesn't mention arrival times but booking.com does), in which case I use it for information purposes only and cringe at the dark patterns every time.
I'm not sure that's what the GP cares about - it's a dark pattern because I don't think any of those statements are true. Sure they are unverifiable, but I wouldn't be surprised if you book a room, open a incognito widow, and find the same hotel again with the same number of rooms available. Or if you try to book a room 1000 years in the future, and you'd also find that "there are only 3 spots available".
Disclaimer: worked there for a bit.
Tried to book a one of Starwood Preferred Guest hotel. Had to create an account, but this is a given. For a single room there are 12 offers you can choose, really simple /s.
The cheapest offer is for "SPG Member Exclusive. Am I one? How do I know? I guess I'm not, just created an account, but let's try anyway since it isn't disabled. First thing they try to upsell me on a room with 3X price. Can skip it. Now the price is different, it includes VAT. Why would you not include VAT in the first place? You have to pay taxes in Europe. Ok, apparently the price includes 5% discount and a free wifi (wow). Let's try others since 5% is not that much.
Oh, if you click the small link you can see the prices without the upselling attempt. Again no VAT included, but why is this "Save 10 percent - prepaid rate" somehow more expensive then the 5% discounted rate? Maybe this is for non-exclusive people.
On the first sight "Weekend package" offer is just more expensive, no value added. Unlike other offers it doesn't say this in the title, but it includes breakfast.
There is "SPG Member Exclusive: Flexible rate". Still don't know if I'm exclusive enough, but the rate itself isn't flexible (I blame bad translation though, part of the interface is in my language, part is in English). It's just a cancellable offer.
There's also a cancellable offer for non-exclusives such as myself.
Other offers either include breakfast or are some expensive packages.
I have given up, since I don't know if I'm an Exclusive Member. The price on booking.com is the same as non-exclusive one, so really no point in booking here.
Other strange thing for me. Every place on the site mentions some points. Is this an American thing? If you just want to book a room it feels like you are paying a premium, so the points-people can pay less. How I guess it works: you choose more expensive hotel/room to defraud your employer, so you can get more points to use on your own travels. Just a wild guess though.
IHG.com hotel was no better. Again confusing pricing, where what you see first is never the end price. If you choose breakfast, it changes rate but also includes some "Additional guest charge" (???). There's "IHG® Rewards Club Advance Purchase" and also "IHG® Rewards Club" and normal rate. Don't know which can I take.
The 'points' thing here is even more ridiculous - you can pay more to get more points, like pay X more per night and get Y more points.
In the end I booked on booking.com. It was 3.65% cheaper through the hotel chain site if I'm exclusive enough (still don't know). I probably lost some points, but I don't want to be constrained in my travels with some loyalty programs. SPG only has 7 hotels in my country and IHG has 5, so I would have a hard time earning those points. Also I almost always travel privately so can't defraud my employer for points.
"I SEE IT ONLINE FOR $50 LESS ONLINE, YOU HAVE TO MAKE IT CHEAPER!!!" seems to be the classic style of negotiating car prices. It seems to be the only bargaining chip that you have available to you.
The long and short of it: you're trying to win over another human being to be on your side. You don't demand that a company or "lowly employee" meet your expectations. Tact for the win!
Edit: this is in Europe though
I think they term it that way for 2 reasons: first, to try and build some fake loyalty and familiarity (you're already exclusive!) but secondly it's so their normal rate is the same as other booking agents - they can offer it cheaper by making it "member exclusive"
With regards to flexible / cancellable that's usually exactly what flexible means - you can cancel it (and as a flow on, can change the dates, since worst case you can just cancel and re book)
Extra guest charge is most common with a rate that includes breakfast and lastly I've always assumed those double points rates are a cheap way to abuse people booking business expenses.
Hope that helps...
Looking at all the negative observations about booking.com here, I'm curious. Has anyone from here actually applied to any of their job postings on @whoishiring ?
How has your experience been?
The one positive thing I've seen is that they mention that they sponsor work visas for their successful candidates (in Europe / Amsterdam location only I think).
My experience is of some years ago (2/3 years).
A very nice experience honestly, great process of interview.
At the time was following `Damian Gryski` presentations how they used redis for their cookie management for such a large web-site. Also was reading into their back-end systems and over-all cultural inside the business.
Though was super excited about the interview with them although froze up during the interview process.
Nice to see other people here went through the interview processes and had a great time. I just suck at interviews.
Thanks, I'll keep using Booking
(Though the flashing things are annoying - but you can discover using booking then go to the hotel page and book there)
Just a shame they often charge the same price so I think why did I bother doing them the favour?
Some examples: I've booked directly with the place to pay half price for one night in an amazing farm in Iceland; I've got the opposite last time I booked a night in a cheap hotel in Portugal. I usually check the Booking.com price and then check directly with the hotel then "Oh, but I've seen this cheaper in Booking.com", "Yes, please do the reservation via Booking.com then".
I don't know how that is even legal.
Their support is so pathetic that they made me regret couple of bookings I made. Days, weeks - no response. You send follow up emails, no response. You escalate no response. Radio silence.
The GPS locations of properties are so deceiving that you have to check every single hotel on Google Maps and it was during on of these map searches that I realised they had been ripping me off all these months.
Immediately uninstalled the app and I started searching for hotels on Google Maps and TripAdvisor.
"14 people are looking right now. In high demand! Booked 124 times in the last 24 hours. Latest Booking: 3 minutes ago"
"In high demand – only 3 rooms left on our site!" "Someone just booked this In high demand!"
"Limited supply in Oslo: 3-star hotels. 4 hotels like Best Western Karl Johan Hotel are already unavailable on our site!"
"3 other people looking now"
While all true it has no connection to how much the hotel might be booked next February.
"Only 1 room left!"
"Booked 14 times in the last 24 hours!" - Oh yeah? This hotel in Appleton WI, with 80 rooms, had FOURTEEN rooms booked for a random Wednesday in September 2018 through booking.com ALONE in the last 24 hours.
Screw dark patterns, that's outright deception, if not fraud.
(edited, I originally said October 2018, when in fact my example was for Wed September 19, 2018).
The site said “14 bookings in the last 24hours”. You read it as “14 bookings for the date you searched for, in the last 24 hours”.
I don’t believe this is an accident.
I really dislike how companies like booking.com (and others) plus physical merchants enable "gotcha capitalism" like this, where each party points at the other and they both keep my money.
booking.com: 'talk to the hotel for a refund'
hotel: 'talk to booking.com for a refund'
Yea I experienced this last March. Charegbacks are not easy for regular consumers. Their customer service are trained to never give refunds (based on first-hand experience).
You'd have to be a valued client of your bank to have a successful dispute. And it is the only way I believe.
Both parties (booking.com and hotel) simply won't budge.
And then of course there's the fact that reversing charges doesn't change legal liabilities, so this isn't a protection you can rely on if the receiver feels they're in the right and are willing to take (sometimes fairly simple) legal steps.
It's definitely still a nice protection to have, since at least it places some burden of proof on the recipient.
The question is: how can one measure the long term impact these dark patterns have on future sales?
I do my best to avoid using booking.com precisely because of these dark patterns. I love Perl, there are just a few big companies that are still using Perl as their main backend technology and whenever I can I try to give them money. Especially when they're getting involved in the community and are trying to grow the ecosystem like booking does. But when their web site tries to apply the cheapest manipulation tricks on me, I avoid them.
It's not a standard that most people will use to decide, but most people don't love software... but if you do love your software and it's not leading-edge anymore (or even if it is, I don't know much about modern Perl development and I assume that is because it's unfashionable...) you want companies that also love that software to do well, and keep putting their improvements back into the upstreams.
Definitively AB testing. The website runs hundreds of experiments simultaneously, on a few pages. Although in theory all the experiments are independent in practice it is often not the case and some bugs show only in some combination of 2 or more experiments. Especially, in such crowded web pages, even technically distinct experiments influence each others UX wise, which can cause bugs of their own (like, two distinct experiments displaying two seemingly contradictory messages). Eventually, the mix of experiments a given user is subjected to can look a lot like an outright lie or bug or scam or deceptive practice (especially when it's a combination of small dark patterns of course), and I think that's what's happening here.
Their excuse? The real address was available to me in my confirmation email, i.e. after I had already paid. If you can't trust their map, it serves no purpose whatsoever. A few weeks later I was trying to find the listing but it appears to have been removed.
I'd switch in an instant if someone built a useful alternative to Booking. Agoda is the same deal as far as I can tell, and it is owned by the same parent company.
EDIT: Airbnb is great - I use it a lot, more than Booking - but sometimes you just want a more professionally run hotel, hostel or apartment. In fact, after cancelling that place I ended up booking a studio with Airbnb at the last minute.
Generally speaking if it's not a flexible/refundable rate you will probably pay online from what i noticed but don't quote me on that.
Also, the cancellation was 1 month away from actual booking but they do not care. They just want to decieve (scam?) you and get your money.
Luckily, the bank sided with us. The dispute is a sure process as long as they value you as a customer.
I went through a period where I was frequenting the same hotel ~10 times a year. They knew me by name, and I knew most of them. There was no such thing as “full” - they would move heaven and earth to accommodate repeat custom.
When they perceive your ‘loyalty’ as being to a portal, and me as years of repeat custom .. well what would you do?
(Unrelated tip: If a hotel is booked out, visit them directly. Most don’t list all their rooms on portals, for similar reasons)
The place where booking.com really shines is for individual hotels and smaller properties like bed and breakfasts - often they only use one provider and it's usually booking.com/Priceline (at least here in Europe). You could just call them directly once you've found it though...
Went to a travel agency in a mall nearby. Got a better price and even some useful hints as where to go to when I'm there.
I'll be back when you have that AI travel agent...
They basically told me it wasn't worth their time unless we were booking a cruise.
How is this even possible? Did you take away their time? Were there people waiting who would book a cruise?
My experience above is from Germany.
I would naïvely think that booking directly with hotels would be cheapest, but I have definitely seen deals on these aggregators that were unavailable on the same hotel's own site – which is the only reason I even think about using them.
This happened to me and we had to run through a lot of hoops to eventually get hotels.com to reimburse us. It helped that we had called them for parts of our reservation because all calls are recorded and the operator clearly stated that breakfast was included.
The same thing happened to my father who was a bit more alert and noted the missing breakfast from the confirmation. He then had to call them something like five times for a confirmation that actually said breakfast was included. Each time they sent him a new reservation but it wasn't until the last call it did say breakfast was included.
The way around it was to offer more flexibility for direct bookings or throw in breakfast.
They tell me that they booked 14 rooms at the Red Roof Inn in Appleton WI for Wed September 19, 2018, in the last 24 hours.
I'd love to call the Red Roof Inn and ask them if that's the case.
Other than that, that sounds like outright deceptive practices, fraud in marketing.
https://blog.malwarebytes.com/detections/pup-optional-bookin...
> PUP.Optional.Booking
> This is the detection for a family of potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) that show advertisements hailing from the booking.com domain. This PUP predominantly uses scheduled tasks to trigger the advertisements.
Wouldn't mind seeing that looks like. Regardless, "scheduled tasks" definitely sounds like unsolicited EXE execution, which is firmly on the "no thanks" side of shady.
Thankfully, Expedia has good customer service and fixed things for me, even though it was not a cancelable reservation.
I use it to find places, filtering by "wifi available", and then contact them directly.
Cheaper prices and no cuts for parasite middleman.
Do you find all middleman parasitic or is there something else booking should do to stop being in this group?
Sometimes only booking.com has rooms and the hotel site itself doesn't, and in that case, I will still use booking.com.
EDIT: The submission title said something about Booking.com using dark patterns but it has been changed now.
Not a big loss, but I've stopped using their services since.
Obviously it sounds like other have had a worse experience…
When I'm planning a journey the reviews and search by area features of Booking.com make it possible for me to gain some understanding of going rates and hotel quality, but the process leaves a lot to be desired for both me, the customer, and the hotel.
I can search with Booking.com yet book directly with the hotel, but that means I can't review the property and help others.
Sometime after that we got charged 1100$ by Mastercard... I think that booking.com got a complaint from the hotel that Mastercard reverted the charge and then opened a dispute with Mastercard to get their 1100$ that they refunded us...
At least now I know to just go and tell Mastercard every time I get a little resistance from some business who won't rightfully refund me.
It's pretty well hidden though. I've never seen it advertised on the homepage: http://loyaltylobby.com/2013/07/22/booking-com-genius-award/
If the service provides value for research and an easy booking process for roughly the same price/advantages then there's little benefit to booking directly.
I like booking.com because the description of the hotel, photos, and conditions are presented in a consistent format which makes comparing options and locations very efficient. The details have largely also matched my experience which is nice.
I started using the site because I found that their cancelation conditions were better than booking with the hotels directly. More recently, this is less of the case as the differential in price for a refundable booking has increased greatly in some cities, at least for my needs.
Their solicitation for reviews process is pretty good. People’s expectations of service an amenity tend to be pretty unreliable but there are enough substantive reviews to filter out the extremes.
It is slightly convenient to have a diverse range of accommodation types booked in one system but not enough to balance the dark patterns. I no longer recommend the site to those who aren’t at least a little savvy with travel and pattern spotting.
It is not possible or really not intuitive to do something like entering a couple of places you would potentially want to go to, select 2 adults and 3 children, filter them on criteria like free parking, free wifi and sort the results on price.
While this sounds like a pretty common pattern, the experience is really bad. Sorting is messed up by sponsored hotels, not consistent on the price of a room or the room I configured or the price is the cheapest room without wifi...
On top of it, they run all kind of experiments. This causes more confusion for me, because I just learned to do something in a specific way.
I still use it, not because of the great usability or great service but because there are no real better alternatives.
This made me wonder if the site relies on Javascript or graphics.
As an experiment, I just wrote a small POC command line script for
1. searching for hotels by keyword
2. obtaining the hotel ids
3. searching availability using the hotel id
4. printing prices, etc.
Easily adaptable to bulk searching, producing CSV, etc.
Again, this site does not require Javascript or graphics for getting price lists.
Easy to avoid the "dark patterns" and just retrieve the desired data.
I use a text-only browser.
Booking in english gives you quite the disadvantage.
Having said that, my family of 4 adults with different credit cards made excellent use of their generous £15 referral reward kicking back both ways to save a significant amount on the total booking cost.
No where did anyone show me the real price of what I was buying.
Booking.com puts a lot of pressure (through dark UI patterns) to make a reservation ASAP promising that you can cancel at any time. In many cases cancellation simply isn't possible - too late etc.. They are just keeping the money and this is exactly what their business model is after.
They make an awfull lot of money selling actual room nights (think Google-scale a lot, per employee, although the money culture in both firms are opposite to each other), and actually do cancel bookings and even sometime refund non cancelable ones. They are definitively harsh on the business side, especially when negotiating commissions with hotels, especially since it's always easy to justify ("that's for our users"). But this is not a scam.
You might have had a bad experience. No amount of money spent on customer care will ever balance out a big firm being 100% money driven as opposed to reputation driven, and fundamentally not caring for an individual user. So yes when you are that one user who felt through the cracks it feels bad indeed.
Easy to say for someone who haven't experienced their deception first hand.
GP is correct. That is part of their scheme to extract more revenue.
I've also been "stolen" a car booking on rentalcars once, another company belonging to Priceline. I'm not as familiar with rentalcars as I am with booking so can't be as confident but even in that case I doubt the business plan is based on such erroneous bookings. For sure, the incentive to fight fraud they are victim of is bigger than the incentive to fix the UX dark patterns that are causing the erroneous bookings and eventually bring them some extra profit.
Also, let's not forget that companies abusing dark patterns or being slow to fix "bugs" when they convert well, are not merely soulless organisations driven by profit. They are made of teams driven by OKRs, which are made of individuals driven by their desire to fit in the culture (or their perception of it).
they are parasites.