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Comment by jakub_g | Hacker News Reader

Booking is the website with the highest density of dark patterns per pixel I've ever seen.

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.

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What is even worse on these sites is that if you switch too much between room types to check prices the original price goes up. In order to get the price you first got you need to delete your cookies and start over.

I don't know how that is even legal.

Is there any other company not using these dark patterns? I tried to use many others (big enough to have choices) and it's all the same.

Sometimes you're even wondering if it's not just the same website with another branding.

Booking.com is the white label hotel provider for many websites. Kayak, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, etc.

Per excellent report by Ben Edelman, which I strongly recommend reading for anyone interested in the booking platforms http://www.benedelman.org/publications/ota-bias-12jul2017.pd...

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

I wonder where switchfly factors in to all that, it was my impression they did white label stuff for a number of the above -- apparently not?

Does that mean that the different sites within each group have the same listings and deals as the other sites in the same group?

For Hotel bookings, many (all?) Expedia subsidiaries seems to be just a different UI for the same offer with slightly different prices since they target different users (premium vs budget etc). All bookings are made under the name Expedia.

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.

Neither Ctrip nor eLong are owned by Priceline / Expedia. They invested in the respective companies and own a stake, but Chinese law prevents that any foreign company owns the majority of any Chinese company. (Yes, even the Chinese McD, Apple, Starbucks etc are majority Chinese owned)

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...

Then I doubt Apple China makes much profit - almost all profit will be booked to a company wholly owned by Apple US.

Google Hotel search. Hipmunk.

Hipmunk now owned by Concur.

And Concur is owned by SAP.

That's what we're hoping to solve. The state of affairs with online booking is disgusting and the customer is too far removed from the process, while hotels are being strong-armed into price fixing.

Who's we?

The startup I work for. Can't talk too much about it right now.

London and a Belgian team?

Good luck.

Thank you. Interestingly, my post, which was completely neutral in tone, has negative votes. Certainly makes you wonder if our competition, Expedia and Priceline, maintain a presence on HN.

On a marginally related note, what made you decide to create an account just to engage in discussion in this thread?

I just go to the hotel website directly.

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.

Their price match thing is a textbook farce.

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.

Pro-tip: I filtered all of those out with an adblocker.

Are the patterns shared somewhere?

There is a dedicated site: https://darkpatterns.org/

Not those patterns, the extra adblock regular expressions.

would you mind to share your booking specific adblock rules?

I just used ublock's picker functionality. Very easy to use.

I'll take all the dark patterns they have if it means I can avoid hotel chains' own booking systems. At least I already know the dark patterns of booking.com.

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.

If you're only booking a hotel, rather than picking a travel vacation package, you're better off calling the hotel directly to make a reservation. The reservation staff almost always have sole discretion to negotiate prices within limits. If you are polite, and have checked for the best price you can find online, they will often match or beat that price. The trick is truly the politeness factor - "I SEE IT ONLINE FOR $50 LESS ONLINE, YOU HAVE TO MAKE IT CHEAPER!!!" will get you absolutely nowhere. They have discretion to negotiate, but are not required to do so. They deal with enough rude people on a daily basis that the moment you are abrasive, you can expect the wiggle room to vanish.

Out of interest how would you negotiate?

"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.

I suspect the volume implied would be counter-productive.

"I see it online for $50 less, could you possibly make it cheaper? If so I'll pay right away. "

"Could you possibly..." or "Is there any way..." is precisely the right phrasing. And again, the tone used makes or breaks the deal. Furthermore, explicitly quoting the online price is the wrong approach. Ask if there's any way to get $X (online price minus $20-30/night), without explicitly mentioning that you're comparing to the online price. Don't shove the online price in their face (ie: demanding they meet or beat, which is aggressive posturing). Only refer explicitly to the online price if you can't seem to charm them without doing so.

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!

OK, the bargaining chip is effectively the same, just the politeness in asking is different. I was quoting from the parent.

I do this very often, sending an email yields 5%-15% discount on booking.com prices. But that works for independent hotels. What I write here about are chain hotels, which have terrible online experience and contacted through email gave me 10-20% higher prices than online comparison sites (which also include commission for the site).

Edit: this is in Europe though

In this case 'SPG Member Exclusive' means 'a rate exclusively for SPG Members.' you're an SPG Member if you signed up for their loyalty program and got a member number.

Regarding defrauding your employer, Japanese hotels are worse. They have plans with actual $20 or $30 general use vouchers included in some plans to "top you off" to the limit of your business travel approval.

Exclusive just means only if you're a member. But you are, you just signed up.

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...

I've seen this dark pattern at Agoda.com first. They have been doing it for a long time.

Agoda and Booking are owned by Priceline Group, so this makes sense.

As opposed to Trivago which is the worse kind of real life spam in existence?

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)

> 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?

The hotels are not allowed to offer a lower price than booking.com. To undercut, or offer bonuses, risks then getting pulled from one of their largest sales channels.

It went to court in the EU, this is not the case anymore

For most hotel chains if you join the loyalty programs then when you log in and book directly you get the member price which is usually $10-20/night lower.

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, at least in Europe. If you're price sensitive, always check both before booking it.

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".

There are no things flashing or animated elements on Booking.com's website. Maybe you're confusing with some other website?

I see booking.com's BOT posting the same multiple jobs on @whoishiring's thread every month. Ex: Sept 2017 => https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148950

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).

I did. I received an offer that I turned down for unreleated reasons.

My experience is of some years ago (2/3 years).

A very nice experience honestly, great process of interview.

I did, two years ago. It was okay, one or two skype interviews, including a live coding one, and also a technical challenge on HackerRank. They also want to hear about suggestions and ideas for improving the site, how to implement and measure the impact. It helps to read their tech blogs and learn about the way they do things. I think dutch also give a tax exemption for employees who were hired abroad.

booking.com hiring process is very well established, there is nothing wrong with it.

Recruiter contacted me on LinkedIn. Went through the process. It was a Hacker Rank challenge, technical phone interview with coding, on-site interview with coding, systems design and culture fit interviews.

I've considered applying but I didn't like the idea of becoming a Perl developer to be honest. If they were looking for Go or Python developers I would probably have applied by now as I think Amsterdam is a great city.

When I was contacted they where looking for over-all experienced developers. From listening to some of their developers podcasts they found most developer picked up Perl development and didn't have any problems with the language.

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.

As a digital nomad, this "dark pattern" has proved very useful for me a lot of times. It is a worse experience to check a place and when you look again it is not available anymore.

>It is a worse experience to check a place and when you look again it is not available anymore.

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".

Technically, all are true. Sometime the formulation is quite counter intuitive though. The best known exemple is probably the "there is only one room left" message for single room apartments. This has been considered a bug for years. The thing is: any change to the web site, however small, including fixing a bug, must prove conversion-successful in an experiment before going in production. This is both great and dramatic, as you can imagine: great that anyone can change anything as soon as proven successful, but dramatic that often you feel entrenched in local minima. This experiment driven culture is great for the business though. So far.

Disclaimer: worked there for a bit.

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