How Booking.com manipulates users
ro-che.info
ro-che.info
It's hard to quantify negative impact of future dealings, but it's even harder to say Booking.com should change their methods when the people aware enough to be annoyed continue to give them money. It's like complaining about Google following you around the web and using GMail.
Either the alternatives just aren't good enough or the negative externalities not severe enough to change consumer behavior. Either of those considerations could change, but until they do it's hard to argue Booking.com should reduce current earnings. Not when people who book a room above a bar that plays music into the early morning blame themselves for not reading the fine print...
Please tell me how to avoid the duopoly that is Booking.com(Priceline Group) and Expedia in Europe? Especially so when making new booking on short notice. Booking.com has maintained close to 60% market share:
http://www.hotrec.eu/newsroom/press-releases-1714/dominant-o...
Disclosure: Ex-Tripadvisor engineer.
'“The effects we find in our study are actually not that small. For example, the mean hotel in our sample has thirty negative reviews. We find that a hotel that is located next to an independent hotel owned by a small owner will have six more fake negative Tripadvisor reviews compared to an isolated hotel.”'[1]
Here is PDF link to the report: "Promotional Reviews: An Empirical Investigation of Online Review Manipulation", which is worth a read:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18340.pdf
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/avaseave/2014/01/27/when-online...
And, of course, TripAdvisor has their own issues that they don't really care to deal with (fake reviews are a constant problem since they have no way to verify that someone actually stayed there).
[Edit] There's only so much conversation to be had around a point like "we don't want to become MySpace." If what they are doing generates more revenue, and if people don't get so annoyed that they'll use another service, and if they avoid lawsuits and regulators...
You'll never hear this pitch in an executive meeting: "I have an idea that will reduce revenue X% with no quantifiable long-term benefits."
When I arrived late in the evening my room was not available: the (online, credit card backed) reservation I've made was "lost" and no more rooms available.
There was no way to sort it out easily so I booked another Hotel (higher price, and had no time to do some Tripadvisor/Rating research).
The exactly same thing happened when I booked a hotel in Czech last year via HRS. When I arrived I was told by the hotel guy that there was only 1 room available instead of the booked 2. I tried to sort it out directly with the hotel - no chance after 10 min. of discussions.
I then called the HRS hotline, the service agent put me on hold while he called the hotel. I saw the guy at the reception pick up the phone, a few seconds later he came to me and told me that 2 rooms were available. :/
That said: it seems that the OTAs (HRS, booking, expedia) have enough "arguments" (e.g. threaten with delisting etc) that as a customer you may also have benefits from this kind of oligopoly.
Why do you need so many properties and reviews? You're staying in one room, presumably. You just need at least one room with a few good reviews in your price range and you're good to go.
I also never look at reviews since my experience has found that reviews are useless to me. I think reviewers tend to care about things I don't, and have had excellent experiences at places with generally bad reviews.
This is the same with restaurant reviews on sites like Yelp. A restaurant that has 2.5 stars could have excellent, delicious food but are docked points because people who went there and reviewed cared more about the service than the food, or expected the service to be top notch at a place where great service isn't typically expected.
Each site has its own layout and functionality. I like to use the same site every time so that the buttons will always be in the same place, I know how to sort by my criteria, the customer service number is already in my phone...
This also helps avoid hotels full of snooty elitists.
Use Booking.com (and Google, Expedia, etc) as a showroom, after you have found a certain hotel, find their web site or phone and arrange a booking directly.
All the big franchises (Marriott, Hilton, IHG, Hyatt, Choice, Wyndham) will give you a cheaper “member” price at their direct website. Being a member is free, it’s just like airline miles and you even earn points.
https://www-moneysavingexpert-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/www.m...
Reminds me of the thing about "it either will happen, or it won't, so that's a 50/50 chance".
I'd recommend staying away from hotels with very few reviews. But many (even smaller) hotels have several hundred reviews. They're usually very reliable.
On the plus side, I learned a new phrase from HN today. I now know what 'dark pattern' means.
In the end I just compared on worst reviews until I found a hotel where the bad reviews were about really unimportant things to me. The hotel I stayed in actually had one of the lowest review scores of all the ones I had considered but the lowest-scored reviews described an experience I could enjoy far more than the worst experiences at comparable hotels.
My personal heuristic for using booking.com is rating > 8.0, then skim over the negative reviews for dealbreakers. Bad ratings for restaurants or concierge or whatever is fine for me, but "room reeked of cigarette smoke" is not. Positive reviews don't really have a lot of signal to me, but YMMV.
Let me give you the short version of how to book on booking, which is BTW an excellent site for travel arrangements:
1) Ignore anything that makes it sound like you're in a competition. Cheapest price, someone is looking, etc. You're trying to book a hotel room that suits you, not win a race.
2) Any hotel ranked below 9+ has problems. You just need to figure out what the problems are, and those will appear in the reviews section. Don't be lazy - you need to read dozens of reviews. The good news is that you can skip the good reviews - they won't contain what you're looking for. If you book any hotel that has a less than 9 average, make sure you understand what people didn't like about it. If it's over 9, everyone liked it, and you will too.
A few days later, I checked again and the room was going for $50
I mailed them about it. They agreed to refund me $50, so that was nice of them
The private owner also put a hold on my credit card, as did the hotel, with the sum of both being high enough i bumped into my card’s limit before the end of my stay. Oh, and the very low rate of booking.ccom turned out to be the same price as booking direct once all the semi-hidden charges were added.
Lesson learned: always book directly with the hotel.
Dark patterns may help profits in the short-term, but they're terrible for your brand. Just ask TicketMaster.
It isn't just tech-savvy users that will catch on to this either. If an everyday user uses Booking.com, reads reviews and thinks their room will be great, but then has a bad experience, they're going to stop trusting Booking.com's reviews, and stop trusting their brand. It will only take a few bad experiences to go elsewhere.
I like to think that I'm take-savvy (I've been on this forum for quite a while) but I'll happily continue to use booking.com the same as I've done for the past 10 years, give or take. I don't care at all about their brand, I'm aware of their "dark patterns" and as such it's very easy to avoid them, what it matters for me it's that in the last 10 years they've always been reliable (as in 100% reliable) and on point with their descriptions and ratings, no matter the destination (from a 2-star hotel in the middle of the Carpathian mountains to a 5-star hotel in Istanbul). In other words they really do provide value, the same way as Ryanair provides value (it doesn't matter that everybody likes to hate on Ryanair, everybody is still flying with them).
I also spend more than 5 minutes reading through the actual reviews before making a reservation, unlike the writer of the article which is unhappy that not everything is mentioned front and center on the first page. As such, I've never ever had to deal with dirty sheets or a dirty bathroom when it came to locations reserved through booking.com.
I would say you have been unusually lucky then. The practice of fake reviews from booking.com are pretty well documented[1][2]. And 5 star hotels are generally a pretty safe bet just about anywhere in the world, you pretty much know exactly what the experience will be. Accuracy of a 5 star hotel says very little about booking.com.
>"In other words they really do provide value, the same way as Ryanair provides value (it doesn't matter that everybody likes to hate on Ryanair, everybody is still flying with them)."
You mean like suddenly grounding 50 flights a day for the next six weeks and giving customers no shortage of grief:
http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/ryanair-...
>"I also spend more than 5 minutes reading through the actual reviews before making a reservation ..."
That doesn't really mean much when the reviews are gamed does it?
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/06/bookingcom-invest...
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonha-revesencio/the-truth-abo...
TicketMaster's customers are people selling tickets, not those buying them.
Their entire business model is based around burning their own reputation, not the reputation of whoever's selling through TicketMaster. That's why they can get away with using dark patterns to make more money for their customers and themselves - consumers don't have a choice.
TM has been doing pretty well in terms of stock price (not the user happiness) -- probably the metric that they care about. So, I am not sure if that's the best example.
Source: https://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chd...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-ticketing/excl...
One of the Best Western emails encouraged me to sign up for their rewards scheme. Having liked Best Western hotels previously, I signed up, and downloaded the app onto my phone. To get rewards for the booking I just needed the Best Western booking ref. number.
There wasn't one. Just the booking.com ref. number on their Emails, and no ref. number on the Best Western ones.
Once at the hotel I asked for the Best Western booking ref. number and was told "As you've booked through booking.com you don't qualify for rewards on this stay, sorry."
So that will be my first AND last use of booking.com. Fool me once and all that.
They also sometimes offer lower "member only" price for members of their reward scheme as a way to get around their contract (in that case the lower price they provide than booking.com is not public but only restricted to members so it's not a breach of contract).
That said, I don't use booking.com, I find their dark patterns too deceptive for me.
> They can't really offer a lower price than booking.com and hotels.com due to contracts
See, it is the fault of booking.com. I'm not saying I'd have done it differently in their position, but their demand that hotels charge the same via booking.com as directly (even while booking.com gets a cut) is the direct cause of complicated reward schemes like this.
The things described here are not exactly dark patterns - you can bypass them and get to the truth. (This is unlike TicketMaster.) Perhaps I would call them grey patterns.
After hotels.com boned me, I've soured on the very notion of online bookings, price comparison sites for travel stuff, trusting ratings.
Caveat emptor (aka Freedom Markets™) is bad for business because it increases transaction costs (friction).
Reforms like consumer protection regulations are championed by businesses trying to make an honest buck once they get tired of the cheaters ruining the market for all the players.
Resolve to never again use hotels.com
Second incident: Find Kalaloch Lodge resort online. Call them directly. Nice chit chat about peninsula, rain forests, etc. Drove to resort. Arrive, no reservation.
Turns out hotels.com and their affiliates buy up domain names, do SEO, and pretend to be the owner / operator of independent resorts.
aka cybersquatting. I call it fraud, theft, malfeasance.
The owners we spoke to said it happens all the time, they're super frustrated, don't know how to fight back.
Best as I can tell, Freedom Markets™ (caveat emptor) has become increasingly the norm. For everything. It's exhausting.
When I've traveled with my family, I'll sometimes call or email the hotel directly to confirm. As a group we are not as resilient as I am solo. We've not had a reservation go missing, but we have had rooms with no extra bed, which is almost as bad.
Where we have had those kinds of problems more often is using airline miles for rooms. The only solution there is to book a suite or something else special, then they are more likely to make sure it happens.
Yes, some of the practices are a bit annoying - I get multiple emails a week with their "10% off codes" that aren't valid for the majority of hotels on the site. But since I'm not worried about staying with any specific hotel chain, their stay 10 nights get one free (really it's often more 'get a steep discount on a night') ends up being worth it for me.
And the one time I wanted to cancel a reservation - I was told by someone staying at the hotel at the last minute that it was a dump - Hotels.com got it canceled for me and got the cancellation fee waived, which I wasn't expecting, but definitely appreciated. Of course, then I went ahead and booked a different hotel through them, so they got my business regardless.
With that said, I will still book my rooms through Booking.com. But at least this article gave me some nice pointers to keep in mind in the future, like the "fine print".
Be careful with reviews. They might not be fake but certainly arbitrarily filtered.
I never make any hotel decision based on booking.com information, other than their price. To be fair, the clue is in the name, make your decision elsewhere and then come back and use them to make the actual booking (assuming it was cheapest). I appreciate this keeps them and their dodgey tactics going but I'll pay that price.
Though I do only use it for flight tickets, not for hotels. And I always go there in an incognito tab, to make sure I avoid any cookies etc.
Sell Taylor Swift on a different booking system that isn't pathological to users. A few other top shelf performers. Venues will be switching like there's no tomorrow to keep the top performers.
The tricky part of this is getting an audience with people like Taylor Swift. On the other hand, with people like Trent Reznor working for Apple, if you had an alternative that worked well and didn't suck, you could probably get some attention pretty quickly.
It's almost as though there is a market that needs to be disrupted. And all the elements are there.
Live Nations was spun out of Clear Channel which controls the majority of the important radio stations in the US. Needless to say the relationship between Clear Channel and Live Nation is a very "special" one. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Nation_(events_promoter)
and
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/business/25ticket.html?mcu...
Or then I am missing something in the market dynamics of hotel booking.
Going with another vendor is a gigantic undertaking, you would need to overhaul most of your processes. Most venues don't have the resources/bandwidth to pull that off.
And that's how TM stays a monopoly.
Source: used to work for a large venue.
Not in the US you can't. And certainly not for venues large than a club.
1. Priceline (this includes Booking.com, Kayak, Agoda, and others).
2. Expedia (includes Hotels.com, trivago, and others).
3. Smaller aggregators (such as lastminute.com).
4. Booking directly.
The dark patterns described in the blog post are used by everyone, including many hotels themselves, so you're never going to avoid them.
Than check on goggle and call them directly
If they say we're full, I tell them there are still free rooms on booking, if they want I can book there or they can give me the room and avoid paying booking
I used to think these techniques were "dirty." But humanity evolved to be responsive to this type of manipulation. It seems the web has accelerated this process with the ability to A/B test on a massive scale. All the big websites exploit cognitive biases to drive engagement - facebook, google, twitter, instagram, netflix, youtube.
This is one of the reasons I'm convinced knowledge of behavioral economics is one of the most critical pieces of knowledge to have in the early 21st century - not only can you use it to drive engagement on your own platforms, but you can learn what tell-tales you are biased to react to, and resist accordingly.
-"Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Khaneman -"The Undoing Project" by Michael Lewis -"Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb -"Pre-suasion" by Cialdini -"The Moral Animal" by Robert Wright -"The Most Important Thing" by Howard Marks -"Everybody Lies" by Seth Stevens-Davidowitz -"How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big" by Scott Adams -The "Freakonomics" Trilogy
But is not just booking.com, 99% of airline ticket sites use the same techniques.
Basically what they do is raising the price on each subsequent visit, sometimes also lowering the amount of 'available' tickets. This creates a sense of urgency.
My advise is always: shop for the hotel/ticket/whatever you like, then open that URL in a new private/incognito tab, so you get a lower price.
I understand it's not new to have the retail price be higher than the 'sale' price (for example, clothes and furniture), but even at clearance outlets, the price difference while large is rarely as dramatic nor as prolonged.
This also works for the craft store chain Michael's but to a lesser extent. They almost ALWAYS have a 40-50% off coupon in their weekly ad. So if you find something that you want but it's expensive, you can usually get it for half off. It's pretty awesome!
The frequency of running offers, and which offers to run, are just business details that can be tested and optimized. Some firms are a lot better at it than others. But at its core it's not fundamentally different than coupon mailers or rebate offers.
If you ever buy furniture for sticker price you're doing something wrong...
If something is constantly "70% off" (especially non digital goods and services), shouldn't consumers stop for a second and think how this makes sense?
- Selling to a different demographic (young adults - like 20-25 y/o) <-- This was probably a huge reason for the failure
- Making their stores "trendy" (for example, removing POS, instead employees walk around with iPads that have scanners attached)
- Removing constant "70% off" sales
Removing the sales probably was a part of the failure. But it was not as huge of a deal as people make it out to be.
"Only 13% of listings are left for these dates. We recommend booking a place soon."
As a random example, apparently Kamloops, BC is filling up fast for Dec 3-6 (midweek in the middle of winter). And so is Flint, MI on Feb 19th, a Tuesday.
On Airbnb, it's up to the property owner to decide cleaning fees and such, and there isn't any rule about what that includes (that I know of).
Having seen dark patterns described/decried on HN, I thought it was funny that Airbnb apparently has accidentally-light patterns.
www.booking.com##.sr_rooms_left_wrap.only_x_left
www.booking.com##.sr-booked-x-times.clearfix.lbsr
www.booking.com##.soldout_property www.booking.com##.soldout_property
www.booking.com##.sr_rooms_left_wrap.only_x_left
www.booking.com##.lastbooking
www.booking.com##.sr--x-times-booked
www.booking.com##.in-high-demand-not-scarce
www.booking.com##.top_scarcity
www.booking.com##.hp-rt-just-booked
www.booking.com##.cheapest_banner_content > *
www.booking.com##.hp-social_proof
www.booking.com##.fe_banner__red.fe_banner__w-icon.fe_banner__scale_small.fe_banner
www.booking.com##.urgency_message_x_people.urgency_message_red
www.booking.com##.rackrate
www.booking.com##.urgency_message_red.altHotels_most_recent_booking
www.booking.com##.fe_banner__w-icon-large.fe_banner__w-icon.fe_banner
www.booking.com##.smaller-low-av-msg_wrapper
www.booking.com##.small_warning.wxp-sr-banner.js-wxp-sr-bannerI will caveat that I've had some excellent experiences with Booking, but always with very careful cross-referencing with other sites.
The newest scam is: flight comparison websites show you a low price, but only if you pay with a VISA. Switch to MasterCard and it's an additional 20-30€. But then you invested in the whole booking process already.
Amazon Prime: Try to cancel it. They make it sound as if you lose Prime right away. There's an option "remind me 3 days before next payment" that suggests you should think more about your decision. Only after you cancelled, they tell you that you lose your benefits only after your Prime subscription expires.
That might be the victim of taking phrasing from different markets. In the US and UK, when I've cancelled Prime, I immediately lose the benefits + get a pro-rata refund for the remainder of my subscription.
My advice: go to booking.com, find the hotel you want to stay at. Search their phone number or email, contact the hotel directly and you'll get a much better price (15% is booking.com fee).
Downside to this is if you are not booking standard 5 star hotels etc that are meant to have some level of professionalism etc, you might end up getting treated worse just because smaller hotels etc do care a lot about their booking.com rating so they tend to treat booking.com customers better than others (my wife owns 3 hotels, 2 of them happen to be of a smaller size and in reality when they have a booking from booking.com they tend to do anything to please them as opposed to bookings directly from their website).
It made the news a few years back[1] but you can still see it sometimes in a few different industries. You can get into arguments with people about whether marketing as a whole is an enterprise built on manipulation, but this is quite clearly manipulative.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2010/aug/07/computer-...
I have also heard the tech stack is kind of old and so learning-wise it might be an issue. Any tips on surviving and keeping the learning curve straight from a current/former employee?
Very high delivery velocity (You will be expected to roll out code in your first week).
But they have a Monopoly (almost). So that's why people keep using them.
Lots of "not quite lies" in the interface to generate false urgency where none actually exists. Like showing you how many other people "looked at this property", but not saying the timeframe...in the last hour? Day? Week? The idea is to close the deal because you think someone else will snap it up.
They are also crazy arrogant and condescending if you ever have to deal with them as a partner.
The booking.com experience feels like doing business with a sleazy used car salesman.
Although even the few times when I received questionable products the issue was resolved pretty quickly and painlessly with either the merchant or Amazon.com
Contrast that with booking.com where all communications between you and the merchant(hotel) have to filter through booking.com and take 24 hours at a minimum to get a response.
After a day they outright DENIED to honor this "Lowest Price Guarantee" with some lame excuse. When I told them that I'll go to the small claims court I never heard back from them. Don't believe a word on this site.
I instead wowed to never book another hotel on their site (using agoda ever since) and telling friends and posting on forums (it was on the frontpage on reddit india for 1 day) about how they cheated me. I think that must have costed them more money than they cheated me out by not honoring their guarantee.
My guess is this: Booking.com already knows that they are fighting a losing battle against AirBnB. So instead of trying to win it seriously, they go to make the biggest profit they can out of their situation by strongly focussing on the idiots. With idiots you have two advantages:
(a) they stay anyways no matter how shitty you treat them. They have different reasons but one of them is that they are simply used to your service and don't want to learn a new one.
(b) they believe at least some of the stuff you put on these websites.
(c) in exchange for not feeling like a total loser for a moment they are willing to pay more.
For an observant booker this website is really less and less useful. For once you can try the alternative and get a much better experience, and on the other you can often just book a room on-site after you arrive. When Booking.com just hands out a reserveration without prepayment don't think the hotel wouldn't give your room to someone else if enough customers arrive at their desk first. Money now is better than (maybe) money later. The only exception may be when you go to the big fair of your industry and the whole town is booked out.
AirBnB is fun to try but I wouldn't rely on someones apartment for my vacation.
[0] http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2017/08/amsterdam-airb...
Especially when the host might just cancel at the last minute. In that case, all the customer gets is a refund on the accommodation, but not on the full trip which might be ruined.
For a two or three day trip AirBnB isn't practical, and it's not as if AirBnB is perfect either. At least with a hotel I know there is a basic minimum standard and I have some level of consumer protection.
I go direct to the Hotel's own site wherever possible but often they don't have a facility to book online easily and, where they do, the price is often the same anyway.
Chain hotels are the exception but you often need to book and pay well in advance to get any real saving.
lol
Booking.com and AirBnB have different markets: fixed-overhead operations competing on a commodity, and owners selling a unique-experience short-term let. There's some overlap (owner-operated B&Bs), but they're insignificant.
AirBnB's real value is that they created a market, not that they're going to eat hotels. Booking.com will be fine as long as 2+ giant hotel chains exists.
Maybe I am wrong, but I though Booking also lists apartments for rent? At least in Romania, I know people that rent to tourists usually publish their offers on both websites.
To achieve this task I did a small research of other travel web sites and I realised that most of them added such psychological elements lately.
Today I found this gold article and forwarded it to the product managers, hehe :)
The most questionable mainstream ad I've seen recently is by Amazon.com, which somehow manages to convince employees that it's "Earth's most customer-centric company" while concurrently using some of the sleaziest dark patterns of any merchant, small or large. Spot the $99/year recurring fee on this page: https://twitter.com/troyd/status/902673505157648384
> Nor can advertisers use fine print to contradict other statements in an ad or to clear up misimpressions that the ad would leave otherwise. For example, if an ad for a diet product claims "Lose 10 pounds in one week without dieting," the fine-print statement "Diet and exercise required" is insufficient to remedy the deceptive claim in the ad.
> …
> Most importantly, if you are concerned that a disclaimer or disclosure may be necessary to clarify a claim, evaluate your ad copy and substantiation carefully to ensure that you are not misleading consumers.
Obviously it's subjective whether this ad violates any FTC laws (and presumably, Amazon's legal counsel reviewed it and deemed it worth the risk), but presence of a statement in fine print (or as you stated, that "it is in plain text") isn't the deciding factor.
So, you have to catch someone's attention to get the FTC after you. They tend to go on industry specific hunts once public opinion goes a certain direction. Happened with diet pills, cryptocoin hardware, airlines not showing all in costs, etc.
Booking.com will probably eventually get their turn in the barrel. Could be a while though.
They're not explicitly saying you won't get it if you don't order in the next 15 minutes, but they're implying it. Telebrands is the company that's been running that game for like forever. Pretty shady!
So if that sort of thing matters to you, I can also strongly suggest booking direct.
(Note: You do generally have to ask, but I've had good experiences. Do it on-site @ checkin, and I basically say the above -- "Hey I booked direct so you earned 30% more from me. Can you offer me an upgrade to an un-used room since I'm here now?")
Not only their prices are usually the lowest, but they also offer matching prices.
The room was not as advertised? Booking would at least offer a coupon for next booking.
Hotel was overbooked? They would find you a room of no lower standard, in similar location, and they cover the difference. It happens that if there's a big event in the city, they might cover your 5* hotel if you booked a shitty 2* room.
Many small properties have shady businesses, booking.com protects you from this.
They might not use the shiniest tech, but their customer service (which is biggest portion of the work force) is top notch.
Source: shared bed with one of the cs agents
https://medium.com/@ilyadoroshin/bad-ux-how-booking-com-dece...
For example, I learned to ignore the continuous push for urgency, I sort hotels based on user rating instead of Bookings choice, and I check TripAdvisor for reviews instead of Booking.com itself.
So why would I even use Booking.com? Apart from it having one of the largest offerings, it just love that the whole process of booking, paying, and checking in is so simple and consistent, no matter where in the world I book a hotel or for what purpose (business or leisure). That is what makes me come back to Booking.com, and that's what I wish Booking.com would spend most of their time on.
Whenever it's possible, I use something else, like HostelWorld. Their interface is clean, to the point, and the reviews and ratings can actually be trusted.
I'm happy someone did this website. I just came back from a long trip and every time somebody asked me why I hate Booking.com, I pointed exactly to some of the points that were made there. The fake sense of urgency, the cluttered UI. And the cherry on top: The fact they display the "total cost of all nights" in the results, instead of the per-night cost. That's not a misleading UX, it's just a bad UX decision.
But because of it's popularity amongst accommodation owners and travelers, its fall is unlikely.
I prefer the total cost in the results, since that's what I'll ultimately pay. Why do you prefer per night? Doesn't that make you do the multiplication in your head?
A few weeks ago I stayed in an apartment in Austria which was €49 for one night, with a €45 cleaning fee... I thought that seemed a bit crazy (ok there were 7 of us, so still pretty good), but clicking through other results I saw all the properties in this area had similar fees. One had the same price per night and a €70 cleaning fee! I guess it’s a way to avoid taxes or such.
Their hiring and interview process, at least in product management - it looked like they are fishing for fresh ideas on what to A/B test on their website. All the talk was focused around it. Answering the questions they didn't give a single direct answer only extremely vague ones. Red flags all around.
Seems great, until you realise that literally almost every day, they have a similar sale. There's always massive discounts for something in store. I have literally never paid full price, or anything close to it.
I repeatedly verified this on numerous dates, with numerous hotels -- Booking.com's super-exceptional "deals" were occasionally up to 20% more expensive than a direct booking with the hotel, for the exact same room type.
Has anybody else seen this?
Not that I would be the least surprised by any kind of scandal from those thugs but I haven't heard anything recently.
The time ticker "feature" is what was referenced in the other HN article from a month ago.
Screenshots taken literally seconds apart refreshed multiple times to make sure it's still the same:
http://eugene.lt/booking/1.png macOS on a MacBook Pro from New York, NY (via a DigitalOcean droplet VPN)
http://eugene.lt/booking/2.png Fresh Windows 10 VM from Vilnius, Lithuania
But this is basic market segmentation, just based on the person buying and not on the product being sold. Hence why it seems more scummy.
I am surprised that people use a single website to choose where they're going to stay. I never book an unknown hotel without checking reviews on a few different sites (usually TripAdvisor, yay pics, and if in the US then Yelp, yay complainers). And I always check prices at least on the hotel's own site so I know what a discount is and what's not.
For me the likes of Booking, Hotels, and Kayak are for map-search and the actual purchase experience. And for the latter I'm pretty happy with Booking, I use them often.
If the message here is that the travel business gets sleazier the higher you climb up the aggregation pyramid, then yes, true, and I can't remember it ever not being thus.
Are there any trusted review services for travel locations? Something like Consumer Report, but for travel. Although I don't know where their quality levels stand nowadays, I know my parents used to swear by em 10 to 20 years ago.
Yelp I understand though as I don't think there is anything like a "verified diner."
But when I was in Havana, we wandered in to a string of terrible bars, cafes and restaurants over the first couple days. So we went to a hotspot and downloaded the offline TripAdvisor. We wouldn't go to a place unless TripAdvisor gave it a decent rating. After that, we had nothing but great experiences.
I used to work for RentalCars and as soon as booking put the "someone just booked" on the site, RentalCars had to follow suit even if the last car booked was 3 days ago
I often visit the tourist-office website to find an hotel.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/avaseave/2014/01/27/when-online...
More here: https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/vpages/review_mod_fraud_detect...
I travel a lot and have used Booking.com to save myself quite a bit of money over the years. I still regularly compare their prices with other sites and they are pretty consistently cheaper than competing sites.
The "hurry" parts of their site do induce a little anxiety but I tend to also appreciate the real time information so I know I get the room I want.
Trivago?
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The last time this website came up on HN (same issue), I conducted an experiment. The annoyances and manipulation described by the blogger sounded like it relied on Javascript and graphics. I wanted to see how far I could get without using a graphical browser.
I was able to
1. search hotels,
2. return a list of properties in CSV/JSON/TXT,
3. return prices and
4. book.
It required only a shell script of 107 lines, 308 characters, 2934 bytes. This could be further reduced.
I used only a command line http client, sed and tmux send-key (optional). Further optional: Fully customized HTTP headers, including randomized User-Agent if desired.
I had to store a session cookie for getting price or booking but no cookies were required for searching.
I used no Javascript.
I was able to eliminate all the annoyances and manipulation cited by the blogger.
Conclusion: At least for booking.com all these annoyances can easily be avoided by choosing the right browser.
(I did occasionally see the "Only ___ rooms left" message as this is returned in plain text. I did not however see the number change over repeated searches for the same hotel. In any event, I just deleted that line in the output, assuming it is untruthful.)
Yeah, totally common for average people to do this.
The right browser == non-graphical browser. Good joke.
You can achieve the same by installing a simple browser extension for managing cookies & randomizing browser footprint. Firefox has some.
Like I say with all recruiters, I said I was interested. I thought about it and everything was a red flag. Sure I'd get to live in Amsterdam and stay in Europe with my girlfriend, but ... that sounds like the ultimate shit job. I'd have to endure that until I worked out whatever visa contract they'd have or find someone else to sponsor me with a non-shit job.
So I just ignore the recruiter when he calls .. and ignore him .. and ignore him. Dude calls every fucking day for like four weeks straight; after I had already moved back to America. Most recruiters would take the hint after three failed calls. I can't imagine how desperate they must be. Then I heard from a former co-worker one of our other buddies, a Kiwi, had taken a job with them .. leaving NZ to go work there. He's still there ... hope it's not shit.
"All I did was miss three calls because I left my phone at my friend's and when I called they'd given the job to someone else, how unprofessional"
What you have described is very different from:
"Dude calls every fucking day for like four weeks straight;"
I doubt you'd leave your phone at your friend's for a month, and if you were uncontactable daily for a month then, yeah, I can understand them giving the job to someone else.
Let me tell you about my first experience with a recruiter. I realise this is only one anecdote, but it sums up their usefulness.
As a fresh graduate I sent a recruiter my CV and he sent me two job specs. I applied for one and the company ended up making an offer. The salary was well below normal, the company's office was in the middle of nowhere in another part of the country, and I'd had to have moved out there and bought a car in order to do the commute. The deal was not a good one, but through the recruiter I negotiated higher pay. During this process I was warned about coming across as 'mercenary', and he made real efforts to get me to take the job quickly ('stop delaying', 'this kind of job won't come up again').
At the same time as having this offer on the table, I received a separate offer from a company I'd applied to independently, with a salary ~25% higher, great benefits etc, which I accepted, to the annoyance of my recruiter.
Once you get talking to a recruiter, they really do put you through the booking.com experience.
I accept their value. But it is limited.
"They are just doing their job" is a weak excuse. Most of the recruiters are doing such a bad job in matching the workforce with companies that they end up wasting everyone's time. The only reason why these brute-force approaches work is the surplus of demand in the current SE labour market.
This reminds me of the people that think women (or men) that don't want to go out with them owe them some kind of explanation. No, dude. Get some social awareness and move the fuck on.
Wait till you're a grownup and you realize how not true that is.
No, that's being a child. Being a grown up means not only thinking about yourself
Goes both ways.
Being an adult means you get to own many of your choices, but also their consequences.
Giving the recruiter a direct "no" would be far more professional. OTOH, I've dissed more than my share of recruiters myself, though generally only after an initial clear and unambiguous communication wasn't respected.
With regards to their testing procedures, the way I understand it is that they’re focusing on mitigation using clever monitoring/automated rollbacks. They pride themselves in their data analytics abilities, and this is part of that.
Source: live/work in Amsterdam and know many people that work/worked there.
Caveat here is that I'm not referring to all Indian devs, only the few I'm acquainted with.
If these engineers want to move abroad, they'd usually prefer the US because salaries there are significantly higher.
But even if you have good skill set, but don't want too much pressure and would like a fairly stable at some Indian consulting company, you might only be drawing around 30k USD. But you get to earn if you are sent for an onsite assignment.
According to Glassdoor for example the average salaries for Software Engineer are:
- US: $103k
- NL: €45k
For somebody who's moving halfway across the world anyway, I can imagine they'd prefer to look for a job in the US.
Edit: The comments below are all correct. I didn't mention any of the secondary benefits since the internet hardly ever mentions those. To somebody from a country where things like health insurance and paid sick/vacation days hardly exist, there's a much smaller chance they look into those things.
Also in the US a lot is dependent on employer (health care, vacation days, etc.), whereas in the Netherlands many things are set by law.
My point was that people who look at salaries on the internet and compare those, will often choose the highest and dismiss the lowest.
A much better metric is to look at net disposable income after tax, if you're focusing on the "making money" aspect.
If you're focusing on the life quality aspect you'll also have to consider mortgage, car ownership and time off.
Example:
- In Netherlands you have 24 business days of time off, where you can take them from the moment your contract begins (not after 1 year working), and you can take them however you want.
- Taking a mortgage in Netherlands is currently cheaper than renting and most houses in the "sweet spot" cost around 300k euros, which is ridiculously cheap. Monthly payments are subsidized by the government (for some years) which makes it cheaper than renting.
To summarise, every country has a lot to offer, and at the end of the day life is not just about money.
In Italy we have 28 days off plus national holidays
Mortgage are cheap as in other European countries and if you avoid the city center you can buy a very decent apartment for less than 250k
20km from city center you can buy a villa for the same amount
Rents are generally a bit high in larger cities (Rome, Milan, Bologna)
Salaries in tech are not that great, but there's little if no competition, if you're good you can find good deals
Banks and insurances are investing in innovation and new technologies
You get to live the Italian life style
CONS
Nobody is actually investing a lot in Italy, roughly 150.000 people are leaving every year
That leaves a lot of jobs vacant but it can't honestly be considered a plus
It's not yet a startup ready country, things are changing, but it'll take time
Developer market rate in pretty much every country in the world (except maybe Switzerland and Norway) is pretty low compared to the US. Just saying.
Also booking employers refused to let their YAPC conference talks being recorded. https://web.archive.org/web/20111116162105/http://blogs.perl...
It's a lot less stressful if something goes wrong, because you can go to a previous release in a couple of minutes.
Compared to Python and Ruby, Perl might be getting a little long in the tooth but there's probably stuff that's less of a hassle to in Perl than in any of its decendants.
Certainly no red flag.
Virtually every calendar control for booking a date range sucks. Airlines, Airbnb, hotels, whatever.
Having someone work full time on making an intuitive calendar control makes sense to me, and I personally have spent months on single components, and we are just a tiny company...
https://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/bldcontenten/...
I'd be interested to know how your buddy's doing there. Seems like they still post a lot on job websites, and their growth isn't exactly mindboggling, so it would seem they have really high turnover and/or trouble filling positions to begin with.
Not suddenly, but when Centos 5 released in 2007 with 5.8.8 (from 2006), and Centos 6 in 2011 with 5.10.1 (2009). That froze the language environment for a lot of people and they couldn't benefit from the new features. Then they would publish posts explaining how to do things that 5.12 onwards had better solutions for, and new devs would get stuck in a whirlpool of trash.
Those versions worked fine with '1998 perl' (the year the codebase started & also the last time best practices were checked). Newer versions of perl are way better, but for a lot of devs, that 7 year period of weird perl + the halo around it (search for 'perl hit counter') is what they used to get their impression of perl.
The sole purpose of doing so is to get more ad shows. See, a person leaves his computer with YT running or mutes it in the background, and returns half an hour later while google already sold 10 or so ad shows. When autoplay is on, yt tend to put shorter videos into your view que