Hacker News Reader

Comment by edejong | Hacker News Reader

This is what A/B testing does to a popular site. You test for immediate customer engagement but cannot (easily) test long-term customer loyalty. This is why booking.com has become the largest online hotel booking site in several continents. Nevertheless, I think it will eventually be their downfall.

View on HN

"Frankly, I don’t think I am going to stop using Booking.com. I am not aware of any other service with a comparable number of properties and reviews."

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...

A suggestion for people who are upset with this behavior:

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.

Sometimes the direct prices are actually more. Your best bet for sticking it to them might be to use an alternative booking service.

Perhaps calling the hotel to ask if they'll match the online price will work?

Booking.com takes an 18% commission. Only a severely incompetent business would refuse to give you a lower price in exchange for them not having to pay that 18%.

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.

Commissions vary depending on a lot of factors. My property in the south of France, we pay 10% and it’s well worth it. It’s incredible lead generation and saves us a ton on marketing and advertising. I’m happy to pay the commission because for small hotel owners, it’s much easier than having to spend continuously on marketing.

Right. But imagine you have your rooms listed for $220 in your own site, and for $200 on Booking. If someone books on Booking, you get $180. If someone calls and asks to book at the rate they see at Booking, but directly with you, you make $200.

If I understand this correctly, such deals should be forbidden by contracts with property aggregators.

Except that hotel room bookings work a lot differently for lot of hotels than any other types of bookings. Hotels usually sell rooms in bulk to Priceline, Expedia and other OTAs and possibly keep some for their own funnel. So they may not have the same incentive to sell at that price you saw on Priceline.

That is not true for the chain hotels in the US. They also all have best price guarantees where if you see a lower publicly advertised price than the hotel’s own website, then you get a free night. But that never happens since it’s all updated in real time now, and the hotel’s systems will not allow reservations at a lower price.

Actually I've been able to use Best Price Guarantees many times. But it's not as easy to use as you say it is: each program has it's own set of complicated terms and conditions and often reject seemingly reasonable requests. Also, usually the chain needs to independently verify the rate, which can take up to 1-2 days, and by that time, the rate may have changed. Also, often you need to book the lowest rate for the guarantee, which could be a nonrefundable rate.

Easy/Lenient/Refundable: Starwood (20% off) Marriott (25% off)

Easy/Lenient/Nonrefundable: Hilton ($100 certificate)

Medium/Nonrefundable: Hyatt ($50 certificate)

Hard/Nonrefundable: IHG (1st night free)

And small hotels will give you extras as they're not allowed to lower the price but can give you more service. However, wouldn't do that in countries you're not comfortable dealing with as you lose the protection that booking.com gives you.

And who is that in Europe? I tried both Agoda and Hotels.com without much success.

Agoda = Booking.com

Agoda is a Priceline subsidiary, like Booking.com

In Europe, I always check the price directly from the hotel, if it's last minute, I check hotels tonight and if the price is really much cheaper in booking.com, I call the hotel and get them to match the price.

I sometimes use hotels.com though since I often can get a 5% cashback plus their reward scheme which gives me a free night every ten nights (effectively a 10% discount)

Oh and for reviews, I check tripadvisor since, on the contrary to booking.com, they actually publish bad reviews.

>"Oh and for reviews, I check tripadvisor since, on the contrary to booking.com, they actually publish bad reviews."

But what good is publishing bad reviews if they are fake? See:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/avaseave/2014/01/27/when-online...

I book via hotels.com to get there 8% discount (on hotels that apply), or booking when/if the hotel is on the genius 10% list. But yeah, if the hotel I want to stay in isn't on a discount on either site I'll book direct if the price is the same/less. I do travel often without a computer and need to book quickly so will just use booking or hotels app, as it's easy and quick, whereas the booking direct is usually rather hard. + I don't usually book within a hotel chain enough to gain any rewards, which you do on hotels.

If anything, booking.com feels like one of the worst whenever I use it. I vastly prefer tripadvisor, for example, even though their iOS app is a horrible unusable battery drain.

I've tried tripadvisor a few times, but always go back to hotels.com / bookings / google maps. I just find tripadvisor kinda tricky to use and filter to get the type of hotels I'm after.

> I am not aware of any other service with a comparable number of properties and reviews.

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 avoid good reviews and look at what people complain about.

This also helps avoid hotels full of snooty elitists.

Because since people's tastes differ, if a site has a small inventory, it's very likely they will have nothing at least some of the time you want to book. If some small site has nothing that's a fit for you even, say, 10% of the time, the vast majority of people would choose a site they know will have something all of the time.

I find it strange too, though that may be because of the type of locations I stay. I don't seen any reason for customer loyalty to a single booking site. There is very little friction to just use the hotels own booking sites. For each town I stay in there is usually two or three hotels to choose from that have online booking (occasionally I have to make a phone call to book since there are no hotels with online booking.) From those two or three, I sort them by price, and work from the cheapest to the most expensive until I find the cheapest that I think will provide what I want, and book using that hotels site. Occasionally it is booking.com, but more often than not, it is the Motel 6 corporate site or the Comfort Inn corporate site or similar.

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.

> 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.

> I don't seen any reason for customer loyalty to a single booking site. There is very little friction to just use the hotels own booking sites.

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...

>"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"

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...

I don't actually travel much, and have never used Booking.com. So no dog in this fight. But your question is pretty much my point: if people aren't going to use some other service, it's a lot harder to quantify long-term negative impacts of dark patterns vs the measurable short-term lift.

[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."

Why not use TripAdvisor? Not owned by Priceline or Expedia (yet!), nowhere as manipulative as Priceline, and you can actually compare between Priceline and Expedia offerings on the same page. The reviews are much better, rating system is not complicated/hidden and you can sort of ranking/reviews and much better UI with the new redesign.

Disclosure: Ex-Tripadvisor engineer.

TripAdvisor used to be part of Expedia. They were spun off in 2011.

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).

Why? Trip Advisor is actually one of the biggest contributors to scourge the fake reviews! Anyone can't post reviews on Tripadvisor you don't need to be a verified guest.

'“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...

Go direct

Unfortunately directly booking with the hotel has drawbacks as well. 6 months ago I booked The Pullman Hotel in London directly (they had the same pricing as the online agencies).

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.

If you booked with booking.com and the reservation was lost your pretty much SOL as well.

Booking actually helps in these situations, a friend of mine works as a customer service agent there and spends a fair share of his time resolving such issues. If I get it right, in such cases Booking should suggest the new property to a guest and reimburse the price from the first hotel.

I've started to use Google Maps more and more, they give you a good overview of several sites and their prices.

You mean like this from last month where they listed the same hotel in New York City as both a 3 star and a 4 star:

https://www-moneysavingexpert-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/www.m...

Yes, among many others.

I actually think this is caused a by a highly croweded, overly competitive market. There are so many booking sites that they have to resort to these things to win sales.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com