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Comment by simonsaidit | Hacker News Reader

My only problem with booking.com is that some random employe in philiphines in another hotel can see my reservation and full credit card details... Im pretty sure this isen’t PCI-DSS compliant.. and Yes my sister in law send a screenshot so i could see it in person.

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Not to speak of the horrible dark patterns - count down timers, "only 3 rooms left!!!!", alarming colors, confusing interface.

There was a time, oh what a time, when I could use hotels.com and booking.com to get really good prices and still stay at very nice hotels if I was ok with booking close to the date.

Remember a time when a friend and was given a literally shitty room (with overflowing toilet) in Cairo via hotels.com. Hm, doesn't rime well with the paragraph above. :)

I've personally started using a combo of agoda.com, Booking, and HostelWorld for all my booking, and finding the best deal of all three, works like a charm.

Booking.com also has some really bad checking for email adresses, which is why I often find reservations in my account for people who enter my email adress instead of theirs in the booking email field (I have a booking.com account with that email, they don't, but the booking still gets tacked to my account - it cost me nothing, but I could change their reservation if I wanted to)

Same with Vanguard and Fidelity. I could steal someone's funds if I really wanted to.

Now that I think about it, Quicken and TurboTax too. People signed up for all kinds of important things using my email.

Same with airbnb, you can book and have the host confirm booking without any checks your email address is correct.

I did a phone screening for them once back in 2015. Everything was written in Perl (with no intention of migrating), developers often push modules straight to production, and there are little to no automated tests.

This was all from their HR person on the phone.

They offer more money than most other companies in The Netherlands .. and I think it was clear why. ... I passed.

Not a lot of insight knowledge but those coding practices sound worse than what I got from some talks they did.

I think they're doing only light testing for features before they push them to production because they're doing so much A/B-testing that all small "improvements" that decrease conversions or $$$ per minute are pulled again very quickly. So it sounded like a lot of small PoCs that then get rewritten properly when the idea is good.

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