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Comment by bertil | Hacker News Reader

It’s interesting that no one here, after 160 comments, is speculating about the impact to Booking.com

B. is the 7th largest internet company in the world but because it’s in Amsterdam and not US based, hardly anyone think about them. They have incredible technology, often on-par with the big ones but I’m not anyone here could name one problem where they pionnered a solution.

Disclaimer: I used to work for one of their subsidiaries.

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> B. is the 7th largest internet company in the world

By what measure? Just checked and it's not market cap, not revenue, not number of employees, and not earnings.

I think it's easier to make this kind of statement about how they measure up in terms of public e-commerce companies and market cap. Amazon's bigger. Alibaba's bigger. Who am I missing? I think that would put them at #3 in that particular segment.

Fun fact from some years ago: It used to be a head-to-head race for 2nd between Booking and Ebay (when ebay was at their peak and included PayPal).

I got them at #9 or so in market cap for all Internet companies (see sibling comment). In yours and mine, they are pretty high up.

They are close though in market cap? They should be able to get into top 10.

Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Alibaba would be the huge ones. Then Salesforce, PayPal. Don’t know Alipay and Uber market cap space yet if they are internet companies.

I don’t know if you can include companies like Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco as internet companies. If you include Microsoft, still puts Booking into top 10.

I just googled “largest internet companies” and a list popped up with ‘Priceline’ in 7th, so it was a year-old list. I would agree it’s a vague statement but they are much larger and more interesting than most people suspect.

Completely disagree on the technology part, everything being written in Perl doesn't help and the user experience is not as good as Airbnb. The main thing going for them is that they have basically every hotel on their platform. And like others mentioned, that a lot of people prefer hotels to airbnbs.

I heard the integration part was mostly java. I’d guest they have both alive internaly, a bit like amazon at a time (?)

PS: dealing with hotels is playing with decades old technology. I think they’re doomed to keep a flexible and tried and true stack to deal with all the atrocities they’ll have to adjust to.

> Completely disagree on the technology part, everything being written in Perl doesn't help

Doesn't help what exactly? Lots of Amazon.com still runs in perl so not sure why this matters.

>the user experience is not as good as Airbnb.

This user's perspective is the opposite.

I can’t and I won’t comment on that larger part of the code base, but I suspect that you are right. (I did leave the company after all.)

Having every hotel on the planet requires some very heavy-handed growth teams and they have impressive talent there. It also requires to develop very flexible solutions and, even of the main code-base has some problem, that flexibility is worth mentioning.

There are three areas where I’ve seen some world-class internal products (on par with what I’ve seen at Facebook): data engineering, A/B testing, Machine learning hosting and serving. I’ve asked them to open-source and started what I could to help them do that, but they are far from being able to do it.

Booking.com has gone the other way, integrating private apartment rentals in their hotel listing. I’d imagine they saw it coming and as a customer they seem to be doing fine.

Also as they are one of the king of the hill, any move in the market is basically a move against them. For now at least I am not sure there will be that much impact.

I avoid booking.com because I loathe the asshole design patterns in their platform. I like booking my hotels without "<blink>get this room now without thinking or you'll miss it!</blink>" flashing everywhere.

I’ve heard of rumours that sometimes, those banners are not loaded on pages that should and someone might have blamed uBlock Origin for that. I wouldn’t know anything about this.

my favorite part about Booking is that it will tell me how many other people are currently looking at the last available room i'm looking it. Let's me know if i have to swoop it up quickly!

A/B testing at work

Uh?

That feature has been extensively A/B tested and every argument about how garish it is fails while someone points at a number on the screen that is long and has $ at one end.

I question the accuracy, and that's as someone who has worked in the industry.

This is nothing if not a dark pattern, and I would be very suspicious of what metric triggers "looking at the room"

There are several copies, and one is explicitly that: they have loaded the same page recently. There are other copies, like rooms remaining, the recent slope of bookings is steep and will hit zero soon, etc. All are reasonably true.

They just say that, because the sense of urgency on the customer's side is the seller's greatest asset.

I'd always assumed that was a lie. To me, the most useful feature of Booking is the refundability of most of their reservations, so I don't have to book hotel and flights simultaneously.

It's not a lie.

Booking has received tremendous regulatory/legal scrutiny on that group of features and they wouldn't be caught red handed doing something indefensible in that space. That being said, there are clearly some decisions to be made about what "currently looking at" means: As engineers, we all know that nothing is tracking user eyeballs (thankfully), so in reality these things are necessarily implemented as a rolling sum of non-bot page views within X minutes.

Whether or not the information is correct, of course, doesn't mean anybody has to like the feature. I personally really don't like it, but acknowledge that it was a feature with shockingly significant business impact when first released.

Source: Used to work there. Read the respective code at the time (~2015/2016 or so).

Good to have an authoritative answer on this! Thanks.

I can confirm (like smueller1234) that it is a real number (within reason on data flowing and estimates) which is actually a surprisingly hard engineering feat to achieve.

I have heard several other sites where the number is a lot more… interpretative.

Is hotels.com related to them in any way?

Not that know of.

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