Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmarquez | Hacker News Reader

Glad to hear the EU is cracking down on Booking.com's sales tactics. Unfortunately, those manipulative tactics actually work.

I frequently have to remind my mother (in her 70s, and tends to believe everything on the internet) not to rush through a Booking.com transaction because "rooms are selling out fast." Or not to favor Booking.com because she was given some "insider discount" (forgot the exact phrase) for repeat business.

As the article states, plenty of rooms are still available for a given hotel no matter what Booking.com claims. And that "insider discount"? I got the same price as her while logged in on a brand new account.

View on HN

I keep wondering about this. In your mother's era, surely there were "hucksters" or snake-oil salesmen. But now, it seems like almost everyone (on the Internet) is one. Why?

Is it the only way to succeed? Or profit >> reputation? Or the faceless-ness of online selling? Or the global economy?

What fundamentally changed since, say, 1980?

Hasn't the internet always been stuffed to the gills with con artists? At least, since the "Eternal September"?

Isn't it surreal how quickly society snapped from, "never tell anyone your real name or where you live, never try anything that people tell you to do without independently verifying the advice first" to actively encouraging oversharing?

It feels odd to say this considering how nihilistic and distrustful the current zeitgeist is, but does anyone else get the feeling that many people who came online in the past decade or so are way too credulous and never received the cautions and warnings that we used to give new users as a matter of course? I don't think it's limited to older generations.

That's a good point. One explanation would be that social media profiles suddenly gained value. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the "influencer" economy. The expectation of having a LinkedIn profile. Suddenly it's no longer viable to hide behind a pseudonymous identity.

I'd say a major factor is the removal of the human factor when conducting business. Automation makes it possible to push a large part of the responsibility to the customer. Just imagine standing in front of a person in a travel agency saying the same things to you as the booking.com website says; "I can offer you a discount because you're such a valuable customer to us, but you need to book within 2 minutes or I'll remove the discount!".

Metrics, A/B testing and top-down management. It's well-known that commissioned salespeople always acted like this. A/B testing means the whole website has the same incentives as someone working on commission, and the same behaviour will result.

Hell, when one half of my brain has to remind the other half not to be rushed by all the "only one room available!", what hope is there for your mother?

The most blatant piece of evidence for what they do is how they say "ONLY ONE ROOM LEFT AT THIS HOTEL" but when you go back and request two rooms, this changes to "ONLY TWO ROOMS LEFT AT THIS HOTEL" immediately.

I used to work there until end of 2017 in a senior role, running the infrastructure development department.

During my time there, the company would never actually do something that was technically wrong (or lying), with a couple of exceptions where some individual went too far and wasn't caught in any review. There were certainly UI elements that were misleading or suggesting (never claiming) of something being a freebie when it was included in the chosen rate. These sort of changes consistently received internal criticism, but ultimately due to the outstanding A/B testing tooling, were shown to be worth too much money for the detractors to succeed. There were maybe a handful that were rolled back due to internal criticism.

In any case, it seems unlikely that booking would implement the change you describe.

NB: the actual availability was always controlled by the hotels, as were the prices - booking does not own inventory, unlike some of its competitors!

Edit: removed surplus punctuation.

Not booking.com, but travel sites definitely have gotten caught using Math.random() to generate the "x people are looking!" alerts.

https://twitter.com/OphirHarpaz/status/1184486445039411201

Oh yeah. Booking doesn't do it because it's big enough that it would get called out - externally and internally. Also, is actually much less snake oily a company than its reputation here or else I wouldn't have worked there for as many years.

"Hate selling" as it was dubbed by one of the trade magazines (over 4 years ago)

https://skift.com/2015/08/10/travel-brands-stop-hate-selling...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com