I think A/B testing went horribly right here. They make the most money they can comparing all the scenarios they ran, but the user is left with a shitty experience. But they keep coming back, converting, booking...
That's exactly right! Source: I designed and built a version of their experiment tooling (the last iteration before they had proper mathematicians to get it more right).
Satisfaction and Conversion can be so much at odds with each other sometimes. I see this in other markets a lot too :)
Local maxima everywhere though.
That would explain why their most annoying aspect — asking me to rate the every single time I book a room, sometimes more than once in a single transaction — has never gone away.