I wouldn't want to shop on that site ever again, they have no respect for their users.
Also, their support is abysmal. Often when hotels fail to provide rooms as advertised, they play a "not my fault" game with the hotels, where the hotels claim they can't refund because the money is stuck with Booking.com while Booking.com claim the money is in the hotels account. Then they give you a "20% refund" that you can use on your next purchase there.
It also happened twice to me that they "double charges" me, with a pre-charge (that is deleted in a few weeks) and then with a real pay, which might leave you without money in your credit card if you have a small credit limit.
However, last time I travel for a extended time (hotel everyday at different place for a month), I found Booking has the best UI after some comparison between all the major players (keep in mind lots of them are from the same company), I still used it.
Would like a recommandation about what to use instead.
Trip.com
Tripadvisor
Lastminute
When I can't find anything, I use AirBnB.
I'm going through the exact same dispute with VRBO (Expedia Group). The apartment that we rented wasn't at all what was advertised, so we left after one night. VRBO first said that because we left voluntarily, there was nothing they could do. After pointing out that we still have our booking as active, they said we need to talk to the owner directly. After pointing out that the owner is just ignoring our messages, they just said that they handle as a middle-man between us and the owner.
After pointing out that the apartment isn't what is advertised, and that the reviews don't even match the property, they said that we agreed to their terms and conditions. I then spend a couple of hours looking at their other terms and conditions, and pointing out that the owner had agreed with these, but that they had broken several of their terms and conditions by apparently using the same listing for multiple properties.
VRBO finally agreed and refunded us their 10% service fee, but claimed that the rest of the money is already with the owner, so we need to talk to them for a refund. (They have ignored us for weeks now)
I'm still baffled that they would handle it this way. First completely dodging any responsibility, only taking some responsibility after highlighting that the owner had broken several of their rules, and only refunding us their service fees. I never paid any money directly to the owner, so I have no clue how the owner will ever refund me.
At this point I don't even really care about the money that was lost, but the fact that both VRBO and the owner are willing to just take my money (1500 EURO), for a single night in their falsely advertised property infuriates me to no end. And I'm doing anything in my power to make their lives as difficult as possible.
My wife provided video and picture evidence of this to airbnb - no support. Hosts threatened to provide negative feedback to her and essentially blackball her with other hosts in London. We provided THAT messaging to airbnb - still nothing.
airbnb's position was "well, if it was bad, you should have left and we might have refunded some of your money". Leave $2k with them, go spend another... $2000 on hotel someplace else (assuming you can even get anything short notice), then hope/pray you get some refund? I think we have waived some chargeback ability because of T&C we'd agreed to (I might be misremembering this). We should have pressed chargeback with cc company. It was horrible experience, and we've not used them since.
This place sounds terrible, and of course it should have had curtains. But the part about facing onto other buildings is pretty normal in London.
Heh, VRBO said the exact opposite to us. Essentially "you should've stayed at the property, but since you left, we can't help you". One of our major complaints was that you had to walk through he first bedroom in order to get to the second. For two adults, that's just a stupid arrangement, and should've been mentioned up front.
I'm now traveling alone, and am paying around $80 a night for a decent hotel. I agree, peace of mind is worth paying for, traveling these days is already stressful enough.
You know this happens a lot when they issue 10% refunds. If it were rare and they cared about customers at all they would refund 100% and deal with the owner themselves. They just don't want to get into the business of talking with renters.
Them issuing a 10% refund just felt like an insult to me. Hence why we're taking it further as well.
[+] Yes they use scare tactics but come on, they're easy to ignore. Who cares it's the only available room and 500 people are looking at it right now and 5 of them are already typing in the credit card details? Not me. If I can't get that particular room, I'll get another one, whatever. (I guess it also helps that we often book ~1year in advance, so we're reasonably confident that we'll eventually find something).
Haha exactly. Two of them have already hit enter! Our service mesh is delaying calling the Stripe API as long as possible in case you want to buy instead!
Which is basically what Emesa (VakantieVeiligen.nl) do. Scumbags, too.
The hotel was very helpful, and we cancelled the booking both from our, as well as the hotel’s side. Nonetheless it took Booking.com days to decide that the refund was legitimate.
Consider yourself lucky. For me it was 20eur take it or leave it, on 500eur loss.
<rant> I consider cancellation/refund policies that end before your arrival technically - a scam. The situation was like that - the apartment was booked with cancellation available 3 (or smth) days before arrival [0]. Upon arrival - the place was cigarette reeking, bedbug infested, with 30 year old completely worn out mattresses disgusting place. Owner says - "sorry - no refunds" [1], booking says - "we talked to the owner, cancellation policy has ended, the reviews are above average" [2][3]. Upon other calls they gave me 20eur. Bank could not issue a refund, because everything was up to policy.
Though I still use booking.com. I learned to ignore those dark patterns, because it's obvious that 1 spot is left for an apartment, there are no more to it :) . I had only 1 horrible experience with them, but had much worse with AirBNB. Booking.com is great to search all types of accommodation and it's often possible to find a way to book directly and for cheaper, so using it sort of as a search engine. </rant>
[0] from my experience it's usually like that, cancellations/refunds until your arrival usually add exorbitant amounts to the price
[1] though owner suggested ordering cleaning services, but that place needed crime scene level cleaning and complete refurbishment
[2] lesson learned: always sort reviews by newest and translate from foreign languages, because newest 3 reviews were horrifying. But I have not read them, because have not translated them, or have not seen them. Because default sorting shows by "relevant", i.e. foreign language reviews are on the bottom and the other sort order is a mystery to me.
[3] it seams that people do not know how to vote in reviews. If you returned from vacation and infested your own home with bed bugs, and had multitude of other problems - do not give 7 or 8 as a review score - give it a 1. Booking.com used those reviews against me - "if it's above 8 - we cannot do anything about it".
The funny part is that you can cancel before arriving, but if you're set to stay multiple days, you can't cancel the other days. Might as well make N reservations instead of 1 with N days.
About reviews: Booking.com didn't allow me to leave a review, since they claimed I could only spend one day at the hotel. Even though they charged me for a week. They are as crooked as it gets.
We had a feeling about this. So we explicitly did not allow them to cancel, unless they refunded us. I had a hunch if they'd cancel, we also going to lose ability to leave a review. On top of that it would allow host of the apartment to re-rent the place for our days and essentially be paid twice.
> As a market leader, it is vital that companies like Booking.com meet their responsibilities in this area, ensuring that online accommodation reservation systems are free from manipulative techniques such as hiding sponsoring in ranking, unduly putting time pressure on users or misrepresenting rebates.
> Booking.com has committed to make the following changes to their practices by 16 June 2020 at the latest:
* Make clear to consumers that any statement such as “last room available!” refers only to the offer on the Booking.com platform;
* Not present an offer as being time-limited if the same price will still be available afterwards;
* Clarify how results are ranked and, whether payments made by the accommodation provider to Booking.com have influenced its position in the list of results;
* Ensure that it is clear when a price comparison is based on different circumstances (e.g. stay dates) and not present that comparison as a discount;
* Ensure that price comparisons presented as discounts represent genuine savings, e.g. by providing details about the Standard Rate price taken as a reference;
* Display the total price that the consumers will have to pay (including all unavoidable charges, fees and taxes that can reasonably be calculated in advance) in a clear and prominent way;
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/es/ip_19_...
Chargeback is the real way to fight such scammy companies. Because, they lose more money than they will make from you. Hit them where it hurts. Lesson learnt. Now, I ALWAYS use my credit card for booking anything online.
This is super ballpark estimates, could be order of magnitude different, but the idea is that there is enormous incentive to push people to book, its the same as the example in the article, pushing people to buy. Purely because the pay-per-click is so expensive, you need ROI > 1 to survive.
Those companies are in survivor mode, and anything that is even remotely legal, or can be defended in court, is allowed and encouraged.
Thing like 70% off on pair of shoes, that just had their price increased by 90% for 1 minute, just so there was a record in the database that they actually had higher price, nobody cares that they never sold at the high price.
Companies constantly push the legal boundary.
EDIT: also think about how many times people book per year, maybe 4-5 times in the upper quantiles? so if booking pays 3$ for you, it will take a couple of months until your next booking so they can reinvest your 15% commission to buy other people.
In my country this is explicitly illegal. A good or service must be sold for a certain period of time (2 weeks I think) before it can be used as the pre-sale price.
I've only heard this in relation to physical stores though, not sure how it works for e-commerce.
https://www.lawdonut.co.uk/business/marketing-and-selling/co...
https://www.lewissilkin.com/-/media/files/main/insights/cmi/...
You'll find similar rules in many European countries, though most won't be available in English. This document is, for Denmark:
https://www.consumerombudsman.dk/media/14560/forbrugerombuds...
https://thecai.ie/your-rights/your-rights/pricing/
>Businesses cannot claim that goods have been sold at a higher price and are now on sale for a lower price unless the goods were actually on sale at the higher price for a “reasonable period,” which is generally understood to be 28 days in the three months before the price reduction.
In the UK, that's a criminal offence.
* search hotel at booking.com
* find that hotel at google
* call them directly, by actual phone
You will get a lower price always. Of course, you need to actually manually call them, which people don't want to do; but it always worked for me.
Quite often I get a lower price or free goodies (ie. a bottle of wine) because I skipped booking.com
* Find them at Google
* Call them directly
* Get a super expensive price and a tip to book online
I had a gf who was able to get a different experience but it always seemed she had to get the manager on the line to do so.
1) you will talk to a human
2) you will be able to talk about particular requests (like - say - higher or lower floor, an additional bed for your child, room with balcony, non standard breakfast, etc.)
3) the dates/times of your arrival and departure will be double checked interactively with the hotel clerk [0]
4) the rate will be double checked and confirmed [1] (besides very likely being lower, particularly if you are going to stay mmore than one or two days)
[0] it is not extremely rare that people make mistakes with the dates, when/if you arrive one day earlier it is usually not a problem (unless the hotel has no vacancies) but if you arrive one day later, that is a "no show", your money cannot be recovered
[1] it happens often enough that people books a double room ( but for one person) by mistake and then is surprised that the hotel asks for a supplement for the second person
I am aware of booking's dirty tools to make you feel you have to book NOW! However, after around 100+ booking.com booking all around the world (including small villages in Amazonia or Laos) I am eternally grateful that for that extra 1$/night or so I get instant support with whatever probleem I had.
Obviously as middle man you take some part of the pie - though idea is that it's worth for everyone.
BTW - it's not that common to meet customer with 100+ reservations. So excuse me for asking - what do you think of the changes in the account area (My Trips)?
Currently I only have the android app (well, traveling again) and I am mostly satisfied with it.
However the web version I always found a disaster. Especially since I had a linked business account too, and the SSO just craps itself into a redirect loop when I try to logout from it.
Everything else seems to be very user-oriented and I am satisfied in general.
(ha, I also happen to know the storage system behind the backend ;-) )
When speaking Vietnamese, you get an extra discount.
https://skift.com/2015/08/10/travel-brands-stop-hate-selling...
Perhaps this may the case for you (it's one of the reasons I refuse to use food delivery apps), but across the general population these dodgy tactics do seem to work.
In my eBay business, at times we've seen a >100% increase in sales during the last 24 hours of a promotion, when the site starts showing ticking red countdown timers.
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While I can't really give too many details (BTW I still work at Booking - just moved teams).
I did the real time (it's a stream so technically that's "near real time") processing back-end which collects all the "views events", uses anonymous unique user identifiers to make sure it's truly not counting duplicates, bots are also excluded ...etc. And result is a reverse index of sorts.
On the FE side (technically still BE so think backend for frontend) as part of producing message (or not) we literally do a real-time query on that reversed index to be sure that even if looking only at count it's "1" - we want to be sure that it's not you.
As of things like "Only X left" - that's literally how many rooms we've got left to offer to you for the dates you've entered.
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And speaking generally. Booking.com being 25+ years old global company, one can imagine that company is basically constantly under microscope of various regulators and consumer protection agencies. So even if there was someone that wanted to fake this type of stuff (and that would be going against what they've learned in various mandatory ethics, privacy, legal ... training). Well something like that would've been very short lived.
And with so much money on the line - companies (at least those that don't have walled garden ecosystems and such) actually do look into long term effect of things like Marketing/Sales/Persuasion - because they don't want to annoy potential customers so much that they never come back.
It was just an illegal consumer practice.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_19_...
Reading through the points from the page you posted - I think internally only actions related to that were basically to add more info (e.g. popup/hover or just "on our site") to clarify to people that same as every other marketplace on the Internet ... coughAmazoncough ...
Things we show are just things we know about and have in our "inventory".
And actually after some of those changes - I believe some customers started to complain that reminding them how "X other people are looking at {name of hotel} for your dates" felt much creepier than "X other people are looking at {name of hotel}" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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PS. Only reason I wrote a quoted "inventory" is that unlike physical goods with real stock. When you're renting accommodation - on top of physical rooms, there's extra dimensions due to different dates, meals (because in many hotels restaurant can't support everyone having breakfast, half/full board/meals) ...etc.
> I was part of "Consumer Psychology Team" at Booking.com for years. That team was/is one way or another involved in pretty much every functionality you mentioned
You were part of a team that cooked up new ways to harm consumers.
Playing the same word games here too is a bit tasteless. When your company is forced to "align practices presenting offers and prices with EU law following EU action", that means you've done something illegal, and you were caught. Nothing else matters.
Though as long as someone doing that is impacting only that person - I don't mind.
However, I would appreciate if you didn't follow taking those bits and pieces you've selected. And then taking them out of context that I've said/wrote them in - re-combining them in ways that would bias others reading just your "curated" version.
It's never too late to reflect on that, and work on making things better at your company, instead of acting surprised that something illegal was called illegal on HN.
Before jumping to further conclusions - I would encourage you to look at actual differences in website before and post that announcement you're referring to. Wayback archive should work - though some of this stuff might have not be shown, or shown differently to bots; otherwise over years there have been a bunch of articles covering persuasive techniques with examples/screenshots of Booking.com.
And then perhaps even ask specific questions based on those observations - and maybe, just maybe someone can answer them without actually breaking the law.
Though since it would be against the law for me to give too many technical and business details (employment contract, regulations related to publicly traded companies ...etc). Only way I can think off for you to get a peak into implementation - would be to become a colleague.
And finally - I will agree with you on that last sentence. It's never too late to reflect on things. That includes not acting surprised (or in denial) to hear that some "big company" you thought is doing bad things - is not.
Oh and definitely keep up with the good fight. Based on news with actual specific details of lawsuits and outcomes (some of which I initially only found about when they were used as examples in internal ethics workshops & trainings). There's a lot of companies out there that should be getting more scrutiny both internally and externally.