De-Stressing Booking.com (2019) | Hacker News Reader

De-Stressing Booking.com (2019)

alexcharlton.co

965 pointsrobin_reala361 comments

This is why I sometimes hate a/b testing. I'm sure someone at booking a/b tested these things and saw an increase in revenue. The thing that these tests don't measure are very long term effects where people either start to hate your product and look for alternatives, or become so numb to the changes that the initial novelty effect wears off. The person who ran the test gets a promotion for increasing revenue during the quarter but the net result is a massive negative for the longevity of the product.

see also: facebook

That is not a problem with A/B testing. It's a problem with the values of the company. I've worked with people who will say, "Oh, this tests well, but we don't want to do it because of [long term concerns X and Y]."

People who value revenue metrics over all else will still do shitty things for users even if they don't A/B test.

The problem with that approach is you now have evidence that the short term change will show immediate results and no evidence of the long term concerns. Given solid numbers vs somebody's gut, most managers will go with the solid numbers, even if the company has good values.

> Given solid numbers vs somebody's gut, most managers will go with the solid numbers, even if the company has good values.

If this is true, that indicates that a company's theoretical "good values" are not being passed down to those decision-makers in a way that makes them impact decision-making.

Which means the company does not have those "good values" in the first place. They have lip service.

Values that are not practiced are not values. You are what you do, both when someone is watching and when someone is not.

I think I see where you’re coming from, but how I interpreted it, it’s just really hard to make these decisions, and from a managers perspective its not that black and white:

- almost any change will have have people arguing for and against it

- if ‘company values’ is a trump card to prevent a change, it will be used by the people against the change

- as a manager, to still make decisions in such an environment, you’ll find yourself needing to weigh the upsides and downsides even if there are strong company values (it just puts a higher weight on certain concerns)

- as parent said, short term impact supported with numbers is easier to weigh and defend than (possible but unknown) long term detrimental impact.

Thus, I think parent is right. Even in corporates with strong company values, it’s easier to prioritize the short term proven impact over long term unproven impact. And therefore, at scale, such decisions will be made.

Still, that’s what sets a good manager from an average, no?

No different with how there are relatively few good engineers but most are average or bad?

I mean there are companies that put out good products but most are average at best.

I suppose A/B testing is bad in the way that table saws are bad — that they are dangerous and I see a lot of videos of people using them in ways that are gonna chop off their fingers, but I wouldn’t blame the table saw for it or want to take it away.

You're assuming bad intent on numbers and good intent on gut. I've seen many places that just go with gut on everything, that's worse. I like working places that get numbers on everything.

You’re making a lot of assumptions. Looking at data and reacting to it absolutely does not imply a lack of values. What if the “good values” are to look at the numbers? This would be the right thing to do for the livelihood of employees, and the right thing to do from a scientific perspective. Some “good values” include never passing dogma down over time but instead questioning assumptions and testing for results.

This is where an involved founder can make all the difference. They’re often the only ones with the authority and incentive to say no to short-sighted cash grabs that degrade the brand and the user experience.

> They’re often the only ones with the authority and incentive to say no to short-sighted cash grabs that degrade the brand and the user experience.

And how do you know the short term changes will degrade the brand and the user experience?

Maybe deep down, users love dark patterns! Our judgement is powerless to determine; only the objective data can tell us!

In my experience founders are often more than happy to toe the line between nudges and shoves.

This is why you have long-term holdbacks: a group of users who never sees a set of experiments. That way you can measure over a longer period of time the true impact of a set of experiments.

You cannot control for lots of other externalities, such as inflation and competitors coming to market. These parameters will affect long-term users as well.

isn't that why it's good? You can't control infinite variables, the only ones here are A/B and you're keeping a subset of them as a control group?

I suppose that is a way of looking at it.

Well presumably these externalities are independent of the variables you are changing so they should affect your hold-out set and your experiment sets equally.

Booking.com does not do it. Once an A/B test shows positive outcome with a high enough confidence level, the experiment goes "full on" and is shown to everybody.

And that's how you get dark patterns. Let them enjoy their engagement lifts until they drive their product over the cliff.

That's correct.

Long term holdbacks actually are way way harder to implement and maintain in a fast moving product than meets the eye. We had passionate and ultimately unfruitful conversations about how to do that when I was there in 2016.

The only thing we had at the time was continued tracking against the experiment groups after flipping that switch.

For very long term effects (e.g., the impact of painting every surface of your website in ads which will certainly drive users away), hold backs aren't enough because it's too hard to consistently identify users. If ads will drive me away over the course of a year, there's a five percent holdback, and I use multiple devices and cash maybe be consistently identified for a few days or weeks at a time, that means that 95% of the time I use the website I get the bad experience, and I eventually bounce. The holdback will show no effect.

"Seeing like a State" in action.

Solid numbers of what? Here we're talking about numbers on short-term effects only, with zero data on long-term effects.

I'd claim that people who are reeds in the wind when there's a short-term gain available do not in fact have good values. "Take the money and run" is a value for sure, and it's common enough. But I'd have a hard time calling it good.

There is also a mathematical problem of assigning events and actions to long term effects. The usual IT crowd unfamiliar with the respective literature will try to ab test and grid search out of the actual scientific part of data science. I had also fallen to that trap.

What would you recommend reading on this?

There is a grey line. I think only one room left is actually useful info. But yeah they push it too far. But most people in a company will be able to argue for themselves the info is useful and truthful so in their minds it's morally ok.

Only one room left would be useful information if it were accurate. Most of the time, booking agents don't really have an accurate picture of inventory though. It's more like only one room available for booking.com to book right now.

It could be that the hotel is holding back rooms for other channels or because they like to not be fully booked so far ahead of time or perhaps the hotel has found listing only one room at a time gets them a better look to book ratio (in part because of anxiety inspiring features like this).

Without an understanding of the industry though, it's not really useful information.

DHH, founder of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp, drew a line between core values and A/B testing https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-don-t-a-b-test-core-values-91b5...

> This is the tyranny of easy metrics. It's easy to measure how much money is saved by preventing cancelations, it's much harder to measure how much long-term business is lost by poisoning your reputation with the 99.9% of customers who had to jump hoops and dodge sleazeballs to get out of the subscription. But the latter could well be orders of magnitude money more over the long run.

I agree but a truly nuanced approach to interpretation of A/B tests is rare especially when mixed incentives are involved. Ignoring empirical evidence is bad and taking it as gospel is also bad.

Yeah-- I think blaming dark patterns on A/B testing is like blaming thermostats for chilly houses. A/B tests just show if one thing does more of something you're testing for than something else. If you're just testing for "conversions" then you're going to make websites like booking.com. If you're testing to see if users are more stressed out by one situation or another, or testing to see if expert users are stymied by some interface abstraction designed to make things easier for less sophisticated users, then that's totally different.

Sure, but it’s a lot harder to test for things like stress or being stymied than it is to test for conversion. Easy implementation + results that make money graphs go up will win every time without C-level involvement.

It's a lot easier to break something with a hammer than bang in some nails. Using a marker to deface property is a lot easier than using it to draw a picture.

>I've worked with people who will say, "Oh, this tests well, but we don't want to do it because of [long term concerns X and Y]."

Then why were they testing it, if they already knew other concerns would veto that alternative?

I suspect if you were to think a bit, you could come up with some ideas yourself. If you're really stuck, let me know what you've got so far and I'll fill in the rest.

I think I'll just wait for you to give the substantive reply you have in mind.

Accounts being jerks get less leeway from me than people being respectful and/or standing behind their words.

You'll be waiting quite awhile. If there's anything HN has taught me, it's the meaning of "pearls before swine". And the futility in providing free labor for people who seem to think they're entitled to it.

It's a discussion forum, amigo. You're supposed to share your insights with those who haven't yet achieved them. If you're not comfortable doing that, you can just not post instead of posting merely to whine and insult.

Bookmarking for later.

I share with people who seem like they'll benefit from it. That includes people who have done at least a little work to understanding what's going on. It definitely doesn't include HN's legion of querulous jerks who mainly look for nitpicks, gotchas, and other opportunities to feel smart, even when that comes at the expense of the good discussion this place is nominally for. You get to influence which group people see you as part of.

When I worked at eHarmony there were two things that we were aware of above all else:

1. Users hated all the advertising even if they were signed in with a paid account

and

2. eHarmony had no intention of stopping this because they valued the revenue from the advertising over the user experience.

I noticed that Redfin has started adding ads to their site which really annoys me. Folks you’ll get a sizable commission for connecting me with the listing agent. The ad revenue has to be a rounding error compared to that. Why are you damaging your brand by showing me ads for luxury vacations next to houses that I’m looking at buying?

Great examples.

To this list, I'd add Amazon's ads. It's providing them with very obvious revenue growth. It's parasitic on their ecommerce business, though, in ways that for me and many others, harm the things that made Amazon popular in the first place.

That'll never change, though, because that revenue has enough people attached to it that they'll fight tooth and nail to keep it no matter how much it harms the rest of Amazon.

Companies need to balance between metrics and vision. It's easy to chase metrics and lose track of why your company exists. If you're just chasing metrics, what differentiates you from anyone else? What big bets are you making? Every company I've worked at has fallen into this trap, and it's gotten worse due to the tech slump.

I think the problem underneath is quantitative fallacy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

It is also one of these things where the first to do it gets the advantage.

If you are the first to do the "only 2 rooms left" trick for example, you will get the full results before people get desensitized. But people will get desensitized everywhere, not just on your website, so if a competitor tries to pull the same trick, he won't get the same effect as you did. If fact, it may be time for you to roll back, to make competitors look bad for using the now well known and ineffective trick you invented. And if it works long term, then you get a head start.

Yup, this "poisoning the well" effect is real, and it's blatantly uncompetitive - which is why it's so important for regulatory agencies to step in and act fast and hard so that this "first mover advantage" is eliminated.

The problem is, regulatory agencies are slow as molasses and courts are overloaded with crap, which means by the time the process is done years later, the companies have long since switched to yet another sleazebag tactic.

Why? The tactics burn themselves out.

I don't want government agencies involved in dictating the minutia of acceptable UI design for a private website.

Businesses have brand reputations. Just let people vote with their wallets. That won't discourage all dark patterns, but is preferable to a world of over-regulation.

Businesses, particularly in oligopoly/platform scenarios, don't care about brand reputation. Just look at Meta - they don't even care about billions of euros worth of GDPR fines, it's all priced in.

There's no point letting "people vote with their wallets" when companies have monopolies or near-monopolies due to network effects - and these shitty tactics work, so their most effective competitors are practically forced to use them to compete.

See also: Google, Amazon, etc. The laissez-faire voting with wallets approach has failed time and again. It doesn't seem to discourage dark patterns at all. I'd love to use companies with less infuriating interfaces but they can't compete.

I'm not too concerned about over-regulation. I don't think there's much innovation possible in the renting rooms to the public space; the biggest change I've seen recently is in more dark manipulation of customer behaviour. However, perhaps there's an alternative to having governments regulate UI design, like requiring 3rd-party API access.

I don't disagree with you, certainly some "improvements" only have short-term positive effects. However, at least the A/B test was performed and data collected. Your assumption that it will eventually be "a massive negative" is pure speculation with no data behind it.

The value of a "brand" is really, really difficult to measure objectively, but certainly has an effect on your revenue. It's hard to know in advance what's going to tarnish your reputation in the long run, but by the time you can measure it, it's far too late.

One of the effects this has on me is that I will use booking.com to find places (amongst other tools), but book directly with the accommodation. Only if the accommodation doesn't do its own booking will I use booking.com to book (about once every twenty places).

I also had great results just walking up to the reception desk and booking there. Some deals are too good to be put online.

But when you are taking vacations with your family you don't want the stress and the risk of not finding a good accommodation.

Every time I've checked this, direct booking was more expensive than Booking.com or Hotels.com.

It often is, but I still book direct because I want to be a customer of the hotel and not of some third party. When things go wrong, I don't want to be be told to take it up with the third party (and this has happened to me).

I book directly. If there is a problem with the reservation, hotels have much more flexibility to accommodate changes. You can usually cancel on the arrival date with no penalty, change room type, etc.

I've heard others say that if you quote an online price, the front desk can match it (better to get 100% of the discounted price than 60%), although I haven't tried it myself.

We had someone from Booking.com come and speak at a company I was working at a good few years ago to talk about their testing process. They were using the multi-armed bandit approach[1] of just throwing dozens of changes at the wall and seeing which worked best. It definitely reflected in the UX.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit

“Dozens of changes” but without values who gets to decide WHAT changes are tested? Sure there is UX/CRO research but without a moral compass it is exactly how you end up with dark patterns.

Agreed, and my impression was there wasn't a lot of scrutiny there. It was purely numbers driven, if it could be tested and measured it would, and if it won it was adopted. Very little emphasis on UX, product cohesion, or any specific design principles.

Can’t believe they are giving talks on this like it’s innovative or something when admiring. I’d honestly be embarrassed saying that my design process was to make shit up and see what happens instead of investing in UX design/ research professionals can run generative studies to better understand their consumer base and sentiments towards booking trips online, like Airbnb heavily invested and can be seen as having a world class user experience next to booking.com

I digress…

Many companies in my experience do test for these things. They remove old features and measure impact periodically, or run a long term hold out bucket, or some other such approach. The deep dark secret of the web is that there often there isn't a negative impact that can be measured no matter how much people try to measure one.

Booking.com lost me as a customer for life after I fell victim to their sleazy tactics a few times. I have refused to book anything on booking for the last few years because I didn't want to be mislead into booking a crappy hotel by their algorithms again.

I guess my decision doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things, because they are still around and judging by the screenshots it's as bad as ever, and people still use the site...

Yup. Go now to booking.com and pick a remote roadside motel in Wyoming for a midweek stay sometime in March of 2024.

And watch booking.com try to tell you that "19 people have booked this today" or some such bullshit.

I’m surprised California hasn’t outlawed this tactic as deceptive marketing or such? Any idea why companies can falsify data for the sole purpose of deceiving consumers to increase their revenue?

There are no laws against it in the US. In the EU there are some[0][1] now.

[0]: https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/bookingcom-commits-adjust...

[1]: https://www.acm.nl/en/publications/booking-and-expedia-infor...

I've just tried this and now they show me identical room for the same price with two different nags. Not sure if they have only 2 or 5 (or 7?) "Queen Studios" left.

https://imgur.com/a/oqOTYlz

> watch booking.com try to tell you that "19 people have booked this today" or some such bullshit

...while watching uBlock Origin go crazy blocking stuff.

I have a personal experience where booking.com’s nudging caused me to reconsider my trip. I was trying to find something suitable to stay in Paris. Maybe it was the exaggeration of booking.com or maybe there was some truth, but at some point I shut down and made a 180 on my plans. I had realised that I don’t want to go somewhere where I have to compete against this avalanche of other visitors who were or were not snapping my accommodation options away. I am now visiting friends in another European city.

But did you still use booking.com for that other European city trip, or another platform?

I am staying with friends, who have a spare room available.

I had a similar reaction to Lyft’s “you have 2 minutes to accept this faster trip” prompt and emphasizing the faster, more expensive option first.

I saw that, balked a bit at the interaction and ended up taking a train instead. Not only was it $6.25 instead of $46 it got me there faster than Lyft’s fastest option. Including time walking to and from the station.

I wasn’t in a hurry but the in your face “look how much money people are willing to spend to save 5 min” helped me rethink my priorities.

Similarly (though also exhibiting teenage American language taking over the world symptoms) is Netflix's new (or new-ish, I just noticed it yesterday as a fairly frequent user) 'everone is watching' category. I have absolutely zero interest in that, it's literally repulsive, trivially incorrect, and just plain stupid even apart from the language - who cares what others have chosen to watch, how does it compare to what I've given thumbs up/down?

I join you in cringing at the word choice but I appreciate ways to find things that aren't similar to stuff I already like.

With a lot of recommendation systems, you watch and give the thumbs up to one piece of Danish art house cinema and forevermore that's all it will give you.

Plus it's more fun to watch something if there's a good chance you can find someone to talk about it.

Fair enough, but honestly in my experience Netflix is a long way off over-fitting to thumbs. I never watch cartoons or 'kids' category stuff, how hard can it be.

The 'everyone is watching' type reccomendations on youtube make me worry for the future of humanity.

Looking at the Youtube frontpage while logged out is like a sad, morbid, glimpse of the world.

Looking at the Youtube frontpage while logged in stares deep into your soul

(+ Youtube tries desperately to occasionally get you to also watch some open mouthed shock faced idiot in a thumbnail with $$$$$$$$$$$ in the title brought to you by the prank content creator house of the day).

I don't have an account, looking at the YouTube frontpage (which is presumably designed to appeal to some notional average user) is a seriously depressing picture of people/society.

I actually just got a message from Lyft this week when I was leaving the airport. I opened the app, checked the prices ($38!!), and closed it to catch the train instead ($7).

I quickly received a push notification saying "Save 50 minutes by taking Lyft. If you take transit, you will arrive at 12:36am".

Well, it was already quite late and it would be nice to save 50 minutes. So I booked the Lyft, and proceeded to wait for 40 minutes as over a dozen drivers would be assigned to me, see where I wanted to go (6km away), and cancel my ride. I gave up and cancelled the Lyft and only barely made the last bus. Lyft made my life a whole lot more stressful for no reason.

I was amazed to learn that 218 million people arrived in France during 2019 (tourist numbers indicate 90 million - not sure how the two numbers correlate).

Sources:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/436536/total-number-of-i...

https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/french-foreign-policy/tour...

I really startet to hate using Booking.com, especially because every time after using it, they start bombarding me with emails. I could probably turn them off.

Another thing that makes me laugh now: I often go to the same hotel, and Booking.com provides better rates then booking directly (no idea why, I asked multiple times for the same discounts). And for my favorite category the hotel has only one room. So booking.com constantly warns me "only 1 room left!". Yeah, I know, there is only one ;)

> (no idea why, I asked multiple times for the same discounts)

Hotels sell a fraction of their inventory cheaply to resellers.

Also, they oversell, because people cancel. And when the hotel is oversold, and has to cancel a reservation, guess which customers get their booking declined?

When you are on booking.com you have the most choices. Not only between all the inventory they have, but you can also browse Airbnb.

When you're at the hotel and you ask their rate, your basically committed. They know how much time and money it cost you to drive to a different hotel. So they can set their rates accordingly.

And hotels hate reservations made over the phone or by email because too many guests never pay a deposit and never show up.

"And hotels hate reservations made over the phone or by email because too many guests never pay a deposit and never show up."

I'm thinking you're from a non-western country, otherwise that would be false; the only wiggle room you gave yourself was 'booking through email' which I don't think even really exists, unless you meant booking through a hotel's website. Hotels take your deposit when you make a reservation over the phone or on their website, and if you book through booking vs the hotel the hotel will lose 15-30% of the room sale.

You have just as many choices when looking for hotels, just look at google or bing. You don't need booking for anything. People rarely just drive up to hotels without checking hotels in the area beforehand on their phone. I'm not familiar with it in developing countries.

Even in Europe there are many smaller boutique hotels who cannot charge your credit card based on a phone conversation. Their bank either require them to use a speed point machine with the card present. Or use an online payment gateway with 3D secure it similar technology.

So they require the deposit as a bank transfer. And this is where the guest gets second thoughts.

People do actually go on road trips. "Oh look how nice that hotel looks. Let's stop and see if they have space for us". They get quoted a high price and that's when the hotel make profit.

I'm actually finding that to no longer be the case... just booked a hotel for a holiday and booking directly through the hotel's website was around 15% cheaper (and didn't try to charge me 50% extra for an infant). The hotel's payment flow for Amex was broken, but well that's another issue ;)

Part of the reason you should always have a long term holdout, so you can see how the win degrades over time, which with dark patterns, it can do.

In theory, the solution in situations like this is to continue the test over a longer time. Typically with ‘holdbacks’ – subsets of users who don’t get a feature for a long time. This is easier if you have an app that everyone uses because with a website, it’s harder to reliably find holdbacks who are also a representative sample (eg it won’t work so well to hold back everyone using the site in a certain language as those people may be statistically different from the general population in other ways).

There are still a bunch of problems – higher maintenance burden, harder to iterate on a site quickly. Though I think you identify what I would consider the bigger problem which is that they cause political difficulties as a holdback can only really turn around and say that the positive impact people claimed wasn’t really borne out in the long term. So even at places that do holdbacks, the results may be silenced or ignored. If a holdback shows something continuing to work, that’s hard to get excitement about even though I think one should expect many of these a/b test results to not have long lasting effects.

The types of effects you want to measure would take months or years to show and are the combination of many different small decisions. Teams need to apply common sense thinking, empirical data, and the willingness to wrestle with uncertainty. All of that is hard, blindly following a/b test results relieves people of that cognitive burden

Am I the only one who thinks THAT is a dark pattern? It would at a minimum, confuse me, if I had a different UI / feature set than my friend(s) - confused for being unaware why my experience looks different, and you better bet that 90%+ of users do not know what an A/B test is. At worst, I'm angry because they are getting a better experience and I randomly got shafted with no ability to upgrade.

That's the same kind of thinking that would criticize pharmaceutical companies for giving placebos. They do it because they don't know with confidence, and they want to. They are collecting evidence.

To get into a medical trial you a) know it's a trial b) get informed that you might get a placebo c) consent to participate in the trial.

If a pharmaceutical company was discovered filling 30% of pill bottles they sent to pharmacies with placebos, they'd be sued unto the eighth generation.

Why is a long-term holdback ethically questionable in a way standard a/b testing is not?

Maybe that’s undesirable. I don’t think it’s a dark pattern as it isn’t about manipulating/tricking people into doing what you want.

While I agree, the problem is in the data-driven decision-making.

There is simply no good way to get good data for this long term type of effect. It's either going to be user interviews, some arbitrary score like customer satisfaction, or maybe a really convoluted split test (long ago cohorts vs new ones... but let's try to remove criteria so it's not apples and oranges).

If a company culture only values data in its product decisions, this is always going to happen.

Good luck fighting an argument against someone who has a supporting data point, and a revenue increase!

Real-life stores do this as well - make individually profitable changes (local maximums) that eventually make the whole experience so miserable that you no-longer want to shop there. Direct upselling is the most obvious, along with constant messing about with pricing and offers, as well as constantly pushing lower quality expensive own-brand goods, but the one I notice most is various cynically high pricing of non-core impulse items around checkouts - it tends to stick in my mind as the shop being expensive.

> I'm sure someone at booking a/b tested these things and saw an increase in revenue.

I know people who used to work at Booking.com. That's exactly what happened. From what I can gather, you're not allowed to make changes to the site without running a test.

Spot on! I think we have a similar problem with TV / video ads. Many of them are funny or intriguing the first time you see them (so they perform well in "one-shot" tests and focus groups), but after five views they start getting exceedingly annoying. A counter example is a State Farm's ad with a guy sitting quietly on a couch and watching TV for a few seconds; I find it very effective.

I find this kind of feels like a squeeze on one's attention.

Where every app or signup has this false premise seeded in a design that it alone is at the center of your digital existence and therefore you can do anything it takes to vie for and keep attention and engagement because the product may experience too much attrition otherwise.

1) Take color away from sites who abuse it and watch your attention and focus go through the roof.

Grayscale the Web is a handy extension. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/grayscale-the-web-...

It has a setting to just turn off all color, or just a site.

2) Add a firewall layer when signing up. I recently registered a voip number and an extra email account to check out for things.

It stops explosions of emails and text messages on my space of the same try to chase people into engaging in a pipeline.

It's surprising how few of these well oiled machines can do without being able to interrupt you constantly.

3) Notifications off, and checking them scheduled.

A good way to test any product beyond it is to silence all notifications. Maybe I have a habit to keep going back, or not.

I worked at booking until late 2017. I was responsible for all their infrastructure and tooling development until the start of that year.

We all hated the urgency messaging internally. Hated it. We felt bad. Many of us were reasonably proud of our product and felt this tarnished our ability to deliver value to customers. We argued with the product org and the CPO on a regular basis.

The reality is that the urgency messaging drove significant incremental business that they felt they could not afford to pass up. The logic that the CPO applied at the time was some pretty sporty mental gymnastics: "we optimize for conversion (looker to booker) because that's a proxy to actually delivering value to the customer." The idea was that if a customer books and stays, it means they found what they were looking for. Being stuck in a perpetual, frustrating decision paralysis sucks after all. While I didn't agree with that framing, it's a touch less preposterous than it sounds. At the time, almost all bookings were fully refundable. So if you booked and stayed (you could have cancelled any time before the day at no cost, for most bookings), there's indeed something that went sort of right. Of course we also tried to measure CSAT in a number of ways (like net promoter scores) but those measurements are tricky at best.

In any case, one of the counter proposals, which I tried to co-champion unsuccessfully, was to add a checkbox to the account area to opt out of urgent messaging. The idea was that if you were annoyed enough by them to find that flag (or to be told where to find it) then surely it would also be better for the company to give you that and retain you as a customer? It was IIRC never tried. I was sad. It would've been a tricky to measure experiment, that would have had to be run for a long time. Loyalty measurement is hard.

Am I the only one that sees such urgency messages and then thinks: Well ok, then not? I'm orienting, looking at options, I'm just annoyed if my final list contains options that are gone by the time I feel ready to make a choice. The whole thing just makes me annoyed and look for other options.

I had the same with a guy that wanted to sell us a mortgage, he said: "Better decide now, interest rates are probably going up next week." one day later he calls again: "You need to decide soon." So I tell him, "Ok, thank you we will not be going with your service then, I prefer to take time and I don't like this pressure." The guy was almost speechless. So I guess he expects people to be persuaded.

Another example: The parents of a friend had their whole kitchen drawn and an offer on the table. So they want to take it home to think it over. The seller tells them: "What? No! I have to ask my manager if I am allowed to let you go like this, we went through a whole process!" So they actually sign! Same thing happened to friends, they told the seller: "What, this is not a prison, are you crazy!"... and they left.

I guess most people are in the "I will allow myself to be pressured into stuff I don't want"-camp. I guess those are the people that also cave under pressure when being social engineered for access to their credit card. Maybe we can do something with this knowledge? Booking.com knows who the people are that will cave, to a degree I guess. Well it would be difficult to separate them from the people that just decide fast.

> The parents of a friend had their whole kitchen drawn and an offer on the table. So they want to take it home to think it over.

While I'm completely with you for not letting sellers try to stress you into buying, I understand that they can't let the parents take the kitchen drawings home. The company put in bespoke work into planning the kitchen, and can't let the customer just take the plans for free and go hire another company for doing the work.

Around here it is pretty standard practice for kitchen shops to draw the whole thing as a sort of "visual offer", their price is determined by all the stuff you drag into the 3D tool. All shops have that, it is really fast. Besides, I can just take all the ideas and not the drawing and achieve a similar result somewhere else. It's just the risk the shops take, that their effort is for nothing.

> I guess most people are in the "I will allow myself to be pressured into stuff I don't want"-camp. I guess those are the people that also cave under pressure when being social engineered for access to their credit card.

Yes, this is why a lot of US states have laws allowing you to undo a transaction within 24h and sometimes 7days if the buyer is over 55. I think a lot of the durations go up for items typically sold by a sales person (i.e. furniture, windows, etc).

I hope the feedback I provided on the CSAT form (worst possible score, more or less stating that I will actively switch to any competitor that doesn't totally suck as soon as I find one, specifically because of the urgency crap) helped support the position of the people opposing this crap.

I worked for a sister company. These features were A/B tested, their effect on bookings measured, and the numbers affected the bonuses of POs. They were thus incentivized to try these kinds of annoying tricks, because ultimately they work, or at least they do when their effect is observed only in terms of bookings.

I asked several times if we somehow measured customer retention, as we kept adding stuff I thought would have a negative effect in the long term (a customer would go through the whole booking process, only to never return because the experience was too bad.) We didn't. I guess it's difficult, I have no idea how this kind of metric would be computed.

The checkbox is a nice idea, it could help retain customers on the verge of leaving. It wouldn't work for customers who visit once and get so annoyed they never come back.

Also: a good portion of the traffic was affiliate traffic, like from Google Maps. I guess people booking from a Google Map listing care less since they land on the hotel page ? They won't be looking for hotels through the site UI, so they get fewer annoying pop-ups and messages.

So one thing we did was for (a/b style) experiments to continue to collect data even after taking a decision to enable or disable[1]. No new sessions/devices would be added to the experiment, but those already exposed would still be reflected. So if everyone who decided to book because of an experiment ends up cancelling or consistently providing more negative feedback over the months that follow, our automation could still flag that.

Whatever we may say about the company and its practices, the engineering team working on the experimentation tooling had their heart in the right place. They worked extremely hard and with tremendous care on trying to make sure the data presented would cause the best possible decisions.

[1] Caveat: if an experiment was disabled fully (doesn't work or buggy) or enabled fully, obviously the experiment measurement is now no longer clean because folks in one variant will now see the other. But for trailing metrics like anything that affected past booking decisions, this type of analysis may not be perfect but still carries some meaning as a health check.

Edit: formatting fix

Thanks for sharing! That is what I suspected. I also suspect that while this does increase revenue in the short term, it might backfire in the future. I hate this messaging so much, that I now dislike booking.com overall and I actively look for other options (such as booking directly with hotels). Searching for a place to stay on Booking is no longer fun: it is an anxiety-inducing chore that I hate and try to avoid. And that's from a Genius level 2 customer.

I guess this works for now, but as soon as a viable competitor appears…

From the last time booking.com was discussed I picked up some ublock origin filters that make the website more bearable.

You can copy and paste them directly in your ublock config (ublock options -> My filters)

  ! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21860328
  booking.com##.soldout_property
  booking.com##.sr_rooms_left_wrap.only_x_left
  booking.com##.lastbooking
  booking.com##.sr--x-times-booked
  booking.com##.in-high-demand-not-scarce
  booking.com##.top_scarcity
  booking.com##.hp-rt-just-booked
  booking.com##.cheapest_banner_content > *
  booking.com##.hp-social_proof
  booking.com##.fe_banner__red.fe_banner__w-icon.fe_banner__scale_small.fe_banner
  booking.com##.urgency_message_x_people.urgency_message_red
  booking.com##.rackrate
  booking.com##.urgency_message_red.altHotels_most_recent_booking
  booking.com##.fe_banner__w-icon-large.fe_banner__w-icon.fe_banner
  booking.com##.smaller-low-av-msg_wrapper
  booking.com##.small_warning.wxp-sr-banner.js-wxp-sr-banner
  booking.com##.lock-price-banner--no-button.lock-price-banner.bui-u-bleed\@small.bui-alert--large.bui-alert--success.bui-alert

Apart from these, I use some additional ublock filters to block some of their tracking that I am not ok with.

  $removeparam=/^(error_url|ac_suggestion_theme_list_length|ac_suggestion_list_length|search_pageview_id|ac_click_type|ac_langcode|ac_position|ss_raw|from_sf|is_ski_area|src|sb_lp|sb|search_selected|srpvid|click_from_logo|ss|ssne|ssne_untouched|b_h4u_keep_filters|aid|label|all_sr_blocks|highlighted_blocks|ucfs|arphpl|hpos|hapos|matching_block_id|from|tpi_r|sr_order|srepoch|sr_pri_blocks|atlas_src|place_types)/,domain=booking.com
  $removeparam=/sid=.\*;BBOX/,domain=booking.com
  ||www.booking.com/c360/v1/track
  ||www.booking.com/fl/exposed
  ||booking.com/personalisationinfra/track_behaviour_property
  ||booking.com/has_seen_review_list

Note that these may result in you receiving some higher prices by removing some referrer info. If you do see that happening, feel free to remove the offending config if the price difference is significant for you. I usually don't bother for differences of < $10 (price displayed on the search page vs the property page).

super! thank you so much!

Could someone explain a bit how this works?

The first set of rules looks for elements in a webpage with a matching ID/class name, and removes them. The second set removes URL parameters, which are used all the time for example in referral links, like on Amazon. It looks a bit like &tracking-id="xxxx" at the end of a link. Those rules will remove those as well, providing a clean link without additional tracking that Booking.com uses to identify where you came from, maybe what ad you clicked on, etc etc

what about .js_sr_persuation_msg from tfa?

Haven't noticed that in my searches yet so haven't needed to add any blocking for that persuasion message. Do you still see it with these filters?

they still there, i just tested.

That’s great. Thanks Obama.

These rules would be a great addition to the low-value content filters we already maintain at https://letsblock.it, and I think a lot of users would benefit from having such a template available.

I don't use booking.com a lot, but would you be interested in contributing to the project and maintain this template when you find rules to update?

Hit me up if you have any question.

After browsing hotels for some time I've seen booking.com show several hotels start to sell out of rooms. That usually causes me to hurry up and book, but after several hotels showed full at once I got suspicious and checked my partners phone. The hotels still showed as available there. Dark stuff. Their website is otherwise pretty good though and I still use them.

This kind of behavior should just fall under fraud laws. If a person intentionally lies or misrepresents themselves for the purposes of gaining money it's usually considered fraud in most countries. This should be the same.

The problem is that there are a lot of laws that in practice only apply to not-well-connected individuals. When done by companies or well-known people it's considered good business acumen.

In the UK at least, they've tried.

https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/online-hotel-booking

Booking.com, amongst others, gave enforceable undertakings that they'd change their practices.

i've started flying recently a lot and in this one particular circuit i see loads of dark patterns.

1. there was this snow season last month and the roads stopped working and suddenly the air prices skyrocketed. (as is now expected), i had to buy a ticket in emergency which i paid 4x the reasonable rate with all websites saying "oops, the fare has increased" trick.

2. many websites did the "just 1 seat remaining" trick and i jumped the gun.

when the next day i traveled, the plane was half empty.

what happens is, travel agents buy up tickets well in advance and then sit on the bookings, they either sell directly or wait for online portals to sell them.

these travel agents having purchased tickets in bulk then say "oh, the ticket is priced $100 on kayak, i will sell it for 95. lets give you some discount" all the while having purchased the same for like 20.

these people are willing to forego tickets because its more profitable to keep the prices high

Usually, the notices I have seen actually say "only 1 ticket remaining at this price". Which they can technically make true by simply setting their pricing algorithm to sell the next ticket for a penny more or a penny less.

They're gambling, because there are actually fines for those sorts of behaviors if they don't clear the unused bookings in a reasonable time or if ARC (the Airlines Reporting Corporation) or the distribution systems detect a fraudulent pattern.

I'm actually building an internal tool for such fines (called "debit memos") for a company with several thousand travel agents, and they're not uncommon at all.

In the Netherlands it probably does (“oneerlijke handelspraktijken”). The main regulator for the European activities of booking is in the Netherlands. If GP were to document this and submit it to the ACM [1] this might be picked up. The maximum fine is a puny 900 k€ though. They already got a few of these and don’t seem to care much.

And that just shows the problem with regulating these large platforms - local regulators with their hands tied against billion dollar platforms. The EU should just step in and regulate these monsters directly and pro-consumer. Or regulators should grow a pair and try to get the CEO / board replaced (a theoretical possibility when they keep getting administrative fines in NL). That will shake up the stockholders enough to shake some sense into these firms.

[1] https://www.consuwijzer.nl/doe-uw-melding-bij-acm-consuwijze...

Well if you made 5 mil with this and payed 900k fine you still made 4 mil, so yeah.

I wonder if the fraud is a two way street.

Could I just craft a POST request and book what I want?

Each of these companies are only allocated a certain amount of inventory so the availability is probably there, especially at the larger hotels

Additionally do they float the price and if so can I edit that also in the post request and name my own price?

If their interface has a fuzzy relationship to reality than maybe you can fuzz it your way

I'm not a criminal but I'm still curious.

It banks on the experience that many have had where delaying a decision has resulted in "Lossing" out on staying where (or at a price) you wanted. Much worse if coordinating with multiple parties going on the trip :)

I guess the most fair disclosure would provide a Google flights like pricing chart that shows cost increase and seasonal availability projections.

I try to make the decision independently of the point of sale vendor. The aggregator can help limit impact of these tactics by API contract with these sites that focus on price/availability without artificial urgency.

I've seen that too.

I think people really must not appreciate booking.com. My wife strayed from the formula, booked directly with major chain, used loyalty points to book a stay at a European hotel they operate. Got charged full price by the hotel, got charged for a number of meals she didn’t have, and we’ve been dealing with that since September 2022. When we have problems with reservations we made through booking.com, and post Covid a lot of hotels seem to overbook so we’ve rolled in and found we have no place to stay on several occasions, it’s just single phone call to booking.com resolve the issue. I don’t know what booking’s cut is but they earn every penny.

This reads like a bizarro-world advertisement.

You book through booking.com, and upon arrival, regularly find your reservation bumped due to overbooking?

That’s not positive for booking.com!

This happens no matter whom you book with. The difference between booking directly and booking through booking.com is the difference between "sorry, sucks to be you, bye" and "there's this more expensive accommodation available for you and you don't have to pay anything extra".

This is just as anecdotal as your story and the original post: For the last 15 years I've spent about 100 nights in hotels per year all over the world and this has never happened to me. When I had a reservation it has always been honored.

I've booked directly with small hotels, using chain sites and various aggregators (trivago, hrs, booking, Expedia, hotels.com). The experience has been pretty much the same. My only reason to use aggregators is to collect rewards across different hotels.

It's happened to me once and to my parents once, and we don't even book that often. Maybe it depends on the country.

It probably depends on your time of arrival. With some rooms sold as fully refundable or as "one night fee for no show", the hotel does not know, even at 10PM, how many people will actually show up, so many go with first come first serve method. As a single data point, I had two cases of booked room not being available and both happened when I got to the hotel after midnight. My 2c.

I have spent far fewer nights but it has happened to me twice. Once in New York City and once in Portugal. Both times the hotels between the lines admitted that it was their fault and compensated me with better rooms in other hotels just a short walk away.

It is not booking that does the overbooking, it is the hotels. It doesn't matter that I made the reservation in advance, pre-paid, and spoke to someone at the hotel the day prior to arrival. They probably give away my room to avoid confrontation with someone else who was overbooked. By the time I roll into town, which is usually 1-2am because I like driving at night, the hotel is locked down tight and the clerk is pretty comfortable behind his intercom telling me to sleep in my car because they gave away my room (yeah! they actually said that). So I called booking and 45 minutes later I'm checking into a hotel (they had to call several places and talk to people to find one that actually had a room because the computers kept seeing availabilities even though the hotels were at capacity).

Not sure if it needs to be said, but try informing your hotel the day of, but close enough to when you're actually arriving that you're speaking to the same person, that you will be checking in late so they're less likely to give it to a walk in.

People _do_ book hotels and no-show enough that they're more than willing to assuming you're not gonna use it if you don't give them a heads up.

They'll overbook before the day

We did that, and to emphasize again we pre-paid, they could have left the room empty for the entire night and been compensated. Instead they gave it away, and this has happened several times now. I suspect what is going on is they give away any rooms during normal hours to avoid conflicts with other people who were overbooked, then let the night clerk who is safely locked away inside the office deal with the rest.

If you book an airline ticket and get bumped from your flight, it has to do with the airline not whoever sold you the ticket. Booking in this case is your intermediary who gets you a seat on another flight on the spot.

I appreciate Booking:

- the info is correct. There may be a lot of small print but everything's there. You don't get surprise cash deposit requirement, etc.

- I dealt with their customer support a couple of times. Each time I got talking to a living human within minutes. Stark contrast with airbnb

- it's not owned by Ctrip that's buying everything travel related. If/when it is, I'm out but until then I think I'm a pretty loyal customer

Using Booking for years, recently deactivated Airbnb so now it's my only option.

What I don't like is that it looks like they are going as far as given jurisdiction allows. Depending on where I connect from I can see prices excluding taxes and possibly other dark patterns that I don't always notice. I wouldn't mind destressing the GUI a bit for sure

> "the info is correct"

Oddly enough, this not being the case is the reason I ended up not using Booking.com for my last hotel booking. I had to go to the hotel website to find accurate basic information (like the size of the bed, which was wrong on all of the Booking.com room options) and ended up just booking the hotel while I was there.

Interesting, never knew they have bed sizes... I would see if it is single/double/whatever and then consult photos/reviews. I guess my information requirements are different;)

Booking actually owns something like 5% of Ctrip.

We all know how ownership goes with Chinese companies...

I showed up at a hotel at around 19:00. Website stated that their reception was open till 21:00. Nobody was there, front door was locked. A single call to Booking.com and an hour later they had put me in another hotel, free of charge. Cost of the other hotel would be paid by the first hotel.

I now do most of my bookings through Booking.com. It is very rare that booking directly gives a lower price (I always try) and the upside of guaranteed logging in that area is a big bonus for me.

I’m very jealous of your experience.

On booking.com I booked a place with a lockbox and it didn’t have all the required keys on it.

Multiple phone calls gave me no help and I found a way to effectively break into the building and I just did that every day for the rest of my stay

I recommend actually booking a hotel instead of a rebranded Airbnb.

I've booked apartments, which are the most common type of travel/tourist accommodation in my country, through booking.com before Airbnb even existed.

Exact opposite experience. I will never, ever book third party again. If you book direct, a cc chargeback is always available to quickly resolve a dispute without debating Indian call center reps for an hour.

I'm about three months into my chargeback, I've had to supply additional documentation twice, and every time I do the hotel gets thirty days to review and respond.

Booking.com's advantage used to be that they had actually good customer service, spread all around the world, no huge call centers in India. They've recently outsourced most of it though, so I can't speak for what it's like at the moment.

I think this is a great example of how easy it is to change a ui in the browser, and something I think we take for granted now. Take any other tech and it'll be hard, potentially impossible.

Something that concerns me is that we end up with Flutter(-like) websites, on a canvas using wasm. No cool stuff like this would exist, no way to escape the ads, and eye strain from websites that Dark Reader can't change. I wouldn't be surprised seeing "dark mode" as an added benefit to a subscription one day.

(Yes, Flutter has html too. But if I tell my boss that it's because of my ideology for the web, that pixel's are a bit off, and performance is degraded, I might as well look for another job.)

It's sort of toxic socially though as devs write dark patterns during working hours and dark pattern blockers in hobby time, for other nerds to use. So dev caste gets usable web and profits from antisocial behaviour, while low non-dev castes are left to drown in the swamp.

You don’t need to be from the “dev caste” to install an ad blocker or the Booking.com De-Stresser extension described in the post.

I think you're underestimating how tech illiterate much of the population is. A quick Google suggests the percentage of people using an adblocker of any kind is only 30-40%. I would consider that the absolutely minimum of web viewing tech literacy.

The point remains though that the technical capabilities necessary to install chrome extensions and the technical capabilities required to program dark patterns are vastly different. No one is getting hired on their ability to do the former.

The asymmetry is that one small group of web devs can roll out a change to millions of users whose ability and patience to combat those dark patterns will vary.

A quick Google suggests the percentage of people using an adblocker of any kind is only 30-40%

That's around 10-20x higher than I think it is in practice. I suspect the majority of users have naturally developed a "mental adblock" instead from all the visual overload, based on how they will completely ignore non-ad information that isn't presented in an attention-getting-enough manner. I've watched others search for information on the Internet without an adblocker and have been astonished at how all the distractions on the pages don't seem to faze them at all, while I could barely keep my eyes on the screen.

You assume the dark patterns and the dark pattern blockers are written by the same people. I, for one, have probably written shitty code and badly designed UI in the past, but I've always refused to become a sleazy salesman, even back when I was doing customer support. I use element blocking all the time but I'm not going to put effort into these shitty websites and I doubt most devs will either. I'm also not installing blocking extensions for every website I visit.

Luckily, even non-technical people are downloading browsers with adblockers that come prepopulated with all kinds of filters, not just basic ads anymore. Opera has run a surprisingly effective ad campaign, for example. All it takes is for one of these browsers to take a more aggressive stance against these dark patterns. Brave already comes with a whole bunch of "annoyance" filters ready to be enabled.

I've told "normal" people about how bad Booking.com is, showed them how they manipulated you, but those people either didn't see the problem ("everyone is trying to manipulate you so what") or don't want to find another website. As long as the government won't step in, and consumers won't stop falling for these tricks, nothing will change. The technical problem is solved, but greedy developers and developers without morals (or the freedom to refuse) need to be fought by other means.

The problem is, nobody cares except for a bunch of ad blocking nerds.

You can modify Android apps. Not nearly as easily, but it's doable.

We've been there before: I remember the proliferation of Flash sites back in the day. Our local legal firm had their entire site written in Flash, for what was basically brochureware plus a contact form. Presumably some lawyer's nephew wanted to practice their Flash skills, or they were taken for a ride by a contractor.

And this is why we need to watch out for that potential timeline where everything gets written as pixels to a web canvas and can’t be MITM altered/filtered/uBlocked

This is an interesting thought experiment. I'm surprised the CSS class names are so transparent. They must think they're doing nothing wrong. "Persuation" is about what I'd expect from people who downvote every spelling correction.

The Chrome extension is ultimately an enabler of bad behavior though. I wish someone over on Lawyer News would share a post about how they used their free time to put together a lawsuit against Booking.com for fun.

Also what makes this author think the numbers of rooms left are any more accurate or honest than the rest of the surrounding bullshit? Just the fact that they're numbers? Anyway you don't need that info. Is there at least 1 room (or n rooms if you requested n rooms) left, yes or no? It's a boolean. Available or not.

I'm often browsing hotels ahead of actually committing to any firm travel plans, so a message like "rooms available" suggests I likely have plenty of time to keep looking (and potentially going to another website to book), but "only 3 rooms left" might prompt me to pull the trigger earlier than I otherwise would have. Of course, I am personally convinced these numbers are totally made up and just ignore them anyway.

Yeah there's a bit of a disconnect between what we wish it was -- a useful indicator of the actual number of rooms left, for purposes of gauging the urgency -- vs. what they use it for[0], which is to create the urgency artificially.

[0] I should say "probably" since I don't have any concrete evidence.

They aren't totally made up, but they are deliberately obtuse. Hotels are ultimately the ones that control the availability of rooms sold on the platform. It is a common tactic to only list a handful of room nights until those are sold, then add more. This means that all of their rooms always have the urgency messaging. The larger chains do this at scale and across multiple third party sites. So Booking isn't really lying, those numbers are "true", in that there are "only 2 rooms left" but they don't mention the hoteliers' smarmy behavior in abusing the urgency messaging about the availability or their own complicit participation in the lie-by-omission.

In the UK it’s called “pressure sales” and there are consumer laws against it.

It's not just the front end though. I used booking.com to book a hotel room with my wife and daughter, and it had a label on the booking option saying "your child's stay is free!" or similar. Turns out that her staying might be free, but the bed for her to sleep in is £30 per night, which was an extra I had to pay when we arrived. Booking.com is fine for finding somewhere because so many places are on it, but in the future I'll always book directly with the location through their website.

That’s so messed up. I’d probably report their dark pattern crap to the advertising standards agency. They don’t like that sort of thing.

> in the future I'll always book directly with the location through their website

I've tried this with a hotel in Italy, and found out that the price was actually higher. I couldn't believe it. I actually asked the reception whether they were really sure. Yes, this is our price, they said.

That's because the terms of use of bookings.com insist that you can't offer a price lower than on booking.com.

I don't even if this is legal in your country, but in Germany they ruled against it: https://www.thelocal.de/20210518/germany-upholds-ban-on-book...

Beyond the TOS nobody reads (not even sellers), this sort of difference might be due to a number of factors. It could well be that they provide rooms discounted to Booking.com because they want to fill a certain amount no matter what, and then do price-anchoring for other rooms on their website. This is more or less like them giving rooms massively discounted to package sellers (Thomas Cook etc).

100% wrong. You can't advertise a lower price - for obvious reasons, but you can of course give a lower price to people who call, email or walk in.

Many hotels are idiotic about this and will put a cheaper price on booking, then wonder why booking is taking all their reservations. Unexplainable...

It's common with many online businesses. On large online aggregators (booking.com, amazon, steam etc.), they have to post a low price to be competetive in a sea of other available option. Whereas, on their own website, they can charge whatever they want, and hope to get a price-insensitive sucker who didn't check on amazon first.

You can often get them to drop the cost if you say "if you're not going to match them I'll just book it on booking.com" because they'll get less income. That rather depends on the person you're talking to caring about the hotel's income though, so the larger they are the less likely it is.

I'm very much ashamed of this, but when the receptionist couldn't match the Booking.com price I made a reservation through Booking.com while I was in the lobby. Two minutes later the booking came through in their system and I got the keys to the room.

I don't see it as something to be ashamed of as a customer. Some manager made a nutty pricing descision and now they have to live with stupid behaviour.

Why ashamed? I don’t see anything wrong with this.

I sure hope you used the hotel's wifi in the lobby to do so! ;)

Did you ask Booking.com to solve the discrepancy? After all, the extra charge may have been something the hotel came up with.

The charge was buried deep in the small print on Booking.com so technically they'd advised me about the charge. I challenged it, but it was a live chat with someone who clearly had no power to change anything. I decided I'd rather just suck up the charge and treat it as a learning experience rather than spend any more time on it.

From their customer FAQ:

> "Typically, additional costs for children (including extra beds/cots) are not included in the price. Please contact the property directly 1-2 days before your stay to find out more." https://www.booking.com/tpi_faq.html

After this, what's the point of using Booking.com?

Modifying a site to be less sensational does not make the makers of the site any less dishonest. Why would I do business with a site that is using sensationalism to get to my money when I could just do business with one of dozens of other travel websites who treat me better?

It's not like booking.com has a monopoly. Why not so business with a booking company where customer relationship is more of a priority?

> Why would I do business with a site that is using sensationalism to get to my money when I could just do business with one of dozens of other travel websites who treat me better?

It’s cheap, it’s reliable, and whenever I’ve had any sort of issue then Booking.com have fixed it right away. For all this urgency stuff, I’ve found them absolutely excellent.

I agree. I don't like booking.com's sales tactics but otherwise they're an excellent aggregator. Sort of like Amazon. I don't like that they promote their own branded stuff over competitors but I still use them.

It's a sad state of things. I've grew unsensitised to that sort of things. Nowadays I usually automatically ignore that and what my brain perceives as ads. They all became background noise to me at this point.

> It's not like booking.com has a monopoly

You may want to take a closer look at the "dozens of other travel websites." Yes, there are still a few independent ones, but the majority of major sites are all owned by just two companies, Expedia and Booking Holdings (formerly Priceline). It's unfortunate but true.

I used to use booking.com a lot. I can cope with the dark patterns and the aggressive anxiety based encouragement (although I find it repulsive).

But more recently what's put me off is many of their listings aren't hotels, they are private landlords letting apartments Airbnb style. I'd like to be able to filter out those types of listings because having had a few bad experiences with AirBnB in the past what I usually want is a hotel. I don't want to deal with a private landlord hassling me, cleaning deposits, and rules, etc.

They have a filter for that (that I always use).

Isn't it just easier to go to the hotel chain you prefer and search the map though?

Status gets you all the perks people here want

Have you tried filtering search results by "Property Type" (Hotel) and "Property Rating" (3-star, etc.)?

This looks awesome!

I used booking.com a lot a few months ago and was just constantly amazed at how dumb all these “nudges” are. My favorite was a warning on a hotel listing saying “only 1 room at this price left on booking.com”. Turned out the hotel was completely empty! The hotel has only one of their smallest size room, so _necessarily_ when the hotel is empty there is only one of the cheapest rooms left. But still they try to make you feel anxious!

Well... they're not lying, then, are they? Should the code really be supposed to account for obscure edge cases like that? I always assume that there are a limited number of rooms available for third-party booking in any case, so I've come to accept that there will be hassles and risks associated with that.

Starting to use airbnb more often for that and other reasons.

"only 1 room at this price left on booking.com", could also mean, the hotel only lets booking.com sell a limited number of rooms through their site, and presto, only 1 type of that room left, "on booking.com"!

Plot twist, they’re referring to room #1, which is the last one ti be rented out.

Here is the direct link to the extension [0] for anyone who wants to try it out. It's kind of hard to find on the actual webpage because the author made links the same color as normal text.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookingcom-de-stre...

> the author made links the same color as normal text.

I'm sure there's an extension to fix that

Right now, somewhere in the bowels of booking.com, a middle manager is crafting an e-mail to the front-end devs, "hey can we remove that .persuation-msg CSS class, and replace it with those nonsensical .xj892FXy0-style class names that are all the rage now? Thanks!"

Please tell me you're aware that those "non-sensical" classnames are machine generated during a production build? An eng isn't manually choosing that name.

I think that's the intended joke

Whooshed me good.

;)

I was a bit surprised by seeing this, before I saw "Date: 23rd July 2019"

Booking.com was a textbook example for a website made terrible through such tactics, but has significantly improved since then (at least for me - note that this may be because I'm in Europe, and they got fined for some of their tactics, so maybe they only turned it down here). They still have 1-2 such "hurry up and buy already" things but it feels like it's nowhere near as bad as it was. I guess at some point they realized that it's really good at a) increasing conversions within the session b) making users absolutely hate you and poisoning your brand. (Although some of it is probably also me getting used to it.)

Unfortunately, except for the high pressure sales tactics, Booking simply has the absolutely best UX I've ever seen on a booking web site:

1. It actually works. That shouldn't be remarkable, but I can't count the number of times a site either told me they were sold out or the price went up 5 steps into the booking flow, or failed at the payment step with some cryptic error. Especially flight booking sites are so terrible that by now I'm willing to pay the surcharge for booking directly with the airline or a known-working site, but I've had that with hotel sites too.

2. They know to only ask for the minimum of actually required information (although they sometimes hide a second set of questions behind a short first step - but it's never the 5 steps that I commonly see elsewhere).

3. They actually show you what's available and provide a decent overview of what is or isn't included.

4. They usually show the actual price, or the actual price minus a $2 tourism tax. Unlike a hotel web site, where you are playing guessing games with taxes, resort fees etc.

5. They don't require me to create an account (unlike e.g. many hotel web sites, where it's often clear for me that I won't be staying there repeatedly).

In addition to that, they have very good inventory, often with favorable cancellation conditions, and often significantly cheaper than booking directly with the hotel (I've never gotten a better price by reaching out to the hotel directly, usually they're not even willing to match and tell me to book through Booking...).

Ultimately, the horribleness of the competition is what resulted in me going back to Booking despite hating their sales tactics. Is there any competitor that is actually better?

Sadly, I have to concur. The US based ones are all more awful.

I can deal with nagging messages while using the site, as long as I'm shown the full price, and not bombarded with upsell emails afterwards (that I have unsubscribed from 3 times already).

Never going to use Expedia again.

> They usually show the actual price, or the actual price minus a $2 tourism tax.

In my experience this is not true in the US, although God only knows how they segment their customer base for tests.

I use booking.com frequently but not exclusively, but that's mostly because I have more familiarity with the domain than most. It's perfectly fine for figuring out availability in an area (although you may also want to check airbnb) and then making a decision about how you actually want to book.

A much easier solution: don't use their product. This would serve as a fantastic article about the reasons why it's worthwhile to stop giving them money. Except, it's the exact opposite of that--it teaches (or encourages?) everyone to learn the tricks required to ignore a company's unethical behavior, or install the extension to do it for you.

But booking usually has better prices. Also competitors are not much better in terms of user experience. As a consumer I want to continue to use it, but to be blind to their persuasive techniques.

I used booking.com to plan a short holiday earlier this year. It messed up the card payment failure with zero feedback, so I wasn't sure whether any payment had gone through or not.

Long story short, I just booked the flights on the airline website and the hotel room through the hotel website. Price difference was maybe 20 EUR give or take, with very little extra inconvenience. And I had the assurance that if there were any problems, I could just contact the airline or hotel directly without having to deal with booking.com.

Some of these patterns are now illegal.

https://techpulse.be/nieuws/268825/booking-com-mag-klanten-m...

Which I believe is the only real way of stopping these patterns. If they are illegal and the law is enforced, then the field is level for the players, so they can't out-manipulate each other - with these patterns, at least.

Unfortunately, this is the result of years of AB tests that prove that urgency messages increase conversion.

They don't stress customers just for the sake of having a less pleasant experience.

I work in the online accomodation business, BTW.

It's not the fault of the tests. It's the fault of the people who choose value short-term conversion metrics over everything else.

Unfortunately years of experience has shown that threatening to shoot or stab people when you are mugging them increases the chances of them handing you the valuables they have on them.

The muggers don't threaten their victims just for the sake of inducing fear.

I work with the local gangs in my area, BTW.

This is terribly demagogic

There is actually a joke from a famous Scottish comedian (whose name escapes me rtn) that goes "as I came off the bus, a guy at the stop went OI! GIVE ME A QUID, OR YOU'RE GETTING STABBED! Now, compared with the likelihood of getting maimed, losing a pound looked like extremely good value! I don't know about you, but I'm a sucker for a bargain!"

Kevin Bridges! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8W_k7ybGBDg

I booked on booking.com 2016 and now again. I feel booking.com reduced their dark patterns. After 2016 I said to myself, never again, and 2023 I said to myself, let's have a look, and it is better.

This said, I try to take the approach of an eagle. Browse leisurely and then shoot down to the prey. Ignore pretty things blinking and focus solely on what you need.

The sorting orders are the most weird (but still way better than Airbnb where you control nothing and are doomed to scroll an infinite list). For example, teh sort order I use most often is to sort by price, but I need to start from the most expensive offers as I'm looking for (the pretenders to the) best places in a given area. Unfortunately, Booking.com allows to sort by price in one direction only, so I have to start from the end and from the bottom of each page. Weird but easy to solve.

But what I hate is that they won't let me sort by rating! Why do they include ratings, though? They present several weird options I'd never use as they are optimized to land me with a place I don't want. I just want to sort by rating - and let me decide if the number of ratings received makes it trustworthy.

Those ratings are fake anyway. You can score it a 1 (actually the lowest option is 2.5) due to nearby noise making it impossible to sleep. But they'll also ask you to rate the cleanliness, service, and location(??) and suddenly your terrible stay is a 6.0 rating.

https://ro-che.info/articles/2017-09-17-booking-com-manipula...

I rant about the 2.5-10 scale on every Booking thread. It's not totally fake but it's very deceptive.

When I had access to a large amount of rating data, the median rating on Booking was 8.1. If you can filter for business travelers (not sure if the UI allows this, but the data might still be in the page), that drops down to mid 7s.

If anyone from booking.com is reading this, if you're looking for faster conversion rates, just let users save their filters! As a nomad, I don't want to think about the number of cumulative days I've spent selecting "Private bathroom", "Air-conditioned", "8+ user rating", "Laptop workspace" etc over and over.

Can't you just bookmark a search with all these params?

Not sure if this is common knowledge, but I learned booking.com does not necessarily integrate with hotel backends in the way you might expect given their name. Turns out they (at least sometimes?) just lie to you in the UI.

I know that because my dad used booking.com last year, but when he presented the booking.com printout at the front desk - 'Sorry sir, we can't recognize that.' He wasn't late or anything. Pretty sure he prepaid too. Total nightmare - you had one job, booking.com, GTFO.

Personally given the blatant deception, plus the way they took UK/Netherlands pandemic money and laid workers off anyway [1][2] I don't think I'll ever use it. Also, Barry Diller thinks working from home is a crock [3]. I'll take my business elsewhere, GL with that Barry.

[1] https://hospitality-on.com/en/concept/booking-holdings-repor...

[2] https://skift.com/2022/02/11/booking-com-to-eliminate-2700-c...

[3] https://viewfromthewing.com/expedia-boss-trashes-his-employe...

Carlton City Hotel Singapore, I arrived there in the middle of the night with a printout from booking.com of my (already-paid-for) reservation.

The staff said they don't have my reservation, told them to check booking.com, they replied they do not have access to booking.com, a third party manages that for them which was unavailable at night. In that moment I realized I was putting way too much trust in that website. I was able to pay for a new reservation and later got the booking.com payment refunded. Luckily the hotel was not fully booked...

> they replied they do not have access to booking.com, a third party manages that for them which was unavailable at night.

I guess that's primarily the hotel's fault. They should not give rooms to weird third parties. But with the market shares of the big booking sites that would cause them significant loss of bookings.

Yes, I am also surprised about the original author characterizing any message as helpful. I am pretty sure the "x rooms left" and similar messages can never be really trusted.

First of all hotels juggle between portals and selling locally. So they don't give all their rooms to a single portal and wait until they are sold. They add a couple of rooms to every portal and more once they are sold out. It has also happened to me (with booking.com) that a hotel had overbooked. Probably not intentionally, but they made a mistake in their juggling. Not a problem for me, they sent me to a more expensive room in a hotel 3 minutes away. So the numbers on booking.com cannot be reliable even without their direct fault.

Additionally I have the strong feeling booking.com are crooks. I would not trust their numbers and messages even if they got perfect information from the hotels. I have no proof for that, but unethical practices reported above and the questionable work conditions you hear about them seem to be in line with my suspicion.

We (hotel owners/employees) hate booking dot com and their guests.

Remember that if you book with booking dot com, you are their guest. Not ours.

---

At the end of the month, hotel has 6 days to reconicle all the reservations. If we miss it they will charge us commission for the guest who did no shows, cancelled or CC declined. You can only dispute that twice.

They made UI so bad. If the guest card fails, marking CC invalid is not enough. They will still charge us commission. We also have to mark that we are charging 0 for no shows.

75% of the our no-shows are booking dot com guest.

Booking dot com guest are the worst too. They pay 2 star rate, and expect 5 star hotel service.

Genuinely curious, if that's the case, why do you keep using it then? Is it simply that too many customers come through it and you have no choice?

It's the best aggregator out at the moment. I call hotels before booking and ask for the same rate or similar perk. Most are happy to oblige and avoid booking.com fees.

"Booking dot com and customers too bad but I still allow them out of generosity of my heart."

The same way a mobile developer might say App Store and Google Play are bad, but have to distribute through them.

Booking and Expedia dominate the space, not just their own brands but Agoda, Kayak, Priceline, Hotels dot com, Travelocity, many others.

Yes, and imagine a mobile developer openly saying Android customers are cheap and leave bad comments.

Do you feel that way about all the aggregators (and their guests) or is Booking.com especially bad?

Just curious - I used Expedia recently to book a hotel/car package for a much better rate than I was able to get anywhere else, and it all worked out. I did feel like I was put in a pretty unimpressive room though. Not sure if the hotel was just a bit less nice than I expected or if the hotel figured “let’s put the cheapo from Expedia in the shabbiest room”.

> We (hotel owners/employees) hate booking dot com and their guests. Remember that if you book with booking dot com, you are their guest. Not ours.

You are completely unfit for your line of work.

You have a duty treat all guests well and if you don't want them to book through booking.com you are free to remove your listing. They are not forcing you to do any business with them.

If you can't attract enough guests by yourself without using booking.com, that means you have failed in the most important part of your business.

If I go to your web site, will I be able to book the same room for the same price as on booking.com, with the same cancellation conditions, in the same or lower number of steps/fields to fill out?

This is more likely to be the hotel's fault than Booking's. You'd likely have the same issue with any third party aggregator. Many hotels (much like airlines) regularly overbook as a business decision, and third parties don't really have any visibility into this kind of thing. It's less likely (but not impossible) for this to happen to you if you book direct, and it's helpful to inform the hotel if you're going to be arriving late.

Plenty of reasons to dislike Booking, but this particular one is more of a systematic issue.

> Not sure if this is common knowledge, but I learned booking.com does not necessarily integrate with hotel backends in the way you might expect given their name. Turns out they (at least sometimes?) just lie to you in the UI.

In 99% of cases this is the fault of the hotel. In the contract with booking.com you have to honour the reservations, wether you have a system that integrates with them or not. That is the whole idea! Booking.com integrates very well with backend systems, but the hotel can still screw up, and they are responsible.

I quit using booking after finding out it's usually much cheaper to book with the host directly. It's not always possible and some convenience that booking.com provides is gone, but I usually prefer to use the saving for included breakfast.

"Only 1 room left" has become a totally useless message for me. I book every 2 months in the same city at different hotels, and I'm seeing this message pretty much all the time, and there seems to be always 1-2 rooms left, whether I book now or later. I'm guessing some hotels only put 1-2 rooms up in the system at a time, or something similar

We need more EQ (emotional intelligence) in our UI design.

This is an area that AI will be unlikely to solve.

Designing a SAAS that can motivate and relax and not manipulate or stress requires a particular human wisdom.

They have plenty of "emotional intelligence". They're just using it for their interest, not yours.

If you mean benevolence, not being an asshole, etc., say that - but they're not doing it because they don't understand.

I would like to know ow the world of hotel booking looks like these days.

Is everybody here using booking.com?

Or is anybody using alternatives as well?

If you use something else: What?

If you only use Booking.com: Why?

Find places online, then call to reserve. Just last week I called a place I found on Booking and found they had a room at half the price shown online. This is in France though where there seem to be rules about how rates are advertised.

I’ve stayed at a few places where when I went to the front desk to extend my stay, they discretely told me to book via Booking.com rather than with them, because I’d get a better rate that way, and they were right. Like flight pricing, hotel room and channel pricing is complicated.

Booking.com have a price guarantee, and a good one, so you will rarely get a better price from the hotel _unless you’re a member of their loyalty programme_ … so for the big hotel chains, sign up to those and book via their apps

I guess the front desk has no discretion to give discounts, in smaller places the owner can give you the booking.com price because it means they don't have to give a cut (is it 30%?) to the bastards from Amsterdam.

I remember walking into a hotel at around 10 PM (I was road-tripping around Iceland and could've slept in the car too) and asking if they'd give me a discount (1 room more to sell), and the front desk person clicked around on a lot on his computer and when a colleague asked him, he said "I'll just give him the agency rate.".

I believe commissions are pretty standardized at 10-12% by now; OTAs have been competing on commission in the fight to sign up hotels.

The most likely reason you might get a better rate from a third-party booking site than from the hotel direct is if the hotel allows the site to do variable pricing to try to capture more willingness-to-pay; sometimes that variable pricing will work out in your favour.

I wonder if commissions have dropped a lot in the past ~5 years, or if your hotel just has a better rate. I remember hearing that average commission back then was in the 20% range (less for major chains with negotiating power), and I know that Booking/Expedia would be happy to kick down 8-12% for any traffic people referred to them. Any startup with zero volume could sign up for an affiliate account to get access to Expedia's availability and booking APIs and get 8% for each booking, and larger customers could negotiate that upwards. I think I saw 14% for one supplier, but I don't remember if that was Booking or Expedia or a smaller company.

That's interesting info - Thanks! But the standard for booking.com is for sure 20% for any new operator.

Wow really? When did that change? It was 12% as recently (hah) as 2018.

I have only recent direct experience (OTAs all being 10-12%), but I do know one recent change is that “AirBnB model” listings are turning up on Booking.com a lot more now (renting out your holiday home as if it were a hotel with one unit). I know AirBnB charges 20% commission (I think they call it a service fee), perhaps for these cases Booking.com is offering those operators 20% as well.

Ah, that would explain, thank you. No way they would have been able to make that change on hotels.

That makes perfect sense, they were the same type of single villa style. The biggest things I discovered is that while airbnb charges the host 3-4%, they charge the guest 9-15%. Booking.com reverses this and charges the guest no fees while the host has all the cost, 20% and the most risk if the charge/credit card was fraudulent.

That's incorrect. It's never been as high as 20%. That's a claim that I've seen frequently over the years on HN, but it was never the case, at least at Booking.com.

They have a few mechanisms to try and drive up commission from the usual 12%, though. They have a preferred program which boosts search results but costs 3%> They would have loved to drop it to better tune search, but they were addicted to the incremental revenue.

At various times there were also dynamic ranking boost efforts, where a hotel could increase boost their ranking (with a preview) by increasing the commission percentage. IIRC that went as high as 18%.

Both of those applied to the default search results order ONLY. If you clicked "order by price" or similar then you simply got that.

(Worked for booking until end of 2017.)

Never heard of booking.com until today, never used it. I sometimes book directly with a hotel or use Expedia or whatever else returns the cheapest price.

I associate Booking with higher prices. I find better deals on Google Maps/Super(.com)

Though, Google Maps' UI is buggy and often the deals are out-of-date/sold out, but I still find it better overall

Use OTA for research. Book direct with the hotel.

The issue is that booking directly is usually crappy and the hotels rarely care (or are under gag order not to say otherwise).

Only true for the big-brand hotels in my experience. This is almost always true for flights though

The exception I've found for flights is that sometimes the OTAs can setup selling-airline and codeshare combinations that would be impossible to do direct. e.g. an airline won't book flights on its own metal through its codeshare partners. Maybe I could call in and get it, but that's a hunt I don't wish to do.

Had a flight on all American Airlines metal that the OTA purchased through Iberian airlines on a mix of AA bookings and Finnair codeshares. The flight did not touch Finland or Spain.

I try to avoid multiple carriers after getting caught out missing a flight in Dubai due to maintenance delays in Sydney. With a single carrier, the carrier has to pay for accomodation etcetera and it is their problem to get you to your destination.

With multiple carriers, sometimes things become your problem.

If you buy multiple independent tickets to get the cheapest fares possible, you can be really screwed.

So it really depends on your appetite for risk. I sometimes choose the lowest risk to get to my destination, and a high risk option on the way home where I am less time constrained and can be more flexible dealing with any issues. New Zealand is the antipodes to Europe and can take 24 hours to arrive (including stopovers), so any flight problems are significantly worse than for many other countries.

All flights were on one carrier: American Airlines. AA's in an alliance with Iberian, Finnair and others. But I guess each one was selling the same flights, with the same rights and everything, at different prices, on one ticket.

But I do see Google's OTA listing offering things like you say where you're not protected in the event of a missed connection delay and have some shady insurer that's supposed to 'protect' you outside of the airlines.

Just anecdata from the other side (i was a hotel manager for the last 7 years): BDC has nigh-unbeatably good SEO, you can't beat it even with e.g. searching for "[hotel name] in [city]", 99% of the time. The other 1% is Expedia in the search results :D

A note on alternatives - loads of former competitors have been bought by either BDC or EXP, i.e. hotels.com is just Expedia, kayak or priceline are BDC, etc.

Btw you should probably define such a non standard abbreviation such as “BDC” the first time you use it

I have never had anything but bad experiences with any non-first-party booker; I now book only directly with {hotels, airlines, rental car companies}. It's just not worth the couple bucks you sometimes save; if there's a problem nobody is willing to be the one to fix it.

I travel a lot.

I used to use various sites, but I realized that if I concentrated on Marriott/Bonvoy I could reach their highest status level (Ambassador). I've almost reached the dollar value and night count to retain my status through 2024, and it's only April!

I'm quite happy with them. I get a lot of free upgrades, lots of points for free nights, free breakfast, late checkout, etc. And if anything is the least bit out of order, they fix it for me.

I hate AirBnb. There are lot of bad actors now, and AirBnb customer support is useless. Even if I need a flat for a long period (like a month or more), I try to find an independent agency and use them. Searching on AirBnb can be a good starting point: if the listing shows an agency name you can usually find them on Google. AirBnb "protection" is useless anyway, so I don't understand why I should pay such a huge premium for it.

Booking.com is fine. I didn't get stressed out about the messages that the author writes about. But now I only use Booking.com when there is no Bonvoy hotel in the place I'm going. I have never had to escalate anything to Booking, but in general the places in booking are as described. There aren't as many bad actors as there are with AirBnb.

EDIT: I'm not employed. All my travel is personal travel paid out my own pocket.

Loyalty programs are just a scam for you and the hotel to rip off your employer, right? Or are you really getting a cheaper/better deal than using a marketplace such as booking.com

In my experience Hilton, Bonvoy-affiliated, Sofitel, etc give better prices when a member and when you book directly than via any other channel

Yes, that's part of their strategy.

But it doesn't apply in my specific case. I'm not employed. I pay for everything out of my own pocket.

I bet a better deal from Marriott directly as a member than by going through a third-party.

Sorry for the offtopicness but could you please email me at hn@ycombinator.com? I want to send you a repost invite.

Generally, no, loyalty programs from hotels are not a scam. Or, I guess, it’s probably most accurate to say that they do not have to be a scam to be profitable, some places may run them as a scam anyway.

Speaking from the other side of the desk, guests can vary wildly in how much they cost to accommodate. A good guest (mostly one who cleans up after themselves) can cost as little as one-quarter of the average guest, that significantly improves the margin on the room and we can definitely afford to pass some of those savings on to you once we know you’re a good guest.

Speaking from a broader view, the kind of guest who stays often enough to meet loyalty targets is usually travelling for work. Their demand for accommodation is inelastic (job needs them in this place for this long) but very substitutable (pretty much any clean room will do). It makes sense to sacrifice some margin to capture that.

So there’s a few good reasons why hotels or hotel chains can offer real discounts in their loyalty programs.

Right, and as a hotel/airline, if given the choice between upsetting two paying customers.. who do you upset: someone who has done 100 nights/flights with you this year, or the guy who got a last minute rate from an online travel site and picked you because you were $5 cheaper?

The 100 nights/flights guy is also probably a much lower touch customer as they are just in&out for work, and "know how things work" generally so doesn't have unreasonable expectations for what they have paid.

It can go both ways. The 100 nights/flights person gets really familiar/routined to what's on offer and is going to complain when you change the brand of rum. Corporate expects you to personally welcome them, read their preference notes and make sure you give them something to bring to their kids because it's their birthday.

You're expected to upgrade them to the best available room/seat but they complain to corporate when someone that does 101/year gets the upgrade instead. If their flight gets cancelled/delayed because they flew into a known hurricane, you better watch out for it and proactively re-book them or hand out food/hotel vouchers.

The $5 discount OTA person... give them the crap room/seat that nobody else wants and just ignore their whining.

Just based on my experience of being the latter and trolling flyertalk...

I think Flyertalk are somewhat of a self selecting bunch of over optimizing nuts, to be fair to your average frequent flyer.

Nah, we are fruitcakes not nuts :P

(used to be. then came covid. now i use my points to fly volunteers to ukraine.)

I mean thats one dark way to look at hotel loyalty programs.

Another way to look at them is they are a gamified & transparent method of becoming "a regular" at a hotel/airline and generally get in return, commensurate better product/treatment/service, especially in cases of adverse events like short notice changes, delays, cancellations, etc.

Just like if you go to the same pub/restaurant in your hometown over & over, you'll get recognized as a regular.. and maybe on occasion get some free apps, access to a table when they might otherwise say they are full, and friendlier treatment. Except at a national/global scale across a brands properties/planes/airports/etc.

It is interesting to me that travel is one of the few remaining places where customer loyalty is in any way rewarded. And why shouldn't it be?

Sometimes it's a tax thing. The points usually don't count as a taxable benefit, so even if you're travelling for your own incorporated business, it's a way to squeeze a few percent of your expenses out as tax-free income.

Or at least a tax-free retirement benefit (not bad if you have an employer).

But it is funny to read on the travel discussion boards how much road-warriors hate hotel/airline X Y or Z because their points program isn't great, but they're substantially cheaper.

Some country's tax policies consider employer-paid meals a (partly/fully) taxable benefit, but if the hotel provides it for free, that's cool.

Same thing with credit card points. That's a huge one for squeezing out tax-free income out of your business.

I guess that depends on the country. In several European countries I have worked the points are property of the employer or they are taxable benefits. However, it is widely practiced and probably rarely prosecuted that employees just use them for their private fun and don't declare anything to the tax office.

However, if you get into any quarrel with your employer that can be fatal. Now they have an good argument to fire you with any compensation because of your wrongdoing. This had recently happened to the head of a Finnish government agency, ironically enough the audit office.

Part of the push for loyalty programs is that Booking (and Expedia) have tried to have a "most favored nation" clause in their agreements with hotels that states that hotels can't advertise a lower price elsewhere...unless they have an existing relationship with the customer. Hotels are often paying 20%+ in commission, so they're highly incented to get you to sign up for their program and give you free wifi or whatever and a few bucks off the room price.

EU regulation is pushing back on the MFN clauses, but I'm not sure what the current state of things is.

Booking.com's entire business is dependent on them being able to advertise the lowest price. If not, then all hotels would just use booking.com for visibility and get all reservations themselves. In short: Booking.com would pretty much instantly go out of business.

If Booking.com wasn't charging any commissions, there would be a strong reason reason for anyone (hotels or guests) to avoid them.

If the difference was small enough, many guests would still book through booking.com instead of the hotel out of ignorance, not caring enough, or because booking provides a better experience.

It'd cut their profits by limiting the commissions they can charge, but I don't see why they would go out of business.

Customers would catch on very quickly. Maybe the sinking ship could float for a little while, but not for long. There are ring effects to consider.

Booking.com has no customer support. They’ll happily fuck you over and not respond to any attempts to contact them.

This is definitely incorrect (has no customer support). Maybe they can choose to fuck you over sometimes, but I have definitely used their customer support as recently as december 2022 (first to call from my destination for some onsite help, then later after the trip to get money back). I wouldn't say they were seamless (that would be if there was no problem at all), but definitely good enough.

I've been booking using booking.com for several years, but not exclusively. As the author notes, it was not always full of dark patterns as it is today... and it's always been reliable and easy to book, view locations, compare prices etc. One of the best UIs for booking hotels I've found. I sometimes check AirBnb as well (if hotel is not my favourite option for some trip) and even the hotel's websites directly. Booking.com seems to get lower prices or at least match the hotels in most cases.

There are lots of other websites for booking hotels. But after trying a few, I don't see any advantage over booking.com so that's what I use (and ignore the dark patterns if possible).

I’m a receptionist, handle about 150 bookings a week. Two-thirds direct, the other one-third are third-party booking sites. Booking.com (Agoda, Priceline, Kayak) makes up about half of that one-third. The other half of the one-third is equally split between Expedia (hotels.com, Orbitz, Travelocity, Wotif, Trivago) and a big bunch of various corporate travel agents and agencies.

Despite the proliferation of booking sites on the web, all of them are either part of Bookings Holdings (Booking.com’s parent company, 17bln revenue last year), or part of Expedia Group (11bln revenue last year), and I would expect the distributions of third party bookings at most hotels to roughly reflect that revenue split. There is one other competing group, Trip.com (5bln), but they mostly service China and don’t have as much penetration into Western markets as far as I know.

Very interesting! Do you think there is space for small or niche players?

No.

Yes, there is space for small niche sites with certain angles, but all of those sites will still be owned by one of the big two parents. There isn’t even much space for a niche player intending to eventually get bought out by one of the big groups like you see in some software fields, because hotels are pretty risk-averse in general and won’t just hand out access to their reservation channels to small players easily.

great mini-thread! thank you for your industry insight!

I did some work on hotel booking for one of the the "small" players in the space (at the time, a distant third in the EU after Booking/Expedia). The majority of their room availability was sourced through the two big players. That's probably going to be the case for most aggregators, and there's a fair chance that your favorite non-Booking/Expedia aggregator is actually just selling you their content and collecting around 10%.

Much less than 10% usually for these 4th-party aggregators.

In a hotel like yours, does making the reservation direct, rather than using third-party services, makes any difference (i.e., rates, more available rooms, etc)?

The only difference is price. The money we get from a third-party site after they take their commission comes out to the same as what we get direct, so the guest is simply paying the third-party site’s commission (usually around 10-12%). It’s that way because we set the price on their channel. The only other downside is changing your booking has to go through them instead of us, and cancellations have to abide by their policies in addition to ours. In practice this doesn’t make much difference to the end result, but it sometimes adds a bit of friction for some guests.

Room availability, staff service, everything else is identical. We have no incentive to encourage you to cut out the middleman and thus we don’t, but to my knowledge we also aren’t prohibited from doing that. Customers do sometimes ask about this stuff and I say “if you know exactly where you want to stay, might as well book direct to save a few dollars, but those sites offer a real service in helping you find a good place when you’re unfamiliar with the area”. Customers also sometimes say they can get a better rate on an OTA than what we are offering, and I always encourage them to book with whatever method gets them the best deal - “we honor all bookings and you will get the exact same room either way”. Usually that better price does not materialize, the guest realizes they were looking at a cheaper room or even a different hotel, though it does happen from time to time even with us (which I have never been able to understand; the OTA must simply be choosing to lose money on those bookings for some reason). We do not overbook, nor do we allow OTAs to overbook.

(I don’t know how representative this is of hotels in general; the owner is particularly upstanding and moral, kind of a “pillar of the community” guy, so this might be an unusually fair setup. But I’ve never heard a customer say we’re unusually fair, so I think this probably is pretty common.)

Essentially the role OTAs play in our case is they are a search engine and perhaps a more convenient booking process, nothing more. I believe this is a common way hotels use OTAs, though that’s just my impression.

The other common way hotels use OTAs is more tightly integrated, OTAs get to do variable pricing and probably other things I don’t know about since we don’t join any of those programs. I can’t speak to those arrangements but I imagine that’s what is going on when the OTA can offer you a better rate than the hotel direct, which definitely does happen with some hotels. That might also be what is going on when you ask questions about OTA rates and it feels like the staff member is under a gag order, but again, I do not know anything at all about that mode of OTA integration.

Thanks for your explanation, I love to learn more about the businesses I use through their employees.

About room availability, I thought that if Booking or any other third-party says "this hotel has 5 rooms left", it didn't necessarily mean the hotel had actually only 5 rooms available for the dates, but maybe there were only 5 rooms left from the "batch" the hotel put in Booking (my assumption was that, to make the orchestration of reservations between different platforms easier, hotels divided the number of rooms between them, or something like that...)

I can’t speak to those spooky warnings of “only X left” from OTAs, I assume they’re technically true in some way but heavily massaged to increase anxiety because that improves conversion.

Orchestrating reservations is a lot more streamlined than you’re imagining. All sources have access to the reservation management system and can poll it for availability, while the booking is in progress it simply blocks out the booking with a “pending” booking. When the booking is made, the source adds it to the hotel’s system themselves. I have had customer support with both OTAs on the phone and heard them say “I can see you have this many rooms available…”. So if we have 7 rooms left, Expedia knows we have 7 rooms, Booking.com knows we have 7, and we know we have 7.

The only exception is if we have rooms with potential maintenance issues (air conditioners, TVs, and hot water systems have Heisenbugs too!), we will sometimes reserve one room of that type in case we need to move a guest. In that case, we would have 8 rooms available but Expedia and Booking.com would see 7.

> it didn't necessarily mean the hotel had actually only 5 rooms available for the dates, but maybe there were only 5 rooms left from the "batch" the hotel put in Booking

Booking.com doesn't know about any rooms that are not made available to them by the hotel, so everything is based on that. In my experience, most hotels just have all their rooms available at all times for booking.com - but maybe some of them experiment with availability to sell a bit more themselves.

The "A person just booked..." and "Only 2 rooms left" messages that booking.com uses to annoy customers are actually correct. I've worked on the other side, and seen from the backend that they don't lie.

> (my assumption was that, to make the orchestration of reservations between different platforms easier, hotels divided the number of rooms between them, or something like that...)

No, they use hotel software that integrates and synchronizes instantly with all platforms, their own web site and the front desk.

> No, they use hotel software that integrates and synchronizes instantly with all platforms, their own web site and the front desk.

Yes, I think that's feasible. However, I sometimes stay at medium to small size hotels (doing my reservation through Booking or other 3rd parties) but when I get to the place, I can see them managing my stay using Excel files or similar "almost by hand" methods. So I was skeptical that those kind of places had actually a system that can automatically synchronize with all the third party platforms they use in real time.

The absolute best in class of these systems cost $100 per month for a small-medium sized hotel, so it's not expensive at all. Many hotels still refuse to use them because of their own backwardness. Then they screw up and overbook and try to blame booking.com when they don't have a room for them.

I travel quite a bit and I like hotels.com much better than booking.com

A Firefox version please?

that would be lovely and I would install it right away, too. I see the time and effort it takes, tho. Would you be able to provide a css ruleset one could add to their browser of choice?

I'm not a front-end engineer so I can't help here. Though, from what I understand, Firefox uses the same extension system nowadays and it's mostly a question of publishing in Mozilla store.

> Some of the language is unnecessary, scolding even. Look at this one, which appears if you hesitate on the check-out page for just a few seconds

Going against the grain here, but I appreciate these messages.

In evaluating the website, I ask: "what would an awesome human do?".

If you were at the physical front desk of hotel making a booking on a busy weekend, the hotel only had 3 rooms left and they were being booked fast, you'd really appreciate the human helping you giving you a nudge and saying "let's get this done super quickly for you so you don't miss out!"

The caveat is the nudge must be honest. If the urgency is abused it loses its meaning and becomes noise.

That's the entire problem here.

One nudge at the right moment is awesome. A constant red alert of status notifications both undermines their credibility and fatigues the user to the one real notification.

"42 other users are looking at this room" is 100% noise. For all I know, someone linked a picture of the sheets on Pintrest and it's people gawking at them rather than potential buyers.

"Someone else booked a similar room" is very close to noise, unless I'm in a narrow audience of needing many similar rooms and being close to the margins.

"There is only one room of this category left" has actual value, in that it is a legitimate ticking timebomb.

But it's easy to lump all of these together when they're lighting up like a user-hostile pinball machine of anxiety.

It's not "42 other users". If someone else is looking at it, it's "2 users" (they and you).

I like Google travel a lot to find hotels and then I book directly. It's the best for cities because of how integrated with maps it is and since Google doesn't sell me anything, I don't have to be as weary of these dark patterns.

You know google is selling you hotel bookings?

Is there a place to book/research hotels that isn't?

Given the title, I was hoping this was a "how we're scaling our Perl backend" post, but still interesting. The hubris of using <div> class names like "persuation"(sic) is funny.

Interesting idea, but goes a bit too far for me. I'd prefer it if it just removed stuff, rather then rewriting.

In my company we use TravelPerk for booking business trip related flights, train tickets and hotel stays. I was shocked by how much more user-friendly it was than Booking.com or any other similar website. Unfortunately, afaik TP is available only for business clients, not individual customers.

Disclaimer: That's not really a praise of TP, because I think that every website should be FORCED to have that level of usability (EU, please save us). User-hostile design should be banned.

I love HN articles about going down the rabbit hole. This one did not disappoint. At the end, though, I started to wonder about legal issues with altering downloaded code behavior. Cybersecurity laws are so clumsily written that the kind of alterations to Booking.com code described here seem likely to fall afoul of one or more such laws not to mention the site terms of usage.

Opinions?

Personally, don't see how modifying anything on the client matters. Actual site and service is a series of authenticated API calls that trigger actions on their server side. None of those meaningful things are modified, only the client layer/ dressing so to speak.

This seems corrrect though it made me curious. I've skimmed the Booking ToS and can't find anything that expressly forbids altering the site appearance to make it render differently. The closest is perhaps Section A14. Intellectual Rights. [0]

So either Booking.com have thought about this and don't care, or they have not thought of it. Given that they do expressly prohibit monitoring/scraping/crawling for commercial purposes I would guess it's the former.

They've limited liability in a way that any loss is limited to the amount paid and also do not offer indemnification, which further limits their exposure.

(Reading legal documents is my personal rabbit hole.)

[0] https://www.booking.com/content/terms.html#nov2021_terms_all...

Who'd be sued? The people who use booking.com with this extension? It'd be a genius (/s) move for a service to sue their customers, ensuring they'll never return.

IANAL, but I imagine a sleazy lawyer from the company could attempt to sue the users for altering a "copyrighted work", although it probably doesn't apply if the derivative work isn't for public consumption. Also it would mean defacing a book would be illegal.

This extension is ~roughly the same as a user style sheet.

Specifically regarding booking.com i try to book accommodation way in advance with free cancellation until X date. When the trip gets closer i always review my booked accommodations at least X-1 days in advance for better deals.

Sometimes i do find better price and location. I have started this strategy recently. So not much empirical evidence yet.

I like how their "only 2 left on our site" is their example of "well this is alerting but useful, when exactly that tactic has been shown (in general, not on booking or at least I don't have that example at hand) to be entirely fictional. There simply isn't any actual shortage.

I love this kind of efforts to make the web more palatable, although changing the wording of some phrases seems to go maybe a bit too far.

For me I'd rather have a cross-browser solution in the form of uBlock Origin's rules. Is there any place where someone has collected some useful ones for booking.com?

I finally moved all my domains away from GoDaddy for similar reasons -- just using the site stressed me out.

Reading all the anecdotes about experiences people had in this thread, both good and bad, it seems like the whole travel and lodging industry is hit or miss depending on seasonality and a million other variables.

“YMMV” definitely applies once you reach your destination lodging/hotel.

Incidentally, since we're discussing booking.com — this site is ready to be disrupted. I recently tried to search for hotel rooms for a family of 3. A single room, for 2 adults and a kid. Good luck with that — they invested tons of money into that terrible anxiety-inducing messaging, but the search/filtering options are gathering cobwebs.

For those who haven't tried: yes, you can select a single room and 2 adults and 1 kid. Booking will ignore that and show you 200 hotels that offer TWO rooms. You will need to sift through all of them to find some that might offer a single room, and then fight through misleading offers, where a room is marked for three people, but has two beds.

> this site is ready to be disrupted.

Do a Kagi search for "hotels in (region)" and you can book directly with the hotels from their website, or contact them directly.

But some hotels don't let you book through their website, and some hotels don't have enough information on their web site, some hotels don't have a website only a social media account, and some hotels don't have any of that.

Well, if they - who have the most to win - are not ready to disrupt booking.com, then who is?

A hotel owner will save thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per year in booking.com fees, if they only invest one week and a few hundred dollars into their own web site. But many would never in their life do such a thing. Not to mention AirBnB, who is worse than booking.com for both customers and hosts.

I am a many years Booking.Com user, but since about 4 years I stick to this pattern: look up hotel on Booking, then go to hotel's website, register account there and get a member rate or privilege. In exchange they will at worst send me some email marketing once, which is easy to unsubscribe.

In larger networks I also getting some bonus points, but the main benefit of being a direct and even registered customer is an attitude of hotel. Most of the time it is better room or even upgrade, or just an available ear for requests or complains.

The reason of that is a visible disloyalty and even dishonesty of Booking.Com site and app towards me. I am just not in the mood to de bullied and dark patterned by a search engine.

Despite their shady practices I still only book through Booking.com when I to unknown places for the firs time. At the end of the day Booking sticks to customers when theres an issue and all the Venues/Hotels seem to care about their relation with Booking.

Not true: if there’s trouble with the property my experience with Booking.com shows that they won’t move a finger and you’ll be on your own.

I use booking.com but the user experience does really grate.

Simple things such as putting in the location and date, to get back a list of properties that aren't actually available for my requested date. Then have to set a search filter to 'show only available properties', which really should be the default. Especially as I set it every time.

An argument could be that people may change dates if they like the property but this is just fluff that gets in the way of finding somewhere to stay.

Could be classed as a 'dark pattern', from my point of view.

The people who desire and authorize this sort of manipulative crap to be put on websites needs to have very bad things done to them. Manipulative money men are the bane of tech.

> websites needs to have very bad things done to them

Make them feel anxious and on their toes about something that is important for them. Exactly like the dark patterns they create.

> Manipulative money men are the bane of tech.

Closely followed by engineers who happily implement this kind of shit (unless you included them already)

It's an interesting extension, will give it a go.

I've been booking a few hotels for this year as I have a bunch of trips aligned and booking is really fucking annoying. All those urgency prompts don't make me book faster or anything, they never did. And after a lot of bookings I tend to not even see them, my eyes already blur them out. I search for what I'm looking for and I book it.

I was looking at a hotel on booking.com and I could not find the final price written anywhere.

There was a highlighted price with “excluding the following charges”, but no sum of the price and the charges.

Even after entering my details I couldn’t find the final charges as they asked me to enter my CC details.

These persuasion messages seem untrue - which makes me not trust other parts of the website.

Can we have an extension that calls them and tells them my entire family is booking rooms individually with the hotel direct, and there are now only 3 people left who will buy through booking.com site, so hurry and offer us an extra discount.

This is brilliant! I was irritated by Booking.com nudges for a long time but I thought nothing could be done about it.

Now I want to build a similar extension. Leave a reply there if you know some site that badly needs de-stressing.

agoda.com

https://pastebin.com/HjWzCAZ4

This plus the fact that you never really get the same room of the picture are the reasons I don't reserve hotels with platforms like this. Either I reserve directly with the hotel or I just walk in.

I’ll donate and I’m sure others here too will if they hit you with a cease and desist let us know! I think it’s important to have tools to unfuck the web from dark patterns companies use to deceive us.

These practices are illegal and they have been fined for it before.

illegal where exactly?

In the EU / the Netherlands. They used to provide false information about the availability.

They changed it to "on our site" in 2020.

Same applies for airlines

In several European countries, that's really not hard to find online: https://www.reuters.com/article/booking-hldg-hungary-idINL5N... https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-privacy-watchdog-fines...

a/b testing obviously drives these kinds of site designs. The business leaders get what they want, but eventually these over-a/b tested products open themselves to disruption.

I also think its funny when people accuse these companies of being immoral, but I think a/b testing is creating these bizarre amoral companies. And once they get lost they seem really lost.

i'd be happy forego having to directly use a computer at all. I really want "Ok google, book an apartment for 4 in this region of <x>. Make sure it has blah blah amenities and blah blah beds" ..then have it show me some options and pictures on my phone or ar/vr headset, i say ok book the thing, and it just does it.

Luckily (?) I live in Hungary where they got fined over this so these dark patterns are not visible.

Communicating by fear in non-dangerous contexts is a bad sign of an attempt to manipulate you.

This should be illegal.

Luckily we have regulators to prevent such abuses.

Booking.com is actually much better about this crap than Agoda.

Agoda is owned by Booking.

Booking.com is a de facto monopoly - break it up!

Turkey banned booking.com for this reason, and while in turkey booking.com tells you: you cannot book from this country (so you need a VPN)

Then I know in Greece the booking.com commission is about 20%.... which is a lot! In Argentina it was (5 years ago) much lower due to availability of several other platform, so yes being the only provider is not a good thing

Btw I love booking.com: I still remember the scams in Venice until the internet popped up with reviews, and I really appreciate platform that helps who works very good: I met owners that told me: "yes, it costs, but I get customers as soon as I provide a great service"

I dislike airbnb as other have written: poor customers service when you tell them a host try to scam.

I've just talked to a host: he says the commission is variable where the more you pay the more they promote

My point is that there is no practical alternative to using booking.com for hotels, and therefore they treat costumers as they please (very bad - during and after the sale) and charge whatever they want (very high). It should be “the free market” driving price formation and market share. Clearly, this isn’t happening here anymore.

But like the Covid vaccine purchase fiasco, EU regulators will just sit idle cozying up to big business instead of standing for the interests of their citizens.

The fact that a project like the OP even exists is screaming proof of what I’m saying: if booking.com wasn’t indeed operating as a monopoly, wouldn’t the “free market” drive out the use of Booking’s notorious stress / bullying sales practices?

I have not yet had to try Airbnb's support for host scam, but unfortunately I am now in a situation with a scam host on Booking.com. Some time after booking and paying for the apartment in NYC, the host disappeared, they removed the listing, don't answer emails/phones/etc. I've been complaining to Booking.com over their chat and phone - no real action for almost a month. The only thing the first line can do is to file a ticket to appropriate department (fraud, I assume) and their hands are tied. They apologise for delay, etc. but nothing is really being done, I'm afraid.

Just in case someone stumbles upon this via Google and wondering what was the outcome. After almost a month of complaining via online chat and over the phone, asking for escalation, Booking.com finally issued a refund. The offered to book another place with a promise to cover the rate difference (about 1/3 of the initial cost). I don't know what actually helped, my stream of complaints, or maybe the fact that I warned them about possible legal actions like ACM ConsuWijzer in the Netherlands which I learned about from this thread or maybe simply this process just takes so long. Due to the lack of transparency BB, it's hard to tell.

I've done the same for slack

This is cool but I just mentally filter all this out already, no extension needed.

I'd like to think I'm above this kind of manipulation but I'm sure I'm influenced like anyone else by things I'm unaware of.

As a rule: people who think this, don't.

I used to think it, too. Then I consulted for a company deep into split testing for marketing persuasion, and it made very clear to me how often I've got an intrusive, consumptive thought entering my brain that I can trace back to an advertisement.

It's why I am pretty militant about ad-blocking (and also paying for things, because I want those things to still exist); I notice it today when I have a really weird "hey, I want that" crop up and derail my train of thought, and interrogating why is often valuable and leads back to the same things. (Even billboards actually work!)

Yeah, like others said. You don't.

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