Comment by rdiddly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdiddly | Hacker News Reader

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.

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