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Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

Zoom -> Pretending you need to install the app to join a meeting and only showing you can join from the Browser after a few seconds..

Booking.com -> Pretending other people are looking at the same property

Booking.com -> Pretending the venue is about to run out of places and there are only "2 places left..."

Any dating platform -> Anything goes...

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> Booking.com -> Pretending other people are looking at the same property

Only one left! Call the hotel -> Plenty of room and cheaper (which is not allowed according to the booking.com model ...). This illegal in some places (including where I am) but they do it anyway.

Actually, booking.com has dropped that last requirement in the whole of Europe due to legislative pressure. Hotels can now offer cheaper rates if they wish. This was already the case in Belgium, Italy, and France, and is now policy for all of Europe.

If its illegal where you are, they've probably stopped doing it since July 1st.

I've heard this a lot of times and never found the hotel to actually be cheaper than whichever hotel aggregator. It's usually more by $10-$20/night. The hotel call is useful for confirming particular requirements, but I still book elsewhere (even after informing them of the online price, I'm always told to book online to achieve it).

One of the booking web sites (Trivago, I think?) is running an ad that implies that some of the other booking sites only have access to a subset of a property's available rooms, which suggests that in _some_ cases the "last one!" nudge may be accurate, if misleading. Given the history of dark patterns used in that industry, I hesitate to give any of them the benefit of the doubt, but it's something I made a mental note to dig into at some point.

When I worked for an online travel agency a decade ago (now just a brand for you-know-who) we got lots of nasty emails about Spirit Airlines, as they were always the cheapest option in our flight booking, but after you booked you found out all the extra charges they required, none of which were given to us to add in the total price. So the price we showed was not the price you would likely ultimately pay (we always joked internally that they charged for air to breathe). But we got all the grief. Also, they had their own flight reservation system, and it was dog slow (at the time it could take more than a minute to make the actual booking).

You got the grief because your company knew spirit was gaming your system but you didn't do anything to stop it, or warn your customers. You could have just stopped offering spirit flights until they fixed their pricing data. (Not maligning you personally, but the company overall deserved flak if they weren't pushing back on spirit to protect customers)

Exactly. A travel agent works for the client, not the airline. Its their job to advice the traveler of any hidden fees.

> Pretending the venue is about to run out of places and there are only "2 places left..."

Lying to a potential customer to make a sale is criminal fraud, no?

It depends on your lobbying budget vs. the FTC's budget.

MS Teams: Announcing that Firefox isn’t supported and you need to use Chrome or Edge, but if you hit ‘back’ at the right time everything works fine.

Sketchy online stores: “Sale ends in <time counting down>” but the time is just a random duration generated in JavaScript.

Autodesk: “Auto-renew Fusion 360 or you’ll lose your SPECIAL PRICING!” The ‘special pricing’ is full price. Their web store has a 25%-off sale on.

> Booking.com -> Pretending the venue is about to run out of places and there are only "2 places left..."

I was buying train ticket in France yesterday (through the SNCF website) and I was shown that exact message...

It might well be true.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Yeah; when you are buying directly from the provider, such a a train ticket from SNCF, the chances that they show accurate messages about remaining space is higher than when you use a third party service which can only show second hand information.

I started noticing on the American Airlines app, because it started spontaneously crashing, that when you repeated the same search under the same account, subsequent searches would come back with higher prices. But then I had my wife search for the same flights under her account, and she was shown the original prices I'd seen on my first search. That felt particularly dirty. They were just flat-out lying to me.

Hotels and hostels routinely overbook and when they're really out they pay for an alternative place out of pocket, so this supposed number of available places is complete bs.

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