How about calling it malicious UX? Bad is not a strong enough word. Or maybe hateful, or exploitive.
Bad UX: How Booking.com deceives clients
41–50 of 154 posts
Re: Bad UX: How Booking.com deceives clients
#42The only time I used booking.com, the hotel wouldn't honor my reservation, even though I showed them the booking confirmation number. They were sold out and simply said "not my problem, third party and we never got it". Who knows who's fault it was but with something as crucial as a hotel in a specific location/date I tend to just book through the actual hotel site from now on.
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Re: Bad UX: How Booking.com deceives clients
#43in my previous trips i have never seen a room rate at one of these booking type websites that i wasn't able to get by going directly to the hotel website or by phoning them.
they are parasites.
Re: Bad UX: How Booking.com deceives clients
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a digital nomad, this "dark pattern" has proved very useful for me a lot of times. It is a worse experience to check a place and when you look again it is not available anymore.
> It is a worse experience to check a place and when you look again it is not available anymore. I'm not sure that's what the GP cares about - it's a dark pattern because I don't think any of those statements are true. Sure they are unverifiable, but I wouldn't be surprised if you book a room, open a incognito widow, and find the same hotel again with the same number of rooms available. Or if you try to book a room 1…
Technically, all are true. Sometime the formulation is quite counter intuitive though. The best known exemple is probably the "there is only one room left" message for single room apartments. This has been considered a bug for years. The thing is: any change to the web site, however small, including fixing a bug, must prove conversion-successful in an experiment before going in production. This is both great and dramatic, as you can imagine: great that anyone can change anything as soon as proven successful, but dramatic that often you feel entrenched in local minima.
This experiment driven culture is great for the business though. So far.
Disclaimer: worked there for a bit.
Re: Bad UX: How Booking.com deceives clients
#45booking.com is a deliberate scam. Their business model is to lock customer into reservation that he would have to cancel and booking.com will keep the money. Booking.com puts a lot of pressure (through dark UI patterns) to make a reservation ASAP promising that you can cancel at any time. In many cases cancellation simply isn't possible - too late etc.. They are just keeping the money and this is exactly what their b…
No this is ridiculously far from the truth.
They make an awfull lot of money selling actual room nights (think Google-scale a lot, per employee, although the money culture in both firms are opposite to each other), and actually do cancel bookings and even sometime refund non cancelable ones. They are definitively harsh on the business side, especially when negotiating commissions with hotels, especially since it's always easy to justify ("that's for our users"). But this is not a scam.
You might have had a bad experience. No amount of money spent on customer care will ever balance out a big firm being 100% money driven as opposed to reputation driven, and fundamentally not caring for an individual user. So yes when you are that one user who felt through the cracks it feels bad indeed.
Re: Bad UX: How Booking.com deceives clients
#46Could someone explain to me any reason why it would be better to book through any third party instead of directly through the hotel?
Re: Bad UX: How Booking.com deceives clients
#47Could someone explain to me any reason why it would be better to book through any third party instead of directly through the hotel?
Mainly the convenience of seeing many options in one place. Sure, if you know you want a specific Hilton in Seattle, then go directly to their site. When we looked for places to stay in Norway and Denmark last summer, booking.com was a great resource to learn about many options and the going rates. Once we narrowed things down to a couple options, we could look at the direct site or book through Booking since many smaller places bounced us back there anyway.
Re: Bad UX: How Booking.com deceives clients
#48My wife and I use Windham Group, and use their app. Very nice booking experience. And if we're driving late we can push a button on the app and a reservation specialist finds us the nearest available room and calls us with the booking. The app also gives a maps link.
Re: Bad UX: How Booking.com deceives clients
#49Even as a host using booking.com I dislike many shady things they put you through but at the end of the day these dark patterns must work in practice as there is no other platform that delivers even closely as many guests as booking.com.
"Dark patterns" are one thing. They tell me that they booked 14 rooms at the Red Roof Inn in Appleton WI for Wed September 19, 2018, in the last 24 hours. I'd love to call the Red Roof Inn and ask them if that's the case. Other than that, that sounds like outright deceptive practices, fraud in marketing.
Technically, they may have booked 14 rooms in 24 hours. Of course, there's no way all of those bookings were for Sept. 19th. It is deceptive but probably follows the letter, but not the spirit, of any applicable laws.
Re: Bad UX: How Booking.com deceives clients
#50Try searching for a hotel room 6+ months ahead. Oslo end of February 2018. "14 people are looking right now. In high demand! Booked 124 times in the last 24 hours. Latest Booking: 3 minutes ago" "In high demand – only 3 rooms left on our site!" "Someone just booked this In high demand!" "Limited supply in Oslo: 3-star hotels. 4 hotels like Best Western Karl Johan Hotel are already unavailable on our site!" "3 other p…
Basically exactly this. I looked at Oshkosh WI for the middle of October next year. Middle of the week, in fact, a Wed night, 1 night, 1 person stay: "Only 1 room left!" "Booked 14 times in the last 24 hours!" - Oh yeah? This hotel in Appleton WI, with 80 rooms, had FOURTEEN rooms booked for a random Wednesday in September 2018 through booking.com ALONE in the last 24 hours. Screw dark patterns, that's outright decep…
This is a perfect example of a dark pattern.
The site said “14 bookings in the last 24hours”. You read it as “14 bookings for the date you searched for, in the last 24 hours”.
I don’t believe this is an accident.