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How Booking.com manipulates users

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Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#51

Post by dpwm »

smtpserver wrote: post #12

Review scores are also a bit offset. I have tried to give the absolute lowest to every metric booking.com gave me to rate and the resulting score was 2.5-ish. I was thinking about making a browser extension that rescales the values accordingly but I just made a mental note that a score 7 hotel is in fact a score 6. With this scaling the scores on the lower end gain more as a 3.3 score becomes a 5. Take this into acco…

Thank you for highlighting this. I used booking.com a few years back when I stayed in London on a budget. I realised something about the site had made the review scores feel really useless but I never realised why until I read your comment.

In the end I just compared on worst reviews until I found a hotel where the bad reviews were about really unimportant things to me. The hotel I stayed in actually had one of the lowest review scores of all the ones I had considered but the lowest-scored reviews described an experience I could enjoy far more than the worst experiences at comparable hotels.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#52

Post by nlh »

dawnerd wrote: post #44

I've just been booking directly from hotels I trust because of this. Used to use hotels.com but they've gotten really bad recently. Can costs a bit more from the hotel but most of the time price is on par. End up getting more room upgrades when booking directly anyways - at least with hilton.

Me too -- this is a very important point. Often the hotel's direct rate will be the same as advertised on hotels.com. Of course you lose the ~10% rebate by not getting rewards points, but since the hotel is effectively earning 30% more from you, they're much more likely to give you a complimentary or discounted upgrade.

So if that sort of thing matters to you, I can also strongly suggest booking direct.

(Note: You do generally have to ask, but I've had good experiences. Do it on-site @ checkin, and I basically say the above -- "Hey I booked direct so you earned 30% more from me. Can you offer me an upgrade to an un-used room since I'm here now?")

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#53

Post by theak »

dawnerd wrote: post #44

I've just been booking directly from hotels I trust because of this. Used to use hotels.com but they've gotten really bad recently. Can costs a bit more from the hotel but most of the time price is on par. End up getting more room upgrades when booking directly anyways - at least with hilton.

My experience directly booking from hotel websites has been really bad. I usually end up using a service like Booking/Priceline/Kayak/Google, just because the UI is nicer than booking directly from hotels, even if it means having to deal with stuff like this.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#54

Post by taytus »

feelin_googley wrote: post #38

What if the manpulation was easily avoidable? The last time this website came up on HN (same issue), I conducted an experiment. The annoyances and manipulation described by the blogger sounded like it relied on Javascript and graphics. I wanted to see how far I could get without using a graphical browser. I was able to 1. search hotels, 2. return a list of properties in CSV/JSON/TXT, 3. return prices and 4. book. It…

>It required only a shell script of 107 lines, 308 characters, 2934 bytes. This could be further reduced.

Yeah, totally common for average people to do this.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#55

Post by aianus »

sturgill wrote: post #20
edejong wrote: post #5

This is what A/B testing does to a popular site. You test for immediate customer engagement but cannot (easily) test long-term customer loyalty. This is why booking.com has become the largest online hotel booking site in several continents. Nevertheless, I think it will eventually be their downfall.

"Frankly, I don’t think I am going to stop using Booking.com. I am not aware of any other service with a comparable number of properties and reviews." It's hard to quantify negative impact of future dealings, but it's even harder to say Booking.com should change their methods when the people aware enough to be annoyed continue to give them money. It's like complaining about Google following you around the web and usi…

> I am not aware of any other service with a comparable number of properties and reviews.

Why do you need so many properties and reviews? You're staying in one room, presumably. You just need at least one room with a few good reviews in your price range and you're good to go.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#56

Post by dsmolovich »

Osmium wrote: post #22

To anyone from Booking.com reading this: I'll go elsewhere next time I need to book a room. Dark patterns may help profits in the short-term, but they're terrible for your brand. Just ask TicketMaster. It isn't just tech-savvy users that will catch on to this either. If an everyday user uses Booking.com, reads reviews and thinks their room will be great, but then has a bad experience, they're going to stop trusting B…

This is exact my situation. No more bookings on booking.com after a bad experience.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#57

Post by learnstats2 »

Osmium wrote: post #22

To anyone from Booking.com reading this: I'll go elsewhere next time I need to book a room. Dark patterns may help profits in the short-term, but they're terrible for your brand. Just ask TicketMaster. It isn't just tech-savvy users that will catch on to this either. If an everyday user uses Booking.com, reads reviews and thinks their room will be great, but then has a bad experience, they're going to stop trusting B…

I use booking.com occasionally because I can actually get to the information I need and want without difficulty.

The things described here are not exactly dark patterns - you can bypass them and get to the truth. (This is unlike TicketMaster.) Perhaps I would call them grey patterns.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#58

Post by smnscu »

colmvp wrote: post #11

I noticed Udemy also manipulates users by saying that x course is 80-90% off but only for one more day!!!!... until you realize it's been that exact same price for weeks/months. I understand it's not new to have the retail price be higher than the 'sale' price (for example, clothes and furniture), but even at clearance outlets, the price difference while large is rarely as dramatic nor as prolonged.

Am I remembering it wrong or was Udemy cancer? https://hn.algolia.com/?query=udemy&sort=byPopularity&prefix...

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#59

Post by beefsack »

Some airline ticket booking sites still track you and increase the ticket price on return visits, optimised to certain intervals. Many in the industry call it "dynamic pricing."

It made the news a few years back[1] but you can still see it sometimes in a few different industries. You can get into arguments with people about whether marketing as a whole is an enterprise built on manipulation, but this is quite clearly manipulative.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2010/aug/07/computer-...

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#60

Post by gnicholas »

drstewart wrote: post #29

Airbnb does this too. No matter where or when you search for, you'll see a notification saying something like: "Only 13% of listings are left for these dates. We recommend booking a place soon." As a random example, apparently Kamloops, BC is filling up fast for Dec 3-6 (midweek in the middle of winter). And so is Flint, MI on Feb 19th, a Tuesday.

Strangely, Airbnb has another problem that is the exact opposite. My wife started to book a unit, got to a point where it said she had 9 hours left to complete the booking, and then someone else booked it first. She was so angry because it seemed to clearly indicate that she had X time left to complete the booking. She messaged the host again to find out what happened; apparently this can only occur when instant booking is available (and the host cannot deny another potential guest in order to keep days open for a pending guest).

Having seen dark patterns described/decried on HN, I thought it was funny that Airbnb apparently has accidentally-light patterns.

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