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How Booking.com manipulates users

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Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#121

Post by what_ever »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #37
zpr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the direct prices are actually more. Your best bet for sticking it to them might be to use an alternative booking service.

Booking.com takes an 18% commission. Only a severely incompetent business would refuse to give you a lower price in exchange for them not having to pay that 18%. All the big franchises (Marriott, Hilton, IHG, Hyatt, Choice, Wyndham) will give you a cheaper “member” price at their direct website. Being a member is free, it’s just like airline miles and you even earn points.

Except that hotel room bookings work a lot differently for lot of hotels than any other types of bookings. Hotels usually sell rooms in bulk to Priceline, Expedia and other OTAs and possibly keep some for their own funnel. So they may not have the same incentive to sell at that price you saw on Priceline.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#122

Post by mitul_45 »

Well, I am joining Booking.com as frontend engineer this November and this makes me a bit worried. The only reason I chose to join Booking was Amsterdam (I wanted to live/work outside India for a couple of years).

I have also heard the tech stack is kind of old and so learning-wise it might be an issue. Any tips on surviving and keeping the learning curve straight from a current/former employee?

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#123

Post by stingraycharles »

djsumdog wrote: post #103

I thought about interviewing for them in Amsterdam. The recruiter put me in touch with one of their people and she explained to me everything was in Perl, there were little to no automated tests and developers often pushed straight to production. I said I had only worked in perl shops that were migrating from it to Scala or Python. She said, "Well we have no intention of moving." Like I say with all recruiters, I sai…

This is true. It might make it a bit better knowing that they’re hiring a few of the top Perl people in the world (Yves, Rafael, Ævar), but indeed, everything is Perl. They’re managing to hire quite a lot of people, by the way, but the compensation is a lot higher than what’s normal in NL.

With regards to their testing procedures, the way I understand it is that they’re focusing on mitigation using clever monitoring/automated rollbacks. They pride themselves in their data analytics abilities, and this is part of that.

Source: live/work in Amsterdam and know many people that work/worked there.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#124

Post by rurban »

djsumdog wrote: post #103

I thought about interviewing for them in Amsterdam. The recruiter put me in touch with one of their people and she explained to me everything was in Perl, there were little to no automated tests and developers often pushed straight to production. I said I had only worked in perl shops that were migrating from it to Scala or Python. She said, "Well we have no intention of moving." Like I say with all recruiters, I sai…

This blog post was quite famous: http://blogs.perl.org/users/bookingemployee/2012/03/truth-ab...

Also booking employers refused to let their YAPC conference talks being recorded. https://web.archive.org/web/20111116162105/http://blogs.perl...

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#125

Post by TeeWEE »

Booking.com 's website is awful. They are still stick in 1995. They do product development solely based on A/B tests. That's how the product is so crap.

But they have a Monopoly (almost). So that's why people keep using them.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#126

Post by EasyTiger_ »

djsumdog wrote: post #103

I thought about interviewing for them in Amsterdam. The recruiter put me in touch with one of their people and she explained to me everything was in Perl, there were little to no automated tests and developers often pushed straight to production. I said I had only worked in perl shops that were migrating from it to Scala or Python. She said, "Well we have no intention of moving." Like I say with all recruiters, I sai…

How about being a grownup and actually take the damn call? Could you not just tell him you weren’t interested rather than being so ignorant? For a whole month I mean, really?

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#128

Post by dazc »

erikb wrote: post #120

Being a little disillusioned about the world these days I would assume this has a purpose. My guess is this: Booking.com already knows that they are fighting a losing battle against AirBnB. So instead of trying to win it seriously, they go to make the biggest profit they can out of their situation by strongly focussing on the idiots. With idiots you have two advantages: (a) they stay anyways no matter how shitty you…

> "My guess is this: Booking.com already knows that they are fighting a losing battle against AirBnB."

For a two or three day trip AirBnB isn't practical, and it's not as if AirBnB is perfect either. At least with a hotel I know there is a basic minimum standard and I have some level of consumer protection.

I go direct to the Hotel's own site wherever possible but often they don't have a facility to book online easily and, where they do, the price is often the same anyway.

Chain hotels are the exception but you often need to book and pay well in advance to get any real saving.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#129

Post by _jgdh »

djsumdog wrote: post #103

I thought about interviewing for them in Amsterdam. The recruiter put me in touch with one of their people and she explained to me everything was in Perl, there were little to no automated tests and developers often pushed straight to production. I said I had only worked in perl shops that were migrating from it to Scala or Python. She said, "Well we have no intention of moving." Like I say with all recruiters, I sai…

In India Booking is known as the company you want to call when you want to visit Europe. The questions they ask in the phone screen are relatively simple by Indian standards so it's straightforward to get tickets and travel to Amsterdam. They don't seriously consider working there because perl isn't the only thing unappealing about Booking. The pay is so mediocre that Indian devs would prefer to stay in India rather than move.

Caveat here is that I'm not referring to all Indian devs, only the few I'm acquainted with.

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