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How Booking.com manipulates users

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Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#141

Post by dx034 »

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…

Actually review scores are the one thing I love about booking.com. I never book below 8.0 and always skim through at least 20 reviews (takes max 1 minute). I've never really been disappointed by an 8.0+ hotel and everything above 9.0 was really good.

I'd recommend staying away from hotels with very few reviews. But many (even smaller) hotels have several hundred reviews. They're usually very reliable.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#142

Post by PeachPlum »

EasyTiger_ wrote: post #126
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?

Meanwhile in another timeline

"All I did was miss three calls because I left my phone at my friend's and when I called they'd given the job to someone else, how unprofessional"

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#143

Post by nnd »

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…

Anecdotally, I’ve recently applied for a full-stack position on their website and got a rejection email a couple of hours later. Maybe because I don’t have Perl on my resume?

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#144

Post by PeachPlum »

bogomipz wrote: post #84
sturgill wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

>"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" Please tell me how to avoid the duopoly that is Booking.com(Priceline Group) and Expedia in Europe? Especially so when making new booking on short notice. Booking.com has maintained close to 60% market share: http://www.…

Go direct

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#145

Post by icebraining »

lucaspiller wrote: post #135
icebraining wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

45€ doesn't sound like much. For a complete apartment cleanup, including bed linen and etc, you need at least three or four hours, so that's around 11-15€/hour. Seems quite reasonable for Austria.

Yeah for Austria it doesn't seem like a bad price, it's just weird that the price is nearly the same as the accomodation fee. And as a Brit the idea of any kind of service fee is pretty foreign in the first place (why not just include it in the advertised price?).

It's a fixed cost, so they use a fixed fee. If they just added a percentage to the price per night, people who stayed more days would be paying more despite not requiring more cleaning.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#146

Post by WA »

Oh it's not only booking.com

The newest scam is: flight comparison websites show you a low price, but only if you pay with a VISA. Switch to MasterCard and it's an additional 20-30€. But then you invested in the whole booking process already.

Amazon Prime: Try to cancel it. They make it sound as if you lose Prime right away. There's an option "remind me 3 days before next payment" that suggests you should think more about your decision. Only after you cancelled, they tell you that you lose your benefits only after your Prime subscription expires.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#147

Post by davedx »

stingraycharles wrote: post #123
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/…

Yeah, they're all about A/B testing, not automated testing. The article shows what you get when you laser focus on CRO. They do very well though, and are probably the top hotel booking site? Definitely a lesson in there somewhere.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#148

Post by beefield »

ianamartin wrote: post #112
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately for us (and fortunately for TicketMaster), there usually is no alternative to them. That doesn't hold true for Booking.com

I think that it would only take a startup selling a few really big names before the monopoly breaks. Sell Taylor Swift on a different booking system that isn't pathological to users. A few other top shelf performers. Venues will be switching like there's no tomorrow to keep the top performers. The tricky part of this is getting an audience with people like Taylor Swift. On the other hand, with people like Trent Rezno…

I find the current "market equilibrium" for both hotel booking and event ticket sales quite weird. I mean, both of them charge ridiculously high fares for a service that costs a fraction of that to produce. I mean, take hotel booking. Hotels could (technically) easily set up a booking co-operative (or two to get some competition), and refuse to sell anywhere else online. The fees to be able to run the co-operative would be sub 1%. It needs no marketing budget because that is the only site that comes up when googling hotels (others are dead).

Or then I am missing something in the market dynamics of hotel booking.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#149

Post by etairaz »

You seriously had to book a shitty hotel in order to understand that you're being manipulated?

Let me give you the short version of how to book on booking, which is BTW an excellent site for travel arrangements:

1) Ignore anything that makes it sound like you're in a competition. Cheapest price, someone is looking, etc. You're trying to book a hotel room that suits you, not win a race.

2) Any hotel ranked below 9+ has problems. You just need to figure out what the problems are, and those will appear in the reviews section. Don't be lazy - you need to read dozens of reviews. The good news is that you can skip the good reviews - they won't contain what you're looking for. If you book any hotel that has a less than 9 average, make sure you understand what people didn't like about it. If it's over 9, everyone liked it, and you will too.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#150

Post by chrischen »

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.

I actually think this is caused a by a highly croweded, overly competitive market. There are so many booking sites that they have to resort to these things to win sales.
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