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How Booking.com manipulates users

ro-che.info

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Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#161

Post by fakalaka »

Lots of complains, but people underestimate how much money, time and effort the company spends on a customer service. It's a war out there, traveloka raising half a billion dollars, "old" companies must fight back.

Not only their prices are usually the lowest, but they also offer matching prices.

The room was not as advertised? Booking would at least offer a coupon for next booking.

Hotel was overbooked? They would find you a room of no lower standard, in similar location, and they cover the difference. It happens that if there's a big event in the city, they might cover your 5* hotel if you booked a shitty 2* room.

Many small properties have shady businesses, booking.com protects you from this.

They might not use the shiniest tech, but their customer service (which is biggest portion of the work force) is top notch.

Source: shared bed with one of the cs agents

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#162

Post by wingworks »

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.…

I've started to use Google Maps more and more, they give you a good overview of several sites and their prices.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#164

Post by smsm42 »

ghgr wrote: post #111
wsc981 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I booked a room, I had leaking water everywhere in the room. Since I was alone and it was only for 1 night, I didn't bother to complain. With that said, I will still book my rooms through Booking.com. But at least this article gave me some nice pointers to keep in mind in the future, like the "fine print".

Even worse. I went to a horrible, horrible hotel in Prague (which at the time was the #1 result, don't know if still is). My (obviously) bad review, while polite and with pictures attached, was ignored after 3 weeks in limbo. Not explicitly refused, no explanation. Just poof, never happened. And support is also ignoring my questions. All that being a "Genius" user. Unfortunately I don't have Twitter so no public-sham…

Put the same review on TripAdvisor. In my experience, they are not afraid to host bad reviews and I've always found the reviews there to be informative and indicative of quality.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#165

Post by gommm »

bogomipz wrote: post #76
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.

And who is that in Europe? I tried both Agoda and Hotels.com without much success.

In Europe, I always check the price directly from the hotel, if it's last minute, I check hotels tonight and if the price is really much cheaper in booking.com, I call the hotel and get them to match the price.

I sometimes use hotels.com though since I often can get a 5% cashback plus their reward scheme which gives me a free night every ten nights (effectively a 10% discount)

Oh and for reviews, I check tripadvisor since, on the contrary to booking.com, they actually publish bad reviews.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#166

Post by wingworks »

rconti wrote: post #41
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…

If anything, booking.com feels like one of the worst whenever I use it. I vastly prefer tripadvisor, for example, even though their iOS app is a horrible unusable battery drain.

I've tried tripadvisor a few times, but always go back to hotels.com / bookings / google maps. I just find tripadvisor kinda tricky to use and filter to get the type of hotels I'm after.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#167

Post by klibertp »

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…

I think this needs to be said: there is literally nothing wrong with using PERL as an implementation language. You might dislike PERL, but simply using it is not a red flag.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#168

Post by javabean22 »

fakalaka wrote: post #161

Lots of complains, but people underestimate how much money, time and effort the company spends on a customer service. It's a war out there, traveloka raising half a billion dollars, "old" companies must fight back. Not only their prices are usually the lowest, but they also offer matching prices. The room was not as advertised? Booking would at least offer a coupon for next booking. Hotel was overbooked? They would f…

Oh really? Good customer service? How about this:

https://medium.com/@ilyadoroshin/bad-ux-how-booking-com-dece...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15152155

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#169

Post by beefield »

lozenge wrote: post #157
beefield wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

For tickets, some of that booking fee is actually going to the venue.

My 30s search gave no answer. If my total cost of a ticket is 100, how much of that ends up typically to ticketmaster's pocket and how much to the venue?

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#170

Post by wingworks »

mwfj wrote: post #25
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…

A suggestion for people who are upset with this behavior: Use Booking.com (and Google, Expedia, etc) as a showroom, after you have found a certain hotel, find their web site or phone and arrange a booking directly.

I book via hotels.com to get there 8% discount (on hotels that apply), or booking when/if the hotel is on the genius 10% list. But yeah, if the hotel I want to stay in isn't on a discount on either site I'll book direct if the price is the same/less. I do travel often without a computer and need to book quickly so will just use booking or hotels app, as it's easy and quick, whereas the booking direct is usually rather hard. + I don't usually book within a hotel chain enough to gain any rewards, which you do on hotels.
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