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How Booking.com manipulates users

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Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#301

Post by devdas »

LeonM wrote: post #192

I tried scraping booking.com once, it quickly became obvious that they use many 'dark patterns' in tricking visitors into booking quickly. Not using cookies was the most efficient method in discovering the 'real' price of an accomodation. But is not just booking.com, 99% of airline ticket sites use the same techniques. Basically what they do is raising the price on each subsequent visit, sometimes also lowering the a…

Nah, hotels are now manipulating prices like airlines, with computers responding in near real-time to perceived demand. As demand increases, so does price. Multiple searches show a rise in demand, so the price goes up, even if there really was just one person searching.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#302

Post by devdas »

mitul_45 wrote: post #122

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?

The tech stack is Perl+MySQL. Ancillary tech is Go, Rust, Java, C. Lots of Javascript.

Very high delivery velocity (You will be expected to roll out code in your first week).

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#303

Post by devdas »

bartread wrote: post #186
klibertp wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agree. Ditto not having drunk the Kool-aid on automated testing, as long as you have a viable alternative to achieve the same end (although I will admit that I find the idea of great monitoring and automated rollbacks a bit stressful on the face of it; you could mitigate that with good discipline around releases though).

You instrument your application so you discover failures very quickly. If you do this right, you pretty much get the reporting people want from business intelligence applications, and use that as your core monitoring metric.

It's a lot less stressful if something goes wrong, because you can go to a previous release in a couple of minutes.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#304

Post by splonk »

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…

You're right, it's a 2.5-10 scale. For future reference, the median review score for a hotel on booking.com is around 8.1, based on a bunch of scraped data. Varies a lot by location, though. Business travelers also tend to rate almost a full point lower than any other group (family, couple, solo, groups), but I'm not sure if you can break out that information on their UI.

My personal heuristic for using booking.com is rating > 8.0, then skim over the negative reviews for dealbreakers. Bad ratings for restaurants or concierge or whatever is fine for me, but "room reeked of cigarette smoke" is not. Positive reviews don't really have a lot of signal to me, but YMMV.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#305

Post by davedx »

siddharthdeswal wrote: post #220
davedx wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd contend they're a top booking site because of the wide variety of hotels available, not because of the CRO. I'd look for the team that goes and signs hotels up to the platform, they seem to be doing a really good job in all territories.

Yes, that's definitely true, their availability is quite staggering in breadth.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#307

Post by andraganescu »

andraganescu wrote: post #306

Would anyone pay a monthly fee for some dev to maintain some chrome/ff/safari ext that simply cleans up booking.com?

I am actually thinking of having an online directory of specific website cleanup extensions which power users of said websites should be more than happy to pay for :)

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#308

Post by aglavine »

jen729w wrote: post #97

I just spent 3 weeks travelling the USA and we used Booking.com to see what was around. But then we went directly to the hotel's site to make the booking and you know what? Same price, if not slightly cheaper in some (not all) instances.

The hotel's site may well be a facade and you're still buying through booking.com

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#309

Post by philjohn »

bogomipz wrote: post #287
codermobile wrote: post #198

TripAdvisor supports booking on hotels and they show all of the comments. Plus, there are much more ratings and comments than anywhere else.

TripAdvisor also supports fake and unverified reviews: https://www.forbes.com/sites/avaseave/2014/01/27/when-online...

There are merits to both systems (reviews from anyone vs you have to have booked through booking.com), the biggest one is that if you visited somewhere but booked directly, or through another OTA, you can still leave your opinion.

More here: https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/vpages/review_mod_fraud_detect...

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#310

Post by mitul_45 »

devdas wrote: post #302
mitul_45 wrote: post #122

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?

The tech stack is Perl+MySQL. Ancillary tech is Go, Rust, Java, C. Lots of Javascript. Very high delivery velocity (You will be expected to roll out code in your first week).

Thanks for the tip! Are you in Amsterdam? Would love to catch up in the first week, if you are around.
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