It's funny how a transparent lie can be allowed to persist. They can't lie about much but apparently it's OK to tell you three other people are looking at that hotel room and two just paid a deposit.
Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
81–90 of 183 posts
Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Booking.com is a terrible company in pretty much every regard. I've had a reservation to a hotel that was pretty full according to the website scare tactics, but when I got there I was the only person to come in weeks. Also, their support is abysmal. Often when hotels fail to provide rooms as advertised, they play a "not my fault" game with the hotels, where the hotels claim they can't refund because the money is stu…
We arrived at a hotel, then found out we could get the room for a cheaper rate than we got on booking. The hotel was very helpful, and we cancelled the booking both from our, as well as the hotel’s side. Nonetheless it took Booking.com days to decide that the refund was legitimate.
Isn’t the hotel screwing Booking.com over in that scenario?
Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Booking.com is a terrible company in pretty much every regard. I've had a reservation to a hotel that was pretty full according to the website scare tactics, but when I got there I was the only person to come in weeks. Also, their support is abysmal. Often when hotels fail to provide rooms as advertised, they play a "not my fault" game with the hotels, where the hotels claim they can't refund because the money is stu…
> Also, their support is abysmal. Often when hotels fail to provide rooms as advertised, they play a "not my fault" game with the hotels, where the hotels claim they can't refund because the money is stuck with Booking.com while Booking.com claim the money is in the hotels account. Then they give you a "20% refund" that you can use on your next purchase there. I'm going through the exact same dispute with VRBO (Exped…
I am very careful never to book vrbo via hotels.com (which i usually use); there is 0 support once you do. Both are selling via Expedia (hotels.com and vrbo) but with vrbo you have no recourse. Doesn't matter what is wrong, good luck to you. Hotels has it's flaws but even in the weirdest places on earth where we booked hotels and the hotel owners had no clue what Expedia is or why we turned up, they always find a similar or better accommodation for you. We found our favorite hotel (unfortunately on the other side of the world) that way. They couldn't find anything close so they asked if we would mind an extra drive but the hotel is 2x the price: they would pay the difference. We said yes and ended up in a fabulous place we immediately stayed 3 weeks at. It is all about the service. Booking has more inventory and vrbo is often cheaper but screw that; peace of mind is definitely better for me.
Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
#84The first time we booked a place on Booking.com, we were anxious the entire afternoon. Not sure if things have changed, but at that time they made it feel like a racing game, flashy countdowns, everything but THAT place sold out in the area, OTHER PEOPLE WERE LOOKING AT IT, several email notifications in the span of hours because we haven't decided yet, and now it might be TOO LATE if we refresh the page. I wouldn't…
I will give you a tip.
* search hotel at booking.com
* find that hotel at google
* call them directly, by actual phone
You will get a lower price always. Of course, you need to actually manually call them, which people don't want to do; but it always worked for me.
Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
#85The first time we booked a place on Booking.com, we were anxious the entire afternoon. Not sure if things have changed, but at that time they made it feel like a racing game, flashy countdowns, everything but THAT place sold out in the area, OTHER PEOPLE WERE LOOKING AT IT, several email notifications in the span of hours because we haven't decided yet, and now it might be TOO LATE if we refresh the page. I wouldn't…
Booking.com is a terrible company in pretty much every regard. I've had a reservation to a hotel that was pretty full according to the website scare tactics, but when I got there I was the only person to come in weeks. Also, their support is abysmal. Often when hotels fail to provide rooms as advertised, they play a "not my fault" game with the hotels, where the hotels claim they can't refund because the money is stu…
> Then they give you a "20% refund" that you can use on your next purchase there.
Consider yourself lucky. For me it was 20eur take it or leave it, on 500eur loss.
I consider cancellation/refund policies that end before your arrival technically - a scam. The situation was like that - the apartment was booked with cancellation available 3 (or smth) days before arrival [0]. Upon arrival - the place was cigarette reeking, bedbug infested, with 30 year old completely worn out mattresses disgusting place. Owner says - "sorry - no refunds" [1], booking says - "we talked to the owner, cancellation policy has ended, the reviews are above average" [2][3]. Upon other calls they gave me 20eur. Bank could not issue a refund, because everything was up to policy.
Though I still use booking.com. I learned to ignore those dark patterns, because it's obvious that 1 spot is left for an apartment, there are no more to it :) . I had only 1 horrible experience with them, but had much worse with AirBNB. Booking.com is great to search all types of accommodation and it's often possible to find a way to book directly and for cheaper, so using it sort of as a search engine.
[0] from my experience it's usually like that, cancellations/refunds until your arrival usually add exorbitant amounts to the price
[1] though owner suggested ordering cleaning services, but that place needed crime scene level cleaning and complete refurbishment
[2] lesson learned: always sort reviews by newest and translate from foreign languages, because newest 3 reviews were horrifying. But I have not read them, because have not translated them, or have not seen them. Because default sorting shows by "relevant", i.e. foreign language reviews are on the bottom and the other sort order is a mystery to me.
[3] it seams that people do not know how to vote in reviews. If you returned from vacation and infested your own home with bed bugs, and had multitude of other problems - do not give 7 or 8 as a review score - give it a 1. Booking.com used those reviews against me - "if it's above 8 - we cannot do anything about it".
Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
#86I was once tasked with upgrading a small desktop application used by warehouse workers to fetch imprint data for an apparel printer. The data was stored in a really inefficient way and so the operation took a stupidly long time. I decided to add a progress bar so that people don't think the app is busted (which they occasionally did). Turned out, much of the time spent was on the server's end, so I couldn't track the…
The fact there isn't a straightforward back-pressure mechanism in browsers to get live updates on how much time is left for an upload or a download is why loading spinners are used everywhere instead of progress bars. You can implement it yourself using websockets and a ton of complexity, but then you need the entire socket tooling and security to be in place. It's one of few the things browsers are really missing in my opinion.
Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way the pay-per-click machine works, is you pay like 3$ for 'hotels in amsterdam', their average (public info) commission is 15%. Looking at booking.com/amsterdam you can see vague idea about average price, lets say most bookings are 2 nights, then you can get ballpark average reservation of around 200$, 15% of that is 30$. So for each room they sell they can buy 10 clicks on 'hotels in amsterdam'. This is super…
>Thing like 70% off on pair of shoes, that just had their price increased by 90% for 1 minute, just so there was a record in the database that they actually had higher price, nobody cares that they never sold at the high price. In my country this is explicitly illegal. A good or service must be sold for a certain period of time (2 weeks I think) before it can be used as the pre-sale price. I've only heard this in rel…
What country is that, if you don't mind saying? I'd love to cite that example when friends who work in marketing start to babble about "cool tricks" they can do next time.
Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
#88I implemented this functionality for a certain SaaS with many large customers. I made sure to have a scalable way to measure unique viewers across different time frames. Only after we launched it, we realized all our competitors just put a random number that looked nice.
How did that turn out in the end? I presume having a real number is long-term optimal in terms of keeping customers compared to showing a fake number.
Hmm, I think the fake number will bring more money, both short and long term.
If you are selling 10_000 items, with uniform demand (just toy example), you need like 3 million unique visitors per day in order to show 'one other person is looking at this item in the last 5 minutes, (24*7)
If I show 1 + random(5) are looking at each item, my competitor has to have enormous amount of visitors to compete.
Sadly, unless its illegal to lie, organizations are disincentivized to do the right thing.
Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Booking.com is a terrible company in pretty much every regard. I've had a reservation to a hotel that was pretty full according to the website scare tactics, but when I got there I was the only person to come in weeks. Also, their support is abysmal. Often when hotels fail to provide rooms as advertised, they play a "not my fault" game with the hotels, where the hotels claim they can't refund because the money is stu…
As an opposing pov: we mostly use booking.com for our reservations, and have never had an issue with them, and found their support useful the one or two times we needed it. They're the best reservation site that I know (others are way worse), and are fairly customer friendly [+]. I still book directly whenever I can because I don't want the hosts to pay the rather large booking.com fees... but we often find places to…
I'm using booking for 15+ years, mostly in Europe. I'm a satisfied user. These scare tactics don't bother me since it's easy to ignore. What I care about is that I see exact micro location of property, if I'm going with friends to a mountain cabin it's a real bonus if it's a bit further from other cabins or surreounded by woods. Airbnb burned me more than once with hidding this critical piece of info and only showing general area.
Re: Are 14 people really looking at that product? (2020)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Also, their support is abysmal. Often when hotels fail to provide rooms as advertised, they play a "not my fault" game with the hotels, where the hotels claim they can't refund because the money is stuck with Booking.com while Booking.com claim the money is in the hotels account. Then they give you a "20% refund" that you can use on your next purchase there. I'm going through the exact same dispute with VRBO (Exped…
I am very careful never to book vrbo via hotels.com (which i usually use); there is 0 support once you do. Both are selling via Expedia (hotels.com and vrbo) but with vrbo you have no recourse. Doesn't matter what is wrong, good luck to you. Hotels has it's flaws but even in the weirdest places on earth where we booked hotels and the hotel owners had no clue what Expedia is or why we turned up, they always find a sim…
Normally I would just book through a hotel directly. But this was a 6 week trip, through multiple countries and multiple cities, with a friend. So instead of us both spending $120 each, we could spend $120 a night on an apartment. We had 4 reservations through VRBO, and the other 3 were perfect for us. But that 1 bad experience really put me off of ever using their platform again. They could've just accepted responsibility and refunded our money, but they decided against it.
I'm now traveling alone, and am paying around $80 a night for a decent hotel. I agree, peace of mind is worth paying for, traveling these days is already stressful enough.