Also a couple of years ago we discovered that Booking shows different prices from different locations and different devices. Prices are higher at some hotels for Mac/iPhone users and Western Europe/US customers. Not sure if they're still doing it, but it's easily testable if someone wants to investigate.
How Booking.com manipulates users
231–240 of 316 posts
Re: How Booking.com manipulates users
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in Amsterdam do not work for booking but constantly discuss them in IT circles. Recently I heard of a guy who spend 0.5 year working on the calendar control that you can see on the main page. Every fucking day he tried to adjust the control to optimise the booking rate. That must be very boring job. Another ex-booker, back-end developer told that he has the PTSD after working with their Perl code base - it was…
What is the 30% rule?
foreign (IT) workers pay a max of 30% income tax the first 10 years they work/live in The Netherlands
Re: How Booking.com manipulates users
#233I 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…
Perl is a bad language suddenly? Pushing to production is a bad practice?
> Perl is a bad language suddenly?
Not suddenly, but when Centos 5 released in 2007 with 5.8.8 (from 2006), and Centos 6 in 2011 with 5.10.1 (2009). That froze the language environment for a lot of people and they couldn't benefit from the new features. Then they would publish posts explaining how to do things that 5.12 onwards had better solutions for, and new devs would get stuck in a whirlpool of trash.
Those versions worked fine with '1998 perl' (the year the codebase started & also the last time best practices were checked). Newer versions of perl are way better, but for a lot of devs, that 7 year period of weird perl + the halo around it (search for 'perl hit counter') is what they used to get their impression of perl.
Re: How Booking.com manipulates users
#234I 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.
I wanted to point that out as well. Especially since the OP is familiar with Ruby it's really not a thing to get wound up about.
Compared to Python and Ruby, Perl might be getting a little long in the tooth but there's probably stuff that's less of a hassle to in Perl than in any of its decendants.
Certainly no red flag.
Re: How Booking.com manipulates users
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
The impact is worse than just hurting brands. After hotels.com boned me, I've soured on the very notion of online bookings, price comparison sites for travel stuff, trusting ratings. Caveat emptor (aka Freedom Markets™) is bad for business because it increases transaction costs (friction). Reforms like consumer protection regulations are championed by businesses trying to make an honest buck once they get tired of th…
Can you describe what happened with hotels.com? I've been using them exclusively because my travel is so random and it's just easier to have all the hotel bookings in one place. But it does make me uncomfortable that I'm getting taken advantage of in one way or another. Thx in advance.
I use them almost exclusively as well, but with a caveat: before booking, I always check the hotel's site for better pricing or bonuses you get for booking directly.
Yes, some of the practices are a bit annoying - I get multiple emails a week with their "10% off codes" that aren't valid for the majority of hotels on the site. But since I'm not worried about staying with any specific hotel chain, their stay 10 nights get one free (really it's often more 'get a steep discount on a night') ends up being worth it for me.
And the one time I wanted to cancel a reservation - I was told by someone staying at the hotel at the last minute that it was a dump - Hotels.com got it canceled for me and got the cancellation fee waived, which I wasn't expecting, but definitely appreciated. Of course, then I went ahead and booked a different hotel through them, so they got my business regardless.
Re: How Booking.com manipulates users
#236I 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…
Perl is a bad language suddenly? Pushing to production is a bad practice?
No and yes.
Re: How Booking.com manipulates users
#237I was a vast user of Booking.com (as I travel a lot).
My advice: go to booking.com, find the hotel you want to stay at. Search their phone number or email, contact the hotel directly and you'll get a much better price (15% is booking.com fee).
Downside to this is if you are not booking standard 5 star hotels etc that are meant to have some level of professionalism etc, you might end up getting treated worse just because smaller hotels etc do care a lot about their booking.com rating so they tend to treat booking.com customers better than others (my wife owns 3 hotels, 2 of them happen to be of a smaller size and in reality when they have a booking from booking.com they tend to do anything to please them as opposed to bookings directly from their website).
Re: How Booking.com manipulates users
#238I 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?
It's quite funny how they'd keep trying for a month. They could just email, but insist on phone calls
Re: How Booking.com manipulates users
#239Oh 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…
> They make it sound as if you lose Prime right away.
That might be the victim of taking phrasing from different markets. In the US and UK, when I've cancelled Prime, I immediately lose the benefits + get a pro-rata refund for the remainder of my subscription.
Re: How Booking.com manipulates users
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Market rate in Amsterdam is pretty low compared to the US salaries you see all over the internet. According to Glassdoor for example the average salaries for Software Engineer are: - US: $103k - NL: €45k For somebody who's moving halfway across the world anyway, I can imagine they'd prefer to look for a job in the US. Edit: The comments below are all correct. I didn't mention any of the secondary benefits since the i…
This is a misleading way to compare salaries and cost of life between countries. A much better metric is to look at net disposable income after tax, if you're focusing on the "making money" aspect. If you're focusing on the life quality aspect you'll also have to consider mortgage, car ownership and time off. Example: - In Netherlands you have 24 business days of time off, where you can take them from the moment your…
Looks like I live in a not so bad place afterall
In Italy we have 28 days off plus national holidays
Mortgage are cheap as in other European countries and if you avoid the city center you can buy a very decent apartment for less than 250k
20km from city center you can buy a villa for the same amount
Rents are generally a bit high in larger cities (Rome, Milan, Bologna)
Salaries in tech are not that great, but there's little if no competition, if you're good you can find good deals
Banks and insurances are investing in innovation and new technologies
You get to live the Italian life style
CONS
Nobody is actually investing a lot in Italy, roughly 150.000 people are leaving every year
That leaves a lot of jobs vacant but it can't honestly be considered a plus
It's not yet a startup ready country, things are changing, but it'll take time