241–250 of 316 posts
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.
To anyone from Booking.com reading this: I'll go elsewhere next time I need to book a room. Dark patterns may help profits in the short-term, but they're terrible for your brand. Just ask TicketMaster. It isn't just tech-savvy users that will catch on to this either. If an everyday user uses Booking.com, reads reviews and thinks their room will be great, but then has a bad experience, they're going to stop trusting B…
1. Priceline (this includes Booking.com, Kayak, Agoda, and others).
2. Expedia (includes Hotels.com, trivago, and others).
3. Smaller aggregators (such as lastminute.com).
4. Booking directly.
The dark patterns described in the blog post are used by everyone, including many hotels themselves, so you're never going to avoid them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
https://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/bldcontenten/...
To anyone from Booking.com reading this: I'll go elsewhere next time I need to book a room. Dark patterns may help profits in the short-term, but they're terrible for your brand. Just ask TicketMaster. It isn't just tech-savvy users that will catch on to this either. If an everyday user uses Booking.com, reads reviews and thinks their room will be great, but then has a bad experience, they're going to stop trusting B…
Than check on goggle and call them directly
If they say we're full, I tell them there are still free rooms on booking, if they want I can book there or they can give me the room and avoid paying booking
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"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.…
Why not use TripAdvisor? Not owned by Priceline or Expedia (yet!), nowhere as manipulative as Priceline, and you can actually compare between Priceline and Expedia offerings on the same page. The reviews are much better, rating system is not complicated/hidden and you can sort of ranking/reviews and much better UI with the new redesign. Disclosure: Ex-Tripadvisor engineer.
And, of course, TripAdvisor has their own issues that they don't really care to deal with (fake reviews are a constant problem since they have no way to verify that someone actually stayed there).
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 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…
Virtually every calendar control for booking a date range sucks. Airlines, Airbnb, hotels, whatever.
Having someone work full time on making an intuitive calendar control makes sense to me, and I personally have spent months on single components, and we are just a tiny company...
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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?
Part of being a grownup is doing whatever the hell you want. If you don't want to pick up that phone (and have a potentially awkward conversation with some sleazebag recruiter that's trying to sell you on a shit job you don't want), don't . This reminds me of the people that think women (or men) that don't want to go out with them owe them some kind of explanation. No, dude. Get some social awareness and move the fuc…
To anyone from Booking.com reading this: I'll go elsewhere next time I need to book a room. Dark patterns may help profits in the short-term, but they're terrible for your brand. Just ask TicketMaster. It isn't just tech-savvy users that will catch on to this either. If an everyday user uses Booking.com, reads reviews and thinks their room will be great, but then has a bad experience, they're going to stop trusting B…
Honestly, mostly have 4 choices: 1. Priceline (this includes Booking.com, Kayak, Agoda, and others). 2. Expedia (includes Hotels.com, trivago, and others). 3. Smaller aggregators (such as lastminute.com). 4. Booking directly. The dark patterns described in the blog post are used by everyone, including many hotels themselves, so you're never going to avoid them.
Being a little disillusioned about the world these days I would assume this has a purpose. My guess is this: Booking.com already knows that they are fighting a losing battle against AirBnB. So instead of trying to win it seriously, they go to make the biggest profit they can out of their situation by strongly focussing on the idiots. With idiots you have two advantages: (a) they stay anyways no matter how shitty you…
lol
Booking.com and AirBnB have different markets: fixed-overhead operations competing on a commodity, and owners selling a unique-experience short-term let. There's some overlap (owner-operated B&Bs), but they're insignificant.
AirBnB's real value is that they created a market, not that they're going to eat hotels. Booking.com will be fine as long as 2+ giant hotel chains exists.