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How Booking.com manipulates users

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Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#261

Post by anouk_anca »

erikb wrote: post #120

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…

> Booking.com already knows that they are fighting a losing battle against AirBnB

Maybe I am wrong, but I though Booking also lists apartments for rent? At least in Romania, I know people that rent to tourists usually publish their offers on both websites.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#262

Post by sAbakumoff »

robocat wrote: post #247
sAbakumoff wrote: post #208

Earlier 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…

Designing good controls for the web is really hard. Spend 10 minutes testing any set of well known components, and you will find multiple bugs (especially if you know how to exercise the parts that are hard to get right). 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 pe…

I understand that it was more like everyday A/B testing of the calendar adjustment because booking seems to be very data-driven - developers work on teams that are assigned to the specific area of the web-site, or even the specific target groups(honey mooners, business traveller, etc.) and try new features/adjustments by using A/B testing.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#263

Post by ekianjo »

gobengo wrote: post #249
tallanvor wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

agoda.com is very good IMO at least around southeast asia. haven't yet used it in the West.

from what i heard agoda is the same company as booking.com

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#264

Post by daemin »

eugenijusr wrote: post #258
welcomebrand wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Showed me the same results (price wise, order was different) in Chrome Incognito on Win 10 desktop and Android.

They're still doing it. Screenshots taken literally seconds apart refreshed multiple times to make sure it's still the same: http://eugene.lt/booking/1.png macOS on a MacBook Pro from New York, NY (via a DigitalOcean droplet VPN) http://eugene.lt/booking/2.png Fresh Windows 10 VM from Vilnius, Lithuania

I think you've got the links the wrong way around.

But this is basic market segmentation, just based on the person buying and not on the product being sold. Hence why it seems more scummy.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#265

Post by Yizahi »

I recently discovered (literally) an apart hotel that had bed linen excluded and could be added for 10 euro per bed. This was a first time on Booking with this trick (common on Airbnb) and they did notify me about it in they dark depths of popups and expand to see more.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#266

Post by mtrimpe »

sAbakumoff wrote: post #245
hof wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

foreign (IT) workers pay a max of 30% income tax the first 10 years they work/live in The Netherlands

I heard of 8 years. In 5 years you can optionally apply for Dutch citizenship and if it's approved 30% rule is gone.

It used to be 10 years but was reduced to 8 a few years ago.

You keep the 30% rule after you apply for citizenship though. It even applies to native residents who haven't lived in NL for more than 10 or 20 years.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#267

Post by eugenijusr »

daemin wrote: post #264
eugenijusr wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're still doing it. Screenshots taken literally seconds apart refreshed multiple times to make sure it's still the same: http://eugene.lt/booking/1.png macOS on a MacBook Pro from New York, NY (via a DigitalOcean droplet VPN) http://eugene.lt/booking/2.png Fresh Windows 10 VM from Vilnius, Lithuania

I think you've got the links the wrong way around. But this is basic market segmentation, just based on the person buying and not on the product being sold. Hence why it seems more scummy.

Thanks, fixed it.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#268

Post by claviola »

hof wrote: post #232
koyote wrote: post #228

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

Not actually foreign, you just have to have lived more than 150 kilometers away (straight line) from Dutch borders for at least 2 years before your employment begins.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#269

Post by skrebbel »

gommm wrote: post #154
Jaruzel wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently used booking.com for the first time, as I was in a rush and needed somewhere to stay that night. The hotel I booked through booking.com was a Best Western. After the booking went through, I received a flurry of emails from both booking.com and Best Western. One of the Best Western emails encouraged me to sign up for their rewards scheme. Having liked Best Western hotels previously, I signed up, and downloa…

That's not exactly the fault of booking.com though. Hotels have learned that if they want people to book directly with them (which gets them more money), they need to make it attractive to customers. They can't really offer a lower price than booking.com and hotels.com due to contracts they have with those companies so instead they offer a reward scheme and exclude bookings not made directly with them. They also some…

> That's not exactly the fault of booking.com though.

> They can't really offer a lower price than booking.com and hotels.com due to contracts

See, it is the fault of booking.com. I'm not saying I'd have done it differently in their position, but their demand that hotels charge the same via booking.com as directly (even while booking.com gets a cut) is the direct cause of complicated reward schemes like this.

Re: How Booking.com manipulates users

#270

Post by skrebbel »

vmarsy wrote: post #140
eh78ssxv2f wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just ask TicketMaster. TM has been doing pretty well in terms of stock price (not the user happiness) -- probably the metric that they care about. So, I am not sure if that's the best example. Source: https://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chd...

I don't know if they will keep doing well in terms of stock price If/When Amazon release their ticket master competitor[1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-ticketing/excl...

Wait, because Amazon is known to do better than others on UX and lack of dark patterns?
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