Thia is actually quite annoying, because the one time I've used their customer services they were really good. I needed to cancel half of a reservation (booked for 2 nights, needed to leave early), and the hotel staff said they couldn't do that as I'd booked through a third party. I called Booking.com and they made it happen. Hopefully whoever they outsource to can continue the good work.
This may be one of the reasons for the uproar. The CS employees far outnumber the rest of the company, and the in-house customer service was one of the moats B.com had against the competition. To have them suddenly transferred to a third party is shocking.
It’s hard to imagine the same level of service can be provided by call centers tending to multiple brands/products at the same time.
I’ve worked there and I can confirm that the customer service was very impressive and able to deal with particularly gnarly problems, in so many languages and cultures. It was a very large part of the company. It was under-utilised to understand customers’ concerns. There was some effort to include them: dedicated product org, include impact on CS metrics in A/B test results, but it often felt like the ugly duckling.
I was thinking or re-investing since the pandemic looked like slowing down and travel stock migth take over but that move tells me unequivocally not to bother.
> Hopefully whoever they outsource to can continue the good work.
Run. Run far away and as fast as you can from this kind of move when you see it.
Outsourcing moves like this are a signal that the leadership views operations as a cost center of script-following monkeys. It won't blow them up, but it will consign a part of their organization to mediocrity, open to competitive attack.
Contrast that with the organizations I've seen who unlock the real value of operations: partners on the front line who feel the trends in their aggregate customer interactions, who are continuously, intricately involved in instrumenting operational data gathering based upon their gut feeling of those trends to drive rationalized product improvements. Software and data analytics makes it all possible, at a scale and granularity never before possible.
I’ve had the same experience in the past. I travel to Japan a lot and outside the big cities many hotels there just don’t have anyone who speaks English, which obviously makes direct interaction with the hotel difficult. Booking.com customer service was always excellent. Never took too long to get connected to a real person, and that person was usually able to solve my problem or at least find a good compromise.
If their service declines I hope a new service gets created that replicates what they do, but I worry that if someone was to build a company like this nowadays they’d just not hire phone support staff.
>Hopefully whoever they outsource to can continue the good work.
I've never seen this go well. My most recent experience is one of many where "improvements" were terrible for me as a customer.
Amerigas, a national propane company, did the same thing the year before last. When I needed someone, I'd call the local office and talk to someone who knew the area and the business and would get whatever question or issue resolved almost immediately. When they "improved" customer service by firing all of these local people and consolidated them into a (not offshore, at least) customer service center, it was a total nightmare.
We were in the middle of a backyard renovation that required burying the propane line for our grill and stove. I called the local office and scheduled everything a couple months in advance. When the appointment time came, I received a notification that it was going to be delayed by a week, which would also hold up my project at a cost of $1000/day to pay for an idle crew and their equipment. Unfortunately, between the time I made the appointment and the time I called to see if it could be moved back, the customer service "upgrade" happened.
Every rep was super friendly, but no one had any knowledge of the business and every call required about 40 minutes of hold time just to speak with someone, 10 minutes of conversation, and then another 40 minutes of hold time to speak with the supervisor who was more knowledgable. Even the supservisors didn't have answers and would promise to call back by the end of the day. Of course, out of the 5-6 conversations we had with that promise, exactly zero resulted in a callback. When the work was finally done, it was done without a permit, which could only be pulled by the gas company, so the project was on hold again until that was resolved.
In the end, I had to find a customer service VP on LinkedIn and send them a very polite note about the "unpermitted gas line work" done on my property. That resulted in the issue being resolved the very next day. Before the upgrade, I could have spoken directly with the local rep, who would then just speak to the local tech, and resolve things almost immediately every time.
In Germany this isn't a legal move. One of my former employees (global telco everyone knows) tried to do the same, namely moving the contracts of the employees to an other company. 200 of them started a class action and won easily. The company had to terminate their contracts (which means the employees are eligible for unemployment benefits, etc.) and had to pay a good severance. Something like (years of employment) * 2 monthly salaries. Some of the employees took the money and went into early retirement.
The Netherlands is complying with a European Directive: 2001/23/EC. In the UK, that directive is embodied in the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) 2006 (TUPE) regulations.
Basically, the directive prevents businesses sidestepping laws and contracts that protect employees' rights by transferring those employees to another organisation. Seems reasonable to me (if you share my view that employees have rights).
The thing is that in many countries of Europe (an maybe somewhere else too) we consider that a company is not only a way for the owners to make money, but they have a social value and responsibility.
Therefore you cannot just fire 200 people to hire another 200 cheaper, because that's a way to increase only company's profit but not society benefit. And if you fire them, you need to compensate them properly. Of course companies try to go around these regulations, it's up to each Government how to enforce laws to prevent it.
I did not say, that is illegal to fire people in Germany. Nonetheless as an employer you have to obey the laws making firing cumbersome. Laws, not made by slave drivers...
The ruling was they had to be fired. They tried to convert them to outsourced employees workibg for anoyher company, that's just olain exploitation since they do this to psy you less and save costs.
It is not illegal, it comes with strings attached because in general, in the EU the employee is seen as being the weak side of a contract, and is protected (to a point) against arbitrariness from the strong side.
It's not illegal to fire people in Germany. But just like most of Europe they need to provide some "just cause [1]", unlike in the US where there are a lot more "at-will [2]" employment contracts.
Left wing economist believe this is a great feature that makes lives much better for employees. Right wing economists believes this a bad feature that only protects incumbent employees and makes employers less inclined to hire in the first place or waste resources on workarounds like temp-agencies. Neither standpoints can be conclusively proven, so is mostly a matter of ideology.
It's weird to see all those negative anecdotes about Booking.com. As a counter anecdote, I've used them several times and they always seem to have much cheaper prices then the competition. I was also able to cancel my booking once without issue after talking to customer support. PS: Not in any way affiliated with them other than being a satisfied customer.
It's not weird at all, most forum threads involving huge companies attract largely negative comments (Google, Amazon, even Apple). By and large I'm happy with the services of these companies, but if you go by HN I can get my gmail shutdown with no reason or recourse and half the stuff I bought from Amazon is probably fake.
It's not just huge companies, it makes sense that reviews for anything usually skew negative. Because if someone orders a product/service that worked out great, not many people take the time to write a "thank you letter." But if something was amiss, the user will have no problem venting their (warranted) frustration. I would be livid if Gmail locked me out of my account for no reason, or I received a fake product from an Amazon seller, and would certainly let people know.
However, on the same note, I hate when I see someone blasting/suing Walmart or similar for what one cashier did to them. No amount of corporate training can prepare someone for a bad day.
I've used them - and will in the future - because my wife likes being able to take a bath, not a shower (long hair is hard to keep dry in a shower, but in a bath she just puts it in a ponytail), and curiously enough booking.com is the only site I've ever found that let you use that as a search criterion.
My first large employer was Best Buy, and at the time (and I believe still?) a large majority of their phone customer service operation was outsourced.
I will still never understand why companies do this. Your quite literal last line of defense (and sometimes first) with a customer is people that aren't directly accountable other than a corporate contract? Never made sense to me.
Also, the fact that they are generally the lowest paid is also bizzare.
It could be a confirmation bias problem on my end, I agree. I just know how much time some highly paid corporate support people dealt with "escalations" that could have not become that had the person answering the call either had more resources to help OR just knew how to better de-escalate a situation.
Of course that time is not really quantified officially, it's just a salary.
> I will still never understand why companies do this.
Specialization and economies of scale. Best Buy's core competence isn't phone customer service. A phone customer service can specialize and develop tools and processes that Best Buy couldn't. They can also serve multiple companies with a smaller workforce due to increased utilisation rate (a bit similar to why cloud hosting has become so popular).
> Also, the fact that they are generally the lowest paid is also bizzare.
It doesn't require skills or training, almost anyone who can talk is qualified to do phone customer service. I had many friends in high school whose first job was phone customer service.
So then outsourced CS should be better than in-house. But it doesn't seem to work like that.
> almost anyone who can talk is qualified to do phone customer service
That's not consistent with my own experience; for example, many third-world telephone CS outfits employ staff with accents so thick that I can't understand them. I mean they may be able to talk in some language; but they're not that good at talking English. Outsourced CS reps are much more likely to just hang up on the caller if it looks like it might be a difficult call.
Also, "qualified" is doing quite a lot of work there. Anyone that can talk (the customer's language) is qualified to pick up the phone and follow a script. But good customer service means reps that know the product, and don't need a script.
Having worked there, the sheer volume of phone interactions was crazy, and I haven't worked there in almost 10 years.
Regardless of the volume, it was very shocking to me how many situations that ended up being escalated to even the executive level were caused simply by the interaction with the phone customer care channel. These situations "cost" the company quite a bit in highly paid people time to solve. Granted that cost is never quantified, but it is real.
You also see this pattern replicated in the ISP industry quite heavily.
I have to wonder if they're identifying the right core competencies here.
A general-purpose call centre operator who supports 20 different firms knows how to set up phone systems and churn bodies, but they will, by nature, be unable to optimize around your specific customer needs and internal platforms. The customer-service experience will inherently be worse-- worse answers, more escalations required to get to an outcome, and potentially some resolutions simply not available to a siloed third party.
On the other hand, I suspect that's part of the way they've priced customer service. Getting customers ravingly satisfied with their experience isn't the goal, it's "just enough so they don't litigate or start leaving negative external press." The fact you moved down from "first-choice default go-to store" to "I'll also check Newegg and Amazon before my next purchase" doesn't really show up in this quarter's financials.
Just skimming through the comments, there is some negative sentiment about Booking.com. So I came to say, that over the years, I've used Booking.com numerous times, without any single problem. Yes, there are dark patterns (13 people are looking at this offer right now, etc.), but free cancellation was always free for me, reviews matched my experience, information matched the reality.
Sorry to hear about the layoffs, but customer experience has been great for me.
Booking.com is the _lesser_ evil imho. For one it shows total price 99% of the time right there on the search page where alternatives like Agoda show total at the checkout which is heavily inflated.
Their loyalty program (Genius) is automatic and simple too where's competitors resort to various coupon and other complex "discounts".
The reality is, we need a functioning hotel aggregator, and AirBnB needs a competitor. For me, booking.com for European travel has been overwhelming positive in experience, happy with the increasing Genius offerings. I don't use them for apartments however, I don't feel I trust them for that and prefer AirBnB. I also hope they stick around and maybe find a way to make all the cash they feel they can make without ruining what should be a very mutually-beneficial experience between hoteliers and customers.
Also positive experiences with Booking since 2005 :)
What AirBnB gets horribly wrong is hiding exact location of property. In some cases, 200-300m make all the difference, e.g. directly on the sea coast or 10min up the hill, which can happen when the road goes around. Or is it directly next to a noisy club or in a quiet street behind. Or for skiing, whether you’re directly on the track or not. Probably all my searches on Booking start with basic parameters and then immediatelly switching to map.
Also, even for locations I go often and know very well, and can easily find contacts of accomodations I’m interested in, I still choose Booking because it beats calling tens of different phones when single search shows what’s available for specific dates.
The business revolves around bedbanks contracting hotels and selling them to retailers and aggregators. There are exchanges, there are hybrid models and what not. That's why "2 rooms left" kind if messages are almost always total BS because every hotel can have more than one bedbank contract or the contract can be flexible and you can't know exactly how many rooms are left but you can query if the number of room you want to book is doable.
At the end of the day, what you have is multiple networks that somewhat overlap and provide API for finding and booking and Web interfaces for the high street retailers etc.
Making an aggregator means, you getting an access to these API and therefore there are many aggregators out there. The problem is, the margins are really tight at that point and you can hardly do anything about it. The money used to be in the high street retail where you can have fat margins and sell extra services like city tours, paragliding - that also have fat margins.
The industry have seen quite a bit of squeeze both because of AirBnB and the aggregators.
A good way to make a lot of money is to contract all the hotels in an area and sell the company to a bedbank like Hotelbeds. Now hotels are opening every day, things change every day so there's quite bit of people on the ground chasing hotels making deals and getting paid handsomely for it.
I've actually used booking.com recently to book an apartment that was also listed on Airbnb, and booking had a cheaper price (and better cancellation policy).
So sometimes worth it to see if the Airbnb listing is on other sites as well.
Have to agree. I've had an account for years and booked hundreds of properties all over Europe (hotels, self-catering apartments, houses), often travelling with a pet too. Never had an issue with free cancellation; places I've stayed at matched the photos and reviews; prices are generally competitive. Yes the UI has some dark patterns but on the flip-side it's also pretty good at what it does (i.e. making it very easy to quickly find and filter accommodation). For getting things done, I much prefer booking's UI to e.g. Airbnb's.
Same for me. The website has some dark patterns that really do suck, but their prices often beats the hotel directly and many hotels even refer you to booking.com
I'm not a happy user, but also not a sad or angry one. I do consider their service trustworthy, though their salesmen ship is a bit slimy
The only problem I've had with booking.com was when I ended up in a place that would have been bad for an AirBnb. It seems to be a similar problem to Amazon. I had the impression that I could expect the places on there to all be at least professional. It seems I'm not alone as everyone I've told about it has been surprised that such a place was on booking.com. It would have been expected from AirBnb.
The customer experience has been great but consistently decreasing over the years.
Last time I used them I think they pivoted into fighting with AirBNB so they took on smaller and smaller "venues" up to people (illegally) renting an apartment. The guy straight up threatened me in writing on Booking when I decided to cancel seeing how different the conditions were compared to the pictures.
From the perspective of someone on the front desk side of things, I always got a sinking feeling whenever I saw a reservation come through Booking.com. They must do 0 CC validation, because their customers were the only ones I ever had payment issues with, and it happened regularly.
Thank you for your valuable contribution to this thread about employment practices. I'm sure the CEO who fired people over pre-recorded video appreciates your praise!
On a more serious note, yes, the layoffs are bad and I am sorry to hear about it, but when I see people in comments posting about their negative experience with the service, I feel like it's relevant to balance it with my overwhelmingly positive experience with the service.
I worked as a consultant with a phone operator who were insourcing their inhouse sales (telemarketing) after having it outsourced. What they had discovered was that by outsourcing that function they had lost a large chunk of their overall talent pool that they could recruit from to almost any other function (especially sales of course).
A past company I worked for decided to outsource recruitment.
Went from having a dedicated human to talk to knowing me, and being aware of what kind of team people were running to having generic folks on the phone crawling linkedin profiles for me.
Who do you think was having a better success rate at finding the right candidate?
In companies where there are many roles open, someone needs to be aware of what kind of team would fit the profile to ensure success.
A couple years later, half the teams were using under the radar private hiring firms to help find talents.
Readit News
Thia is actually quite annoying, because the one time I've used their customer services they were really good. I needed to cancel half of a reservation (booked for 2 nights, needed to leave early), and the hotel staff said they couldn't do that as I'd booked through a third party. I called Booking.com and they made it happen. Hopefully whoever they outsource to can continue the good work.
It’s hard to imagine the same level of service can be provided by call centers tending to multiple brands/products at the same time.
I was thinking or re-investing since the pandemic looked like slowing down and travel stock migth take over but that move tells me unequivocally not to bother.
Run. Run far away and as fast as you can from this kind of move when you see it.
Outsourcing moves like this are a signal that the leadership views operations as a cost center of script-following monkeys. It won't blow them up, but it will consign a part of their organization to mediocrity, open to competitive attack.
Contrast that with the organizations I've seen who unlock the real value of operations: partners on the front line who feel the trends in their aggregate customer interactions, who are continuously, intricately involved in instrumenting operational data gathering based upon their gut feeling of those trends to drive rationalized product improvements. Software and data analytics makes it all possible, at a scale and granularity never before possible.
If their service declines I hope a new service gets created that replicates what they do, but I worry that if someone was to build a company like this nowadays they’d just not hire phone support staff.
I've never seen this go well. My most recent experience is one of many where "improvements" were terrible for me as a customer.
Amerigas, a national propane company, did the same thing the year before last. When I needed someone, I'd call the local office and talk to someone who knew the area and the business and would get whatever question or issue resolved almost immediately. When they "improved" customer service by firing all of these local people and consolidated them into a (not offshore, at least) customer service center, it was a total nightmare.
We were in the middle of a backyard renovation that required burying the propane line for our grill and stove. I called the local office and scheduled everything a couple months in advance. When the appointment time came, I received a notification that it was going to be delayed by a week, which would also hold up my project at a cost of $1000/day to pay for an idle crew and their equipment. Unfortunately, between the time I made the appointment and the time I called to see if it could be moved back, the customer service "upgrade" happened.
Every rep was super friendly, but no one had any knowledge of the business and every call required about 40 minutes of hold time just to speak with someone, 10 minutes of conversation, and then another 40 minutes of hold time to speak with the supervisor who was more knowledgable. Even the supservisors didn't have answers and would promise to call back by the end of the day. Of course, out of the 5-6 conversations we had with that promise, exactly zero resulted in a callback. When the work was finally done, it was done without a permit, which could only be pulled by the gas company, so the project was on hold again until that was resolved.
In the end, I had to find a customer service VP on LinkedIn and send them a very polite note about the "unpermitted gas line work" done on my property. That resulted in the issue being resolved the very next day. Before the upgrade, I could have spoken directly with the local rep, who would then just speak to the local tech, and resolve things almost immediately every time.
This place is a weird mix of Marxism and laissez-faire capitalism.
Basically, the directive prevents businesses sidestepping laws and contracts that protect employees' rights by transferring those employees to another organisation. Seems reasonable to me (if you share my view that employees have rights).
Maybe if you actually read some stuff, you'd know this.
Therefore you cannot just fire 200 people to hire another 200 cheaper, because that's a way to increase only company's profit but not society benefit. And if you fire them, you need to compensate them properly. Of course companies try to go around these regulations, it's up to each Government how to enforce laws to prevent it.
They're jerks, trying to force them out by moving them to a crap subsidiary without benefits, maybe forced relocation to another country (!), etc.
Firing people means paying severance.
They want to avoid doing that and for obvious reasons in many countries that's illegal.
I guess they figured possible lawsuits are cheaper.
American labor laws are inhuman.
Left wing economist believe this is a great feature that makes lives much better for employees. Right wing economists believes this a bad feature that only protects incumbent employees and makes employers less inclined to hire in the first place or waste resources on workarounds like temp-agencies. Neither standpoints can be conclusively proven, so is mostly a matter of ideology.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_cause_(employment_law)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
Deleted Comment
However, on the same note, I hate when I see someone blasting/suing Walmart or similar for what one cashier did to them. No amount of corporate training can prepare someone for a bad day.
Never had to call customer support, though.
I will still never understand why companies do this. Your quite literal last line of defense (and sometimes first) with a customer is people that aren't directly accountable other than a corporate contract? Never made sense to me.
Also, the fact that they are generally the lowest paid is also bizzare.
Literally cost. That's it. An example from my own experience:
UK Cost center, salaries started at £18k.
They moved this operation to the Philipines. Starting salaries of PHP350k - the equivalent of just under £5k.
Cutting the cost of salaries is much more easily quantified than the cost of a damaging customer service.
Of course that time is not really quantified officially, it's just a salary.
Specialization and economies of scale. Best Buy's core competence isn't phone customer service. A phone customer service can specialize and develop tools and processes that Best Buy couldn't. They can also serve multiple companies with a smaller workforce due to increased utilisation rate (a bit similar to why cloud hosting has become so popular).
> Also, the fact that they are generally the lowest paid is also bizzare.
It doesn't require skills or training, almost anyone who can talk is qualified to do phone customer service. I had many friends in high school whose first job was phone customer service.
So then outsourced CS should be better than in-house. But it doesn't seem to work like that.
> almost anyone who can talk is qualified to do phone customer service
That's not consistent with my own experience; for example, many third-world telephone CS outfits employ staff with accents so thick that I can't understand them. I mean they may be able to talk in some language; but they're not that good at talking English. Outsourced CS reps are much more likely to just hang up on the caller if it looks like it might be a difficult call.
Also, "qualified" is doing quite a lot of work there. Anyone that can talk (the customer's language) is qualified to pick up the phone and follow a script. But good customer service means reps that know the product, and don't need a script.
Regardless of the volume, it was very shocking to me how many situations that ended up being escalated to even the executive level were caused simply by the interaction with the phone customer care channel. These situations "cost" the company quite a bit in highly paid people time to solve. Granted that cost is never quantified, but it is real.
You also see this pattern replicated in the ISP industry quite heavily.
A general-purpose call centre operator who supports 20 different firms knows how to set up phone systems and churn bodies, but they will, by nature, be unable to optimize around your specific customer needs and internal platforms. The customer-service experience will inherently be worse-- worse answers, more escalations required to get to an outcome, and potentially some resolutions simply not available to a siloed third party.
On the other hand, I suspect that's part of the way they've priced customer service. Getting customers ravingly satisfied with their experience isn't the goal, it's "just enough so they don't litigate or start leaving negative external press." The fact you moved down from "first-choice default go-to store" to "I'll also check Newegg and Amazon before my next purchase" doesn't really show up in this quarter's financials.
Sorry to hear about the layoffs, but customer experience has been great for me.
Their loyalty program (Genius) is automatic and simple too where's competitors resort to various coupon and other complex "discounts".
I surely hope Booking is not going away.
What AirBnB gets horribly wrong is hiding exact location of property. In some cases, 200-300m make all the difference, e.g. directly on the sea coast or 10min up the hill, which can happen when the road goes around. Or is it directly next to a noisy club or in a quiet street behind. Or for skiing, whether you’re directly on the track or not. Probably all my searches on Booking start with basic parameters and then immediatelly switching to map.
Also, even for locations I go often and know very well, and can easily find contacts of accomodations I’m interested in, I still choose Booking because it beats calling tens of different phones when single search shows what’s available for specific dates.
At the end of the day, what you have is multiple networks that somewhat overlap and provide API for finding and booking and Web interfaces for the high street retailers etc.
Making an aggregator means, you getting an access to these API and therefore there are many aggregators out there. The problem is, the margins are really tight at that point and you can hardly do anything about it. The money used to be in the high street retail where you can have fat margins and sell extra services like city tours, paragliding - that also have fat margins.
The industry have seen quite a bit of squeeze both because of AirBnB and the aggregators.
A good way to make a lot of money is to contract all the hotels in an area and sell the company to a bedbank like Hotelbeds. Now hotels are opening every day, things change every day so there's quite bit of people on the ground chasing hotels making deals and getting paid handsomely for it.
So sometimes worth it to see if the Airbnb listing is on other sites as well.
I'm not a happy user, but also not a sad or angry one. I do consider their service trustworthy, though their salesmen ship is a bit slimy
Last time I used them I think they pivoted into fighting with AirBNB so they took on smaller and smaller "venues" up to people (illegally) renting an apartment. The guy straight up threatened me in writing on Booking when I decided to cancel seeing how different the conditions were compared to the pictures.
Why it should be a problem to move some employees to different company? This is happening often...
On a more serious note, yes, the layoffs are bad and I am sorry to hear about it, but when I see people in comments posting about their negative experience with the service, I feel like it's relevant to balance it with my overwhelmingly positive experience with the service.
Deleted Comment
I rarely use booking.com, and now I'm sure I never will.
People / Customers are not at the center of the company any more, but behind a wall. Incentives get shifted, and core business becomes a service.
Not a good news.
Went from having a dedicated human to talk to knowing me, and being aware of what kind of team people were running to having generic folks on the phone crawling linkedin profiles for me.
Who do you think was having a better success rate at finding the right candidate?
In companies where there are many roles open, someone needs to be aware of what kind of team would fit the profile to ensure success.
A couple years later, half the teams were using under the radar private hiring firms to help find talents.
A loss on all sides.
Outsourced teams will never care about their work as much as an internal team does and because of that everything else suffers.
Such a shame.