This is why I sometimes hate a/b testing. I'm sure someone at booking a/b tested these things and saw an increase in revenue. The thing that these tests don't measure are very long term effects where people either start to hate your product and look for alternatives, or become so numb to the changes that the initial novelty effect wears off. The person who ran the test gets a promotion for increasing revenue during the quarter but the net result is a massive negative for the longevity of the product.
I have a personal experience where booking.com’s nudging caused me to reconsider my trip. I was trying to find something suitable to stay in Paris. Maybe it was the exaggeration of booking.com or maybe there was some truth, but at some point I shut down and made a 180 on my plans. I had realised that I don’t want to go somewhere where I have to compete against this avalanche of other visitors who were or were not snapping my accommodation options away. I am now visiting friends in another European city.
I had a similar reaction to Lyft’s “you have 2 minutes to accept this faster trip” prompt and emphasizing the faster, more expensive option first.
I saw that, balked a bit at the interaction and ended up taking a train instead. Not only was it $6.25 instead of $46 it got me there faster than Lyft’s fastest option. Including time walking to and from the station.
I wasn’t in a hurry but the in your face “look how much money people are willing to spend to save 5 min” helped me rethink my priorities.
I was amazed to learn that 218 million people arrived in France during 2019 (tourist numbers indicate 90 million - not sure how the two numbers correlate).
That is not a problem with A/B testing. It's a problem with the values of the company. I've worked with people who will say, "Oh, this tests well, but we don't want to do it because of [long term concerns X and Y]."
People who value revenue metrics over all else will still do shitty things for users even if they don't A/B test.
The problem with that approach is you now have evidence that the short term change will show immediate results and no evidence of the long term concerns. Given solid numbers vs somebody's gut, most managers will go with the solid numbers, even if the company has good values.
When I worked at eHarmony there were two things that we were aware of above all else:
1. Users hated all the advertising even if they were signed in with a paid account
and
2. eHarmony had no intention of stopping this because they valued the revenue from the advertising over the user experience.
I noticed that Redfin has started adding ads to their site which really annoys me. Folks you’ll get a sizable commission for connecting me with the listing agent. The ad revenue has to be a rounding error compared to that. Why are you damaging your brand by showing me ads for luxury vacations next to houses that I’m looking at buying?
> This is the tyranny of easy metrics. It's easy to measure how much money is saved by preventing cancelations, it's much harder to measure how much long-term business is lost by poisoning your reputation with the 99.9% of customers who had to jump hoops and dodge sleazeballs to get out of the subscription. But the latter could well be orders of magnitude money more over the long run.
There is also a mathematical problem of assigning events and actions to long term effects. The usual IT crowd unfamiliar with the respective literature will try to ab test and grid search out of the actual scientific part of data science. I had also fallen to that trap.
I agree but a truly nuanced approach to interpretation of A/B tests is rare especially when mixed incentives are involved. Ignoring empirical evidence is bad and taking it as gospel is also bad.
Companies need to balance between metrics and vision. It's easy to chase metrics and lose track of why your company exists. If you're just chasing metrics, what differentiates you from anyone else? What big bets are you making? Every company I've worked at has fallen into this trap, and it's gotten worse due to the tech slump.
Yeah-- I think blaming dark patterns on A/B testing is like blaming thermostats for chilly houses. A/B tests just show if one thing does more of something you're testing for than something else. If you're just testing for "conversions" then you're going to make websites like booking.com. If you're testing to see if users are more stressed out by one situation or another, or testing to see if expert users are stymied by some interface abstraction designed to make things easier for less sophisticated users, then that's totally different.
There is a grey line. I think only one room left is actually useful info. But yeah they push it too far. But most people in a company will be able to argue for themselves the info is useful and truthful so in their minds it's morally ok.
We had someone from Booking.com come and speak at a company I was working at a good few years ago to talk about their testing process. They were using the multi-armed bandit approach[1] of just throwing dozens of changes at the wall and seeing which worked best. It definitely reflected in the UX.
Can’t believe they are giving talks on this like it’s innovative or something when admiring. I’d honestly be embarrassed saying that my design process was to make shit up and see what happens instead of investing in UX design/ research professionals can run generative studies to better understand their consumer base and sentiments towards booking trips online, like Airbnb heavily invested and can be seen as having a world class user experience next to booking.com
“Dozens of changes” but without values who gets to decide WHAT changes are tested? Sure there is UX/CRO research but without a moral compass it is exactly how you end up with dark patterns.
It is also one of these things where the first to do it gets the advantage.
If you are the first to do the "only 2 rooms left" trick for example, you will get the full results before people get desensitized. But people will get desensitized everywhere, not just on your website, so if a competitor tries to pull the same trick, he won't get the same effect as you did. If fact, it may be time for you to roll back, to make competitors look bad for using the now well known and ineffective trick you invented. And if it works long term, then you get a head start.
Yup, this "poisoning the well" effect is real, and it's blatantly uncompetitive - which is why it's so important for regulatory agencies to step in and act fast and hard so that this "first mover advantage" is eliminated.
The problem is, regulatory agencies are slow as molasses and courts are overloaded with crap, which means by the time the process is done years later, the companies have long since switched to yet another sleazebag tactic.
Booking.com lost me as a customer for life after I fell victim to their sleazy tactics a few times. I have refused to book anything on booking for the last few years because I didn't want to be mislead into booking a crappy hotel by their algorithms again.
I guess my decision doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things, because they are still around and judging by the screenshots it's as bad as ever, and people still use the site...
I really startet to hate using Booking.com, especially because every time after using it, they start bombarding me with emails. I could probably turn them off.
Another thing that makes me laugh now: I often go to the same hotel, and Booking.com provides better rates then booking directly (no idea why, I asked multiple times for the same discounts). And for my favorite category the hotel has only one room. So booking.com constantly warns me "only 1 room left!". Yeah, I know, there is only one ;)
When you are on booking.com you have the most choices. Not only between all the inventory they have, but you can also browse Airbnb.
When you're at the hotel and you ask their rate, your basically committed. They know how much time and money it cost you to drive to a different hotel. So they can set their rates accordingly.
And hotels hate reservations made over the phone or by email because too many guests never pay a deposit and never show up.
> (no idea why, I asked multiple times for the same discounts)
Hotels sell a fraction of their inventory cheaply to resellers.
Also, they oversell, because people cancel. And when the hotel is oversold, and has to cancel a reservation, guess which customers get their booking declined?
I'm actually finding that to no longer be the case... just booked a hotel for a holiday and booking directly through the hotel's website was around 15% cheaper (and didn't try to charge me 50% extra for an infant). The hotel's payment flow for Amex was broken, but well that's another issue ;)
In theory, the solution in situations like this is to continue the test over a longer time. Typically with ‘holdbacks’ – subsets of users who don’t get a feature for a long time. This is easier if you have an app that everyone uses because with a website, it’s harder to reliably find holdbacks who are also a representative sample (eg it won’t work so well to hold back everyone using the site in a certain language as those people may be statistically different from the general population in other ways).
There are still a bunch of problems – higher maintenance burden, harder to iterate on a site quickly. Though I think you identify what I would consider the bigger problem which is that they cause political difficulties as a holdback can only really turn around and say that the positive impact people claimed wasn’t really borne out in the long term. So even at places that do holdbacks, the results may be silenced or ignored. If a holdback shows something continuing to work, that’s hard to get excitement about even though I think one should expect many of these a/b test results to not have long lasting effects.
Am I the only one who thinks THAT is a dark pattern? It would at a minimum, confuse me, if I had a different UI / feature set than my friend(s) - confused for being unaware why my experience looks different, and you better bet that 90%+ of users do not know what an A/B test is. At worst, I'm angry because they are getting a better experience and I randomly got shafted with no ability to upgrade.
The types of effects you want to measure would take months or years to show and are the combination of many different small decisions. Teams need to apply common sense thinking, empirical data, and the willingness to wrestle with uncertainty. All of that is hard, blindly following a/b test results relieves people of that cognitive burden
Many companies in my experience do test for these things. They remove old features and measure impact periodically, or run a long term hold out bucket, or some other such approach. The deep dark secret of the web is that there often there isn't a negative impact that can be measured no matter how much people try to measure one.
One of the effects this has on me is that I will use booking.com to find places (amongst other tools), but book directly with the accommodation. Only if the accommodation doesn't do its own booking will I use booking.com to book (about once every twenty places).
I find this kind of feels like a squeeze on one's attention.
Where every app or signup has this false premise seeded in a design that it alone is at the center of your digital existence and therefore you can do anything it takes to vie for and keep attention and engagement because the product may experience too much attrition otherwise.
1) Take color away from sites who abuse it and watch your attention and focus go through the roof.
Spot on! I think we have a similar problem with TV / video ads. Many of them are funny or intriguing the first time you see them (so they perform well in "one-shot" tests and focus groups), but after five views they start getting exceedingly annoying. A counter example is a State Farm's ad with a guy sitting quietly on a couch and watching TV for a few seconds; I find it very effective.
> I'm sure someone at booking a/b tested these things and saw an increase in revenue.
I know people who used to work at Booking.com. That's exactly what happened. From what I can gather, you're not allowed to make changes to the site without running a test.
While I agree, the problem is in the data-driven decision-making.
There is simply no good way to get good data for this long term type of effect. It's either going to be user interviews, some arbitrary score like customer satisfaction, or maybe a really convoluted split test (long ago cohorts vs new ones... but let's try to remove criteria so it's not apples and oranges).
If a company culture only values data in its product decisions, this is always going to happen.
Good luck fighting an argument against someone who has a supporting data point, and a revenue increase!
Real-life stores do this as well - make individually profitable changes (local maximums) that eventually make the whole experience so miserable that you no-longer want to shop there. Direct upselling is the most obvious, along with constant messing about with pricing and offers, as well as constantly pushing lower quality expensive own-brand goods, but the one I notice most is various cynically high pricing of non-core impulse items around checkouts - it tends to stick in my mind as the shop being expensive.
I don't disagree with you, certainly some "improvements" only have short-term positive effects. However, at least the A/B test was performed and data collected. Your assumption that it will eventually be "a massive negative" is pure speculation with no data behind it.
The value of a "brand" is really, really difficult to measure objectively, but certainly has an effect on your revenue. It's hard to know in advance what's going to tarnish your reputation in the long run, but by the time you can measure it, it's far too late.
I worked at booking until late 2017. I was responsible for all their infrastructure and tooling development until the start of that year.
We all hated the urgency messaging internally. Hated it. We felt bad. Many of us were reasonably proud of our product and felt this tarnished our ability to deliver value to customers. We argued with the product org and the CPO on a regular basis.
The reality is that the urgency messaging drove significant incremental business that they felt they could not afford to pass up. The logic that the CPO applied at the time was some pretty sporty mental gymnastics: "we optimize for conversion (looker to booker) because that's a proxy to actually delivering value to the customer." The idea was that if a customer books and stays, it means they found what they were looking for. Being stuck in a perpetual, frustrating decision paralysis sucks after all.
While I didn't agree with that framing, it's a touch less preposterous than it sounds. At the time, almost all bookings were fully refundable. So if you booked and stayed (you could have cancelled any time before the day at no cost, for most bookings), there's indeed something that went sort of right. Of course we also tried to measure CSAT in a number of ways (like net promoter scores) but those measurements are tricky at best.
In any case, one of the counter proposals, which I tried to co-champion unsuccessfully, was to add a checkbox to the account area to opt out of urgent messaging. The idea was that if you were annoyed enough by them to find that flag (or to be told where to find it) then surely it would also be better for the company to give you that and retain you as a customer? It was IIRC never tried. I was sad. It would've been a tricky to measure experiment, that would have had to be run for a long time. Loyalty measurement is hard.
Am I the only one that sees such urgency messages and then thinks: Well ok, then not? I'm orienting, looking at options, I'm just annoyed if my final list contains options that are gone by the time I feel ready to make a choice. The whole thing just makes me annoyed and look for other options.
I had the same with a guy that wanted to sell us a mortgage, he said: "Better decide now, interest rates are probably going up next week." one day later he calls again: "You need to decide soon." So I tell him, "Ok, thank you we will not be going with your service then, I prefer to take time and I don't like this pressure." The guy was almost speechless. So I guess he expects people to be persuaded.
Another example: The parents of a friend had their whole kitchen drawn and an offer on the table. So they want to take it home to think it over. The seller tells them: "What? No! I have to ask my manager if I am allowed to let you go like this, we went through a whole process!" So they actually sign! Same thing happened to friends, they told the seller: "What, this is not a prison, are you crazy!"... and they left.
I guess most people are in the "I will allow myself to be pressured into stuff I don't want"-camp. I guess those are the people that also cave under pressure when being social engineered for access to their credit card. Maybe we can do something with this knowledge? Booking.com knows who the people are that will cave, to a degree I guess. Well it would be difficult to separate them from the people that just decide fast.
> The parents of a friend had their whole kitchen drawn and an offer on the table. So they want to take it home to think it over.
While I'm completely with you for not letting sellers try to stress you into buying, I understand that they can't let the parents take the kitchen drawings home. The company put in bespoke work into planning the kitchen, and can't let the customer just take the plans for free and go hire another company for doing the work.
> I guess most people are in the "I will allow myself to be pressured into stuff I don't want"-camp. I guess those are the people that also cave under pressure when being social engineered for access to their credit card.
Yes, this is why a lot of US states have laws allowing you to undo a transaction within 24h and sometimes 7days if the buyer is over 55. I think a lot of the durations go up for items typically sold by a sales person (i.e. furniture, windows, etc).
I worked for a sister company. These features were A/B tested, their effect on bookings measured, and the numbers affected the bonuses of POs. They were thus incentivized to try these kinds of annoying tricks, because ultimately they work, or at least they do when their effect is observed only in terms of bookings.
I asked several times if we somehow measured customer retention, as we kept adding stuff I thought would have a negative effect in the long term (a customer would go through the whole booking process, only to never return because the experience was too bad.) We didn't. I guess it's difficult, I have no idea how this kind of metric would be computed.
The checkbox is a nice idea, it could help retain customers on the verge of leaving. It wouldn't work for customers who visit once and get so annoyed they never come back.
Also: a good portion of the traffic was affiliate traffic, like from Google Maps. I guess people booking from a Google Map listing care less since they land on the hotel page ? They won't be looking for hotels through the site UI, so they get fewer annoying pop-ups and messages.
So one thing we did was for (a/b style) experiments to continue to collect data even after taking a decision to enable or disable[1]. No new sessions/devices would be added to the experiment, but those already exposed would still be reflected. So if everyone who decided to book because of an experiment ends up cancelling or consistently providing more negative feedback over the months that follow, our automation could still flag that.
Whatever we may say about the company and its practices, the engineering team working on the experimentation tooling had their heart in the right place. They worked extremely hard and with tremendous care on trying to make sure the data presented would cause the best possible decisions.
[1] Caveat: if an experiment was disabled fully (doesn't work or buggy) or enabled fully, obviously the experiment measurement is now no longer clean because folks in one variant will now see the other. But for trailing metrics like anything that affected past booking decisions, this type of analysis may not be perfect but still carries some meaning as a health check.
Thanks for sharing! That is what I suspected. I also suspect that while this does increase revenue in the short term, it might backfire in the future. I hate this messaging so much, that I now dislike booking.com overall and I actively look for other options (such as booking directly with hotels). Searching for a place to stay on Booking is no longer fun: it is an anxiety-inducing chore that I hate and try to avoid. And that's from a Genius level 2 customer.
I guess this works for now, but as soon as a viable competitor appears…
I hope the feedback I provided on the CSAT form (worst possible score, more or less stating that I will actively switch to any competitor that doesn't totally suck as soon as I find one, specifically because of the urgency crap) helped support the position of the people opposing this crap.
Note that these may result in you receiving some higher prices by removing some referrer info. If you do see that happening, feel free to remove the offending config if the price difference is significant for you. I usually don't bother for differences of < $10 (price displayed on the search page vs the property page).
These rules would be a great addition to the low-value content filters we already maintain at https://letsblock.it, and I think a lot of users would benefit from having such a template available.
I don't use booking.com a lot, but would you be interested in contributing to the project and maintain this template when you find rules to update?
The first set of rules looks for elements in a webpage with a matching ID/class name, and removes them. The second set removes URL parameters, which are used all the time for example in referral links, like on Amazon. It looks a bit like &tracking-id="xxxx" at the end of a link. Those rules will remove those as well, providing a clean link without additional tracking that Booking.com uses to identify where you came from, maybe what ad you clicked on, etc etc
After browsing hotels for some time I've seen booking.com show several hotels start to sell out of rooms. That usually causes me to hurry up and book, but after several hotels showed full at once I got suspicious and checked my partners phone. The hotels still showed as available there. Dark stuff. Their website is otherwise pretty good though and I still use them.
This kind of behavior should just fall under fraud laws. If a person intentionally lies or misrepresents themselves for the purposes of gaining money it's usually considered fraud in most countries. This should be the same.
The problem is that there are a lot of laws that in practice only apply to not-well-connected individuals. When done by companies or well-known people it's considered good business acumen.
In the Netherlands it probably does (“oneerlijke handelspraktijken”). The main regulator for the European activities of booking is in the Netherlands. If GP were to document this and submit it to the ACM [1] this might be picked up. The maximum fine is a puny 900 k€ though. They already got a few of these and don’t seem to care much.
And that just shows the problem with regulating these large platforms - local regulators with their hands tied against billion dollar platforms. The EU should just step in and regulate these monsters directly and pro-consumer. Or regulators should grow a pair and try to get the CEO / board replaced (a theoretical possibility when they keep getting administrative fines in NL). That will shake up the stockholders enough to shake some sense into these firms.
i've started flying recently a lot and in this one particular circuit i see loads of dark patterns.
1. there was this snow season last month and the roads stopped working and suddenly the air prices skyrocketed. (as is now expected), i had to buy a ticket in emergency which i paid 4x the reasonable rate with all websites saying "oops, the fare has increased" trick.
2. many websites did the "just 1 seat remaining" trick and i jumped the gun.
when the next day i traveled, the plane was half empty.
what happens is, travel agents buy up tickets well in advance and then sit on the bookings, they either sell directly or wait for online portals to sell them.
these travel agents having purchased tickets in bulk then say "oh, the ticket is priced $100 on kayak, i will sell it for 95. lets give you some discount" all the while having purchased the same for like 20.
these people are willing to forego tickets because its more profitable to keep the prices high
It banks on the experience that many have had where delaying a decision has resulted in "Lossing" out on staying where (or at a price) you wanted. Much worse if coordinating with multiple parties going on the trip :)
I guess the most fair disclosure would provide a Google flights like pricing chart that shows cost increase and seasonal availability projections.
I try to make the decision independently of the point of sale vendor. The aggregator can help limit impact of these tactics by API contract with these sites that focus on price/availability without artificial urgency.
I think people really must not appreciate booking.com. My wife strayed from the formula, booked directly with major chain, used loyalty points to book a stay at a European hotel they operate. Got charged full price by the hotel, got charged for a number of meals she didn’t have, and we’ve been dealing with that since September 2022. When we have problems with reservations we made through booking.com, and post Covid a lot of hotels seem to overbook so we’ve rolled in and found we have no place to stay on several occasions, it’s just single phone call to booking.com resolve the issue. I don’t know what booking’s cut is but they earn every penny.
I showed up at a hotel at around 19:00. Website stated that their reception was open till 21:00. Nobody was there, front door was locked. A single call to Booking.com and an hour later they had put me in another hotel, free of charge. Cost of the other hotel would be paid by the first hotel.
I now do most of my bookings through Booking.com. It is very rare that booking directly gives a lower price (I always try) and the upside of guaranteed logging in that area is a big bonus for me.
- the info is correct. There may be a lot of small print but everything's there. You don't get surprise cash deposit requirement, etc.
- I dealt with their customer support a couple of times. Each time I got talking to a living human within minutes. Stark contrast with airbnb
- it's not owned by Ctrip that's buying everything travel related. If/when it is, I'm out but until then I think I'm a pretty loyal customer
Using Booking for years, recently deactivated Airbnb so now it's my only option.
What I don't like is that it looks like they are going as far as given jurisdiction allows. Depending on where I connect from I can see prices excluding taxes and possibly other dark patterns that I don't always notice. I wouldn't mind destressing the GUI a bit for sure
Oddly enough, this not being the case is the reason I ended up not using Booking.com for my last hotel booking. I had to go to the hotel website to find accurate basic information (like the size of the bed, which was wrong on all of the Booking.com room options) and ended up just booking the hotel while I was there.
Exact opposite experience. I will never, ever book third party again. If you book direct, a cc chargeback is always available to quickly resolve a dispute without debating Indian call center reps for an hour.
Booking.com's advantage used to be that they had actually good customer service, spread all around the world, no huge call centers in India. They've recently outsourced most of it though, so I can't speak for what it's like at the moment.
I'm about three months into my chargeback, I've had to supply additional documentation twice, and every time I do the hotel gets thirty days to review and respond.
It is not booking that does the overbooking, it is the hotels. It doesn't matter that I made the reservation in advance, pre-paid, and spoke to someone at the hotel the day prior to arrival. They probably give away my room to avoid confrontation with someone else who was overbooked. By the time I roll into town, which is usually 1-2am because I like driving at night, the hotel is locked down tight and the clerk is pretty comfortable behind his intercom telling me to sleep in my car because they gave away my room (yeah! they actually said that). So I called booking and 45 minutes later I'm checking into a hotel (they had to call several places and talk to people to find one that actually had a room because the computers kept seeing availabilities even though the hotels were at capacity).
This happens no matter whom you book with. The difference between booking directly and booking through booking.com is the difference between "sorry, sucks to be you, bye" and "there's this more expensive accommodation available for you and you don't have to pay anything extra".
If you book an airline ticket and get bumped from your flight, it has to do with the airline not whoever sold you the ticket. Booking in this case is your intermediary who gets you a seat on another flight on the spot.
I think this is a great example of how easy it is to change a ui in the browser, and something I think we take for granted now. Take any other tech and it'll be hard, potentially impossible.
Something that concerns me is that we end up with Flutter(-like) websites, on a canvas using wasm. No cool stuff like this would exist, no way to escape the ads, and eye strain from websites that Dark Reader can't change. I wouldn't be surprised seeing "dark mode" as an added benefit to a subscription one day.
(Yes, Flutter has html too. But if I tell my boss that it's because of my ideology for the web, that pixel's are a bit off, and performance is degraded, I might as well look for another job.)
It's sort of toxic socially though as devs write dark patterns during working hours and dark pattern blockers in hobby time, for other nerds to use. So dev caste gets usable web and profits from antisocial behaviour, while low non-dev castes are left to drown in the swamp.
You assume the dark patterns and the dark pattern blockers are written by the same people. I, for one, have probably written shitty code and badly designed UI in the past, but I've always refused to become a sleazy salesman, even back when I was doing customer support. I use element blocking all the time but I'm not going to put effort into these shitty websites and I doubt most devs will either. I'm also not installing blocking extensions for every website I visit.
Luckily, even non-technical people are downloading browsers with adblockers that come prepopulated with all kinds of filters, not just basic ads anymore. Opera has run a surprisingly effective ad campaign, for example. All it takes is for one of these browsers to take a more aggressive stance against these dark patterns. Brave already comes with a whole bunch of "annoyance" filters ready to be enabled.
I've told "normal" people about how bad Booking.com is, showed them how they manipulated you, but those people either didn't see the problem ("everyone is trying to manipulate you so what") or don't want to find another website. As long as the government won't step in, and consumers won't stop falling for these tricks, nothing will change. The technical problem is solved, but greedy developers and developers without morals (or the freedom to refuse) need to be fought by other means.
The problem is, nobody cares except for a bunch of ad blocking nerds.
We've been there before: I remember the proliferation of Flash sites back in the day. Our local legal firm had their entire site written in Flash, for what was basically brochureware plus a contact form. Presumably some lawyer's nephew wanted to practice their Flash skills, or they were taken for a ride by a contractor.
And this is why we need to watch out for that potential timeline where everything gets written as pixels to a web canvas and can’t be MITM altered/filtered/uBlocked
This is an interesting thought experiment. I'm surprised the CSS class names are so transparent. They must think they're doing nothing wrong. "Persuation" is about what I'd expect from people who downvote every spelling correction.
The Chrome extension is ultimately an enabler of bad behavior though. I wish someone over on Lawyer News would share a post about how they used their free time to put together a lawsuit against Booking.com for fun.
Also what makes this author think the numbers of rooms left are any more accurate or honest than the rest of the surrounding bullshit? Just the fact that they're numbers? Anyway you don't need that info. Is there at least 1 room (or n rooms if you requested n rooms) left, yes or no? It's a boolean. Available or not.
I'm often browsing hotels ahead of actually committing to any firm travel plans, so a message like "rooms available" suggests I likely have plenty of time to keep looking (and potentially going to another website to book), but "only 3 rooms left" might prompt me to pull the trigger earlier than I otherwise would have. Of course, I am personally convinced these numbers are totally made up and just ignore them anyway.
They aren't totally made up, but they are deliberately obtuse. Hotels are ultimately the ones that control the availability of rooms sold on the platform. It is a common tactic to only list a handful of room nights until those are sold, then add more. This means that all of their rooms always have the urgency messaging. The larger chains do this at scale and across multiple third party sites. So Booking isn't really lying, those numbers are "true", in that there are "only 2 rooms left" but they don't mention the hoteliers' smarmy behavior in abusing the urgency messaging about the availability or their own complicit participation in the lie-by-omission.
Yeah there's a bit of a disconnect between what we wish it was -- a useful indicator of the actual number of rooms left, for purposes of gauging the urgency -- vs. what they use it for[0], which is to create the urgency artificially.
[0] I should say "probably" since I don't have any concrete evidence.
It's not just the front end though. I used booking.com to book a hotel room with my wife and daughter, and it had a label on the booking option saying "your child's stay is free!" or similar. Turns out that her staying might be free, but the bed for her to sleep in is £30 per night, which was an extra I had to pay when we arrived. Booking.com is fine for finding somewhere because so many places are on it, but in the future I'll always book directly with the location through their website.
> in the future I'll always book directly with the location through their website
I've tried this with a hotel in Italy, and found out that the price was actually higher. I couldn't believe it. I actually asked the reception whether they were really sure. Yes, this is our price, they said.
I'm very much ashamed of this, but when the receptionist couldn't match the Booking.com price I made a reservation through Booking.com while I was in the lobby. Two minutes later the booking came through in their system and I got the keys to the room.
You can often get them to drop the cost if you say "if you're not going to match them I'll just book it on booking.com" because they'll get less income. That rather depends on the person you're talking to caring about the hotel's income though, so the larger they are the less likely it is.
It's common with many online businesses. On large online aggregators (booking.com, amazon, steam etc.), they have to post a low price to be competetive in a sea of other available option. Whereas, on their own website, they can charge whatever they want, and hope to get a price-insensitive sucker who didn't check on amazon first.
The charge was buried deep in the small print on Booking.com so technically they'd advised me about the charge. I challenged it, but it was a live chat with someone who clearly had no power to change anything. I decided I'd rather just suck up the charge and treat it as a learning experience rather than spend any more time on it.
Readit News
I saw that, balked a bit at the interaction and ended up taking a train instead. Not only was it $6.25 instead of $46 it got me there faster than Lyft’s fastest option. Including time walking to and from the station.
I wasn’t in a hurry but the in your face “look how much money people are willing to spend to save 5 min” helped me rethink my priorities.
Sources:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/436536/total-number-of-i...
https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/french-foreign-policy/tour...
People who value revenue metrics over all else will still do shitty things for users even if they don't A/B test.
1. Users hated all the advertising even if they were signed in with a paid account
and
2. eHarmony had no intention of stopping this because they valued the revenue from the advertising over the user experience.
I noticed that Redfin has started adding ads to their site which really annoys me. Folks you’ll get a sizable commission for connecting me with the listing agent. The ad revenue has to be a rounding error compared to that. Why are you damaging your brand by showing me ads for luxury vacations next to houses that I’m looking at buying?
> This is the tyranny of easy metrics. It's easy to measure how much money is saved by preventing cancelations, it's much harder to measure how much long-term business is lost by poisoning your reputation with the 99.9% of customers who had to jump hoops and dodge sleazeballs to get out of the subscription. But the latter could well be orders of magnitude money more over the long run.
Then why were they testing it, if they already knew other concerns would veto that alternative?
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1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
I digress…
If you are the first to do the "only 2 rooms left" trick for example, you will get the full results before people get desensitized. But people will get desensitized everywhere, not just on your website, so if a competitor tries to pull the same trick, he won't get the same effect as you did. If fact, it may be time for you to roll back, to make competitors look bad for using the now well known and ineffective trick you invented. And if it works long term, then you get a head start.
The problem is, regulatory agencies are slow as molasses and courts are overloaded with crap, which means by the time the process is done years later, the companies have long since switched to yet another sleazebag tactic.
I guess my decision doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things, because they are still around and judging by the screenshots it's as bad as ever, and people still use the site...
And watch booking.com try to tell you that "19 people have booked this today" or some such bullshit.
Another thing that makes me laugh now: I often go to the same hotel, and Booking.com provides better rates then booking directly (no idea why, I asked multiple times for the same discounts). And for my favorite category the hotel has only one room. So booking.com constantly warns me "only 1 room left!". Yeah, I know, there is only one ;)
When you're at the hotel and you ask their rate, your basically committed. They know how much time and money it cost you to drive to a different hotel. So they can set their rates accordingly.
And hotels hate reservations made over the phone or by email because too many guests never pay a deposit and never show up.
Hotels sell a fraction of their inventory cheaply to resellers.
Also, they oversell, because people cancel. And when the hotel is oversold, and has to cancel a reservation, guess which customers get their booking declined?
There are still a bunch of problems – higher maintenance burden, harder to iterate on a site quickly. Though I think you identify what I would consider the bigger problem which is that they cause political difficulties as a holdback can only really turn around and say that the positive impact people claimed wasn’t really borne out in the long term. So even at places that do holdbacks, the results may be silenced or ignored. If a holdback shows something continuing to work, that’s hard to get excitement about even though I think one should expect many of these a/b test results to not have long lasting effects.
Where every app or signup has this false premise seeded in a design that it alone is at the center of your digital existence and therefore you can do anything it takes to vie for and keep attention and engagement because the product may experience too much attrition otherwise.
1) Take color away from sites who abuse it and watch your attention and focus go through the roof.
Grayscale the Web is a handy extension. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/grayscale-the-web-...
It has a setting to just turn off all color, or just a site.
2) Add a firewall layer when signing up. I recently registered a voip number and an extra email account to check out for things.
It stops explosions of emails and text messages on my space of the same try to chase people into engaging in a pipeline.
It's surprising how few of these well oiled machines can do without being able to interrupt you constantly.
3) Notifications off, and checking them scheduled.
A good way to test any product beyond it is to silence all notifications. Maybe I have a habit to keep going back, or not.
I know people who used to work at Booking.com. That's exactly what happened. From what I can gather, you're not allowed to make changes to the site without running a test.
There is simply no good way to get good data for this long term type of effect. It's either going to be user interviews, some arbitrary score like customer satisfaction, or maybe a really convoluted split test (long ago cohorts vs new ones... but let's try to remove criteria so it's not apples and oranges).
If a company culture only values data in its product decisions, this is always going to happen.
Good luck fighting an argument against someone who has a supporting data point, and a revenue increase!
We all hated the urgency messaging internally. Hated it. We felt bad. Many of us were reasonably proud of our product and felt this tarnished our ability to deliver value to customers. We argued with the product org and the CPO on a regular basis.
The reality is that the urgency messaging drove significant incremental business that they felt they could not afford to pass up. The logic that the CPO applied at the time was some pretty sporty mental gymnastics: "we optimize for conversion (looker to booker) because that's a proxy to actually delivering value to the customer." The idea was that if a customer books and stays, it means they found what they were looking for. Being stuck in a perpetual, frustrating decision paralysis sucks after all. While I didn't agree with that framing, it's a touch less preposterous than it sounds. At the time, almost all bookings were fully refundable. So if you booked and stayed (you could have cancelled any time before the day at no cost, for most bookings), there's indeed something that went sort of right. Of course we also tried to measure CSAT in a number of ways (like net promoter scores) but those measurements are tricky at best.
In any case, one of the counter proposals, which I tried to co-champion unsuccessfully, was to add a checkbox to the account area to opt out of urgent messaging. The idea was that if you were annoyed enough by them to find that flag (or to be told where to find it) then surely it would also be better for the company to give you that and retain you as a customer? It was IIRC never tried. I was sad. It would've been a tricky to measure experiment, that would have had to be run for a long time. Loyalty measurement is hard.
I had the same with a guy that wanted to sell us a mortgage, he said: "Better decide now, interest rates are probably going up next week." one day later he calls again: "You need to decide soon." So I tell him, "Ok, thank you we will not be going with your service then, I prefer to take time and I don't like this pressure." The guy was almost speechless. So I guess he expects people to be persuaded.
Another example: The parents of a friend had their whole kitchen drawn and an offer on the table. So they want to take it home to think it over. The seller tells them: "What? No! I have to ask my manager if I am allowed to let you go like this, we went through a whole process!" So they actually sign! Same thing happened to friends, they told the seller: "What, this is not a prison, are you crazy!"... and they left.
I guess most people are in the "I will allow myself to be pressured into stuff I don't want"-camp. I guess those are the people that also cave under pressure when being social engineered for access to their credit card. Maybe we can do something with this knowledge? Booking.com knows who the people are that will cave, to a degree I guess. Well it would be difficult to separate them from the people that just decide fast.
While I'm completely with you for not letting sellers try to stress you into buying, I understand that they can't let the parents take the kitchen drawings home. The company put in bespoke work into planning the kitchen, and can't let the customer just take the plans for free and go hire another company for doing the work.
Yes, this is why a lot of US states have laws allowing you to undo a transaction within 24h and sometimes 7days if the buyer is over 55. I think a lot of the durations go up for items typically sold by a sales person (i.e. furniture, windows, etc).
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I asked several times if we somehow measured customer retention, as we kept adding stuff I thought would have a negative effect in the long term (a customer would go through the whole booking process, only to never return because the experience was too bad.) We didn't. I guess it's difficult, I have no idea how this kind of metric would be computed.
The checkbox is a nice idea, it could help retain customers on the verge of leaving. It wouldn't work for customers who visit once and get so annoyed they never come back.
Also: a good portion of the traffic was affiliate traffic, like from Google Maps. I guess people booking from a Google Map listing care less since they land on the hotel page ? They won't be looking for hotels through the site UI, so they get fewer annoying pop-ups and messages.
Whatever we may say about the company and its practices, the engineering team working on the experimentation tooling had their heart in the right place. They worked extremely hard and with tremendous care on trying to make sure the data presented would cause the best possible decisions.
[1] Caveat: if an experiment was disabled fully (doesn't work or buggy) or enabled fully, obviously the experiment measurement is now no longer clean because folks in one variant will now see the other. But for trailing metrics like anything that affected past booking decisions, this type of analysis may not be perfect but still carries some meaning as a health check.
Edit: formatting fix
I guess this works for now, but as soon as a viable competitor appears…
You can copy and paste them directly in your ublock config (ublock options -> My filters)
Apart from these, I use some additional ublock filters to block some of their tracking that I am not ok with. Note that these may result in you receiving some higher prices by removing some referrer info. If you do see that happening, feel free to remove the offending config if the price difference is significant for you. I usually don't bother for differences of < $10 (price displayed on the search page vs the property page).I don't use booking.com a lot, but would you be interested in contributing to the project and maintain this template when you find rules to update?
Hit me up if you have any question.
The problem is that there are a lot of laws that in practice only apply to not-well-connected individuals. When done by companies or well-known people it's considered good business acumen.
And that just shows the problem with regulating these large platforms - local regulators with their hands tied against billion dollar platforms. The EU should just step in and regulate these monsters directly and pro-consumer. Or regulators should grow a pair and try to get the CEO / board replaced (a theoretical possibility when they keep getting administrative fines in NL). That will shake up the stockholders enough to shake some sense into these firms.
[1] https://www.consuwijzer.nl/doe-uw-melding-bij-acm-consuwijze...
https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/online-hotel-booking
Booking.com, amongst others, gave enforceable undertakings that they'd change their practices.
1. there was this snow season last month and the roads stopped working and suddenly the air prices skyrocketed. (as is now expected), i had to buy a ticket in emergency which i paid 4x the reasonable rate with all websites saying "oops, the fare has increased" trick.
2. many websites did the "just 1 seat remaining" trick and i jumped the gun.
when the next day i traveled, the plane was half empty.
what happens is, travel agents buy up tickets well in advance and then sit on the bookings, they either sell directly or wait for online portals to sell them.
these travel agents having purchased tickets in bulk then say "oh, the ticket is priced $100 on kayak, i will sell it for 95. lets give you some discount" all the while having purchased the same for like 20.
these people are willing to forego tickets because its more profitable to keep the prices high
Could I just craft a POST request and book what I want?
Each of these companies are only allocated a certain amount of inventory so the availability is probably there, especially at the larger hotels
Additionally do they float the price and if so can I edit that also in the post request and name my own price?
If their interface has a fuzzy relationship to reality than maybe you can fuzz it your way
I'm not a criminal but I'm still curious.
I guess the most fair disclosure would provide a Google flights like pricing chart that shows cost increase and seasonal availability projections.
I try to make the decision independently of the point of sale vendor. The aggregator can help limit impact of these tactics by API contract with these sites that focus on price/availability without artificial urgency.
I now do most of my bookings through Booking.com. It is very rare that booking directly gives a lower price (I always try) and the upside of guaranteed logging in that area is a big bonus for me.
On booking.com I booked a place with a lockbox and it didn’t have all the required keys on it.
Multiple phone calls gave me no help and I found a way to effectively break into the building and I just did that every day for the rest of my stay
- the info is correct. There may be a lot of small print but everything's there. You don't get surprise cash deposit requirement, etc.
- I dealt with their customer support a couple of times. Each time I got talking to a living human within minutes. Stark contrast with airbnb
- it's not owned by Ctrip that's buying everything travel related. If/when it is, I'm out but until then I think I'm a pretty loyal customer
Using Booking for years, recently deactivated Airbnb so now it's my only option.
What I don't like is that it looks like they are going as far as given jurisdiction allows. Depending on where I connect from I can see prices excluding taxes and possibly other dark patterns that I don't always notice. I wouldn't mind destressing the GUI a bit for sure
Oddly enough, this not being the case is the reason I ended up not using Booking.com for my last hotel booking. I had to go to the hotel website to find accurate basic information (like the size of the bed, which was wrong on all of the Booking.com room options) and ended up just booking the hotel while I was there.
You book through booking.com, and upon arrival, regularly find your reservation bumped due to overbooking?
That’s not positive for booking.com!
Something that concerns me is that we end up with Flutter(-like) websites, on a canvas using wasm. No cool stuff like this would exist, no way to escape the ads, and eye strain from websites that Dark Reader can't change. I wouldn't be surprised seeing "dark mode" as an added benefit to a subscription one day.
(Yes, Flutter has html too. But if I tell my boss that it's because of my ideology for the web, that pixel's are a bit off, and performance is degraded, I might as well look for another job.)
Luckily, even non-technical people are downloading browsers with adblockers that come prepopulated with all kinds of filters, not just basic ads anymore. Opera has run a surprisingly effective ad campaign, for example. All it takes is for one of these browsers to take a more aggressive stance against these dark patterns. Brave already comes with a whole bunch of "annoyance" filters ready to be enabled.
I've told "normal" people about how bad Booking.com is, showed them how they manipulated you, but those people either didn't see the problem ("everyone is trying to manipulate you so what") or don't want to find another website. As long as the government won't step in, and consumers won't stop falling for these tricks, nothing will change. The technical problem is solved, but greedy developers and developers without morals (or the freedom to refuse) need to be fought by other means.
The problem is, nobody cares except for a bunch of ad blocking nerds.
The Chrome extension is ultimately an enabler of bad behavior though. I wish someone over on Lawyer News would share a post about how they used their free time to put together a lawsuit against Booking.com for fun.
Also what makes this author think the numbers of rooms left are any more accurate or honest than the rest of the surrounding bullshit? Just the fact that they're numbers? Anyway you don't need that info. Is there at least 1 room (or n rooms if you requested n rooms) left, yes or no? It's a boolean. Available or not.
[0] I should say "probably" since I don't have any concrete evidence.
I've tried this with a hotel in Italy, and found out that the price was actually higher. I couldn't believe it. I actually asked the reception whether they were really sure. Yes, this is our price, they said.
I don't even if this is legal in your country, but in Germany they ruled against it: https://www.thelocal.de/20210518/germany-upholds-ban-on-book...