
Booking.com agrees to EU demands to change travel offers - deng
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-booking-hldg-eu/booking-com-agrees-to-change-way-it-presents-travel-offers-eu-idUSKBN1YO18C
======
Al-Khwarizmi
I use Booking.com because it actually has worked very well for me for many
years (including things like getting me a refund for a non-cancellable
booking, which I wasn't really entitled to and I didn't expected to get...
saved me a good chunk of money). But indeed, in the last few years the sales
techniques are scummy as hell.

Go look at a hotel in the middle of nothing in the most off-peak season, and
it will still tell you that several rooms have been booked in the last few
days and there are like 4 people looking at that hotel right now so you should
book NOW! And of course everything is a one-time bargain. It's so blatant I
don't even know how anyone can believe all that.

What annoys me is that as I mentioned, when it comes to the actual product
(hotel bookings, their management, and customer service), it works great (at
least in my experience). It's far from being a scam. So why they have to
resort to that cheap, misleading sales tactics, probably hindering their
image, is beyond me.

~~~
lotsofpulp
booking.com is like shopping in Times Square, and gives me a headache. But
just like Times Square, many people seem to enjoy it.

Edit: in the spirit of Hacker News, what I always think about is how
financially successful booking.com is, given what I think is the worst
experience in the world for reserving a hotel room. I use it to remind myself
that very few people think like me, and making things to my liking (straight
and to the point) will get me nowhere.

Still boggles my mind that people prefer to patronize businesses that show a
high price with a nebulous x% off, rather than just a simple price.

~~~
thinkingemote
I use Expedia, it's the same. But it's always cheaper than contacting the
hotel directly either via website or phone. Always.

~~~
cardiffspaceman
Never in a million years. I booked a hotel in Hollywood, specifying a king
size bed through Expedia, and I had to go around with the hotel management
about it to actually get the king size bed. They told me that the booking they
got from Expedia was not specific. That was the last time I used Expedia. In
fact I won't use any of the booking sites because I don't need the
complication of wondering who is responsible for a problem.

------
bmarquez
Glad to hear the EU is cracking down on Booking.com's sales tactics.
Unfortunately, those manipulative tactics actually work.

I frequently have to remind my mother (in her 70s, and tends to believe
everything on the internet) not to rush through a Booking.com transaction
because "rooms are selling out fast." Or not to favor Booking.com because she
was given some "insider discount" (forgot the exact phrase) for repeat
business.

As the article states, plenty of rooms are still available for a given hotel
no matter what Booking.com claims. And that "insider discount"? I got the same
price as her while logged in on a brand new account.

~~~
Tempest1981
I keep wondering about this. In your mother's era, surely there were
"hucksters" or snake-oil salesmen. But now, it seems like almost everyone (on
the Internet) is one. Why?

Is it the only way to succeed? Or profit >> reputation? Or the faceless-ness
of online selling? Or the global economy?

What fundamentally changed since, say, 1980?

~~~
leggomylibro
Hasn't the internet always been stuffed to the gills with con artists? At
least, since the "Eternal September"?

Isn't it surreal how quickly society snapped from, "never tell anyone your
real name or where you live, never try anything that people tell you to do
without independently verifying the advice first" to actively encouraging
oversharing?

It feels odd to say this considering how nihilistic and distrustful the
current zeitgeist is, but does anyone else get the feeling that many people
who came online in the past decade or so are way too credulous and never
received the cautions and warnings that we used to give new users as a matter
of course? I don't think it's limited to older generations.

~~~
sansnomme
That's a good point. One explanation would be that social media profiles
suddenly gained value. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the "influencer"
economy. The expectation of having a LinkedIn profile. Suddenly it's no longer
viable to hide behind a pseudonymous identity.

------
aembleton
Add the following to your uBlock filters:

    
    
      booking.com##.soldout_property
      booking.com##.sr_rooms_left_wrap.only_x_left
      booking.com##.lastbooking
      booking.com##.sr--x-times-booked
      booking.com##.in-high-demand-not-scarce
      booking.com##.top_scarcity
      booking.com##.hp-rt-just-booked
      booking.com##.cheapest_banner_content > *
      booking.com##.hp-social_proof
      booking.com##.fe_banner__red.fe_banner__w-icon.fe_banner__scale_small.fe_banner
      booking.com##.urgency_message_x_people.urgency_message_red
      booking.com##.rackrate
      booking.com##.urgency_message_red.altHotels_most_recent_booking
      booking.com##.fe_banner__w-icon-large.fe_banner__w-icon.fe_banner
      booking.com##.smaller-low-av-msg_wrapper
      booking.com##.small_warning.wxp-sr-banner.js-wxp-sr-banner

~~~
apexalpha
Surely people who would add these rules are already aware of the tactics
Booking employs

~~~
aembleton
I'm aware of them, but half of my brain is still reacting to them and making
me try and make decisions quicker. Maybe others are capable of blocking them;
but I know that I'm not, even though I'm aware that it is happening.

That is why I have put together these filters. The social proof really works
on me.

------
benjaminwootton
I had over 1000 nights booked through booking.com.

Once I turned up at an apartment which didn’t exist (it was a scam listing)
and they were absolutely useless in helping us or issuing a refund.

I moved exclusively to Hotels.com since then who offer a free night for every
10 nights you book.

In this case allowing people to list their own properties on their website
without checks was really bad for their brand.

~~~
krick
That always sound like a damn impressive story to be read by some booking.com
executive. Sure, you are just a single customer, but 1000 nights is quite
impressive. To lose such a loyal customer over something that shouldn't have
happened in the first place is a bummer.

I guess I should try hotels.com someday as well.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
> I guess I should try hotels.com someday as well.

Just so folks are aware, there are essentially only 3 major OTA (online travel
agency) brands:

Booking Holdings: Booking.com, Kayak, Priceline, Agoda (and also OpenTable)

Expedia Group: Expedia, Hotels.com, Orbitz, Travelocity, VRBO (aka HomeAway),
Trivago, Hotwire, Cheap Tickets, Wotif

AirBnB: AirBnB and Hotel Tonight

TripAdvisor is also standalone (they previously spun out of Expedia) but their
business, based on recommendations, is a bit different than the others.

------
therockspush
This is the scarcity tactic straight out of Influence by Robert Cialdini. Its
a hardwired response that works on a lot of people.

Good book to raise your awareness about how you're being manipulated by sales
and marketing.

[https://www.influenceatwork.com/principles-of-
persuasion/](https://www.influenceatwork.com/principles-of-persuasion/)

------
Tharkun
Not lying about what you're selling seems like it ought to the norm without
requiring legal intervention?

~~~
pjc50
On the contrary, without legal intervention the market collapses into everyone
lying all of the time. The famous economics paper on this is Akerloff's
"Market For Lemons".

~~~
pas
Free market advocates usually point out that reputation markets could arise in
these situations. Of course the question is, would they, and would they
provide a better force to raise quality of traded goods than regulation?

~~~
perl4ever
You can have private organizations certifying things, but then how do you
decide which certification to trust? And what's the point, since the
certification is going to be tied to the product, not independent?

------
novaRom
I was long time booking.com user until they declined to resolve an issue of
dishonest property description. Their response was:

Resolving complaints after check-out is challenging and less likely to result
in compensation. In the future, communicate any complaints to the property
during your stay, so the staff can ensure the rest of your stay is
comfortable.

My reply was: ok, there are choices. I switched to Google Maps, check reviews
there, and prefer booking directly on the hotel/owner sites.

~~~
kioleanu
I have an anecdote about that:

I had a brief stint working for a hotel booking competitor and, sometimes, a
transaction would go through 3-4 hands, each taking commission, before
reaching the hotel and I just hated that.

This spring we wound up stranded in Amsterdam for an evening and I needed to
book a hotel fast. I checked booking.com and saw what was still available at
the moment and I found a hotel - a double room on booking.com was 230EUR. I
call the hotel, I tell them I want to book a room for tonight, total number of
people etc. The receptionist comes back and tells me a double room is 285EUR.
Do I want it? I do not. I went back to booking.com and reserved the room
there.

I can also say that I had a problem with a dishonest property description
(regarding parking) and complaining to Booking made them produce an
underground parking space in 5 minutes - albeit this was before checking in.

~~~
jorblumesea
Why this works:

Bcom and other OTAs negotiate discounted rates on your behalf, because they
bring in so much volume they can pressure the suppliers. Similar to how
Walmart gets rock bottom prices on goods.

Sometimes it's cheaper to directly contact, but often it is not.

------
jacquesm
In six months... Why they can't do this _tomorrow_ is a mystery to me, it is
not like they have to do something extra, they just have to stop being
dishonest.

~~~
krick
Oh, come on now, this is just stupid. Do you think their website code writes
itself? 6 month is very much a reasonable deadline. In fact, it's the tightest
I can realistically imagine for a platform with a considerable history and god
knows how many lines of code to change its core functionality all their
marketing strategy revolves around.

~~~
jacquesm
I can never tell with HN what is meant as sarcasm and what isn't, but
somewhere in their code there is a bunch of stuff that reads 'do tricks' and
you can just comment that bit out and everything else should continue to work.
That they can sell ignorant politicians on that is one thing but here we
_really_ should know better.

Put another way: if they were given an opportunity to do the opposite it would
be done in a day or two.

~~~
krick
This is nonsense. It sounds like you never really worked on any large scale
project with at least some amount of legacy code. I have experience with
travel industry, and I can tell with absolute certainty that there exist many
projects (much younger than booking.com, by the way), where disabling
something like that "in a day or two" is downright physically impossible.
Marketing and strategical issues aside, there wouldn't be a single person who
could apply necessary changes in a day or two for any amount of money. It
might sound crazy for an outsider, but that's just the way it is.

~~~
jacquesm
> This is nonsense. It sounds like you never really worked on any large scale
> project with at least some amount of legacy code.

Well, what you read into my writing is entirely your problem, but let's just
say that you are far off the mark and it is precisely because I have couple of
decades in IT behind me that I know that six months to _stop_ doing something
at this level is ridiculous.

> I have experience with travel industry, and I can tell with absolute
> certainty that there exist many projects (much younger than booking.com, by
> the way), where disabling something like that "in a day or two" is downright
> physically impossible.

I would hope that the level of competence at booking.com would be a little
higher than that.

> Marketing and strategical issues aside, there wouldn't be a single person
> who could apply necessary changes in a day or two for any amount of money.

I'd be happy to give it a shot.

> It might sound crazy for an outsider, but that's just the way it is.

Or so you say. But the fact is that all software ever written did stuff
because we tell it to and that disabling some bit of code is mostly matter of
locating it. Writing new functionality can be very hard and might take a long
time. But disabling something as simple as 'output ridiculous sentences that
pressure our users into buying' should not be harder than to locate it and
disabling it. If that has unintended side effects at the level that you are
suggesting then booking.com has other problems.

Finally, I'm sure that if they wanted to make quick work of it they could
disable that bit in the CSS for their website and make it pretty behind the
scenes at their leisure. Anything that can be displayed can be hidden.

------
nodemaker
One thing that I dont think people are aware is that Booking.com uses
extensive A/B Testing in the development of the website. This gives us the
website that is extremely efficient in getting bookings but full of dark
patterns.

~~~
tuwtuwtuwtuw
Why don't you think people are aware of this? Seems obvious that they do this
because they know it increase sales. Not like it was made up as a nice
consumer-friendly feature by one of their UX engineers.

~~~
nodemaker
I think the keyword there was "Extensive". Literally nothing can be pushed to
production without being A/B tested.

------
pkaye
> The company would also stop presenting offers as having a time limit if the
> same price applied after the time limit expired.

Now I expect them to change the price slightly in order to continue with the
time limits.

~~~
krick
Yep, the first thought of mine. I mean, it's not like something else is
intended, but I'm feeling uneasy once more because of all these EU
interventions. Don't get me wrong, I felt genuine joy and something akin to
being proud to be an EU citizen when I read the article: the intention is to
condemn something that very much should be condemned despite of us being used
to that being a norm. But all that "we use cookies" notifications also were
somewhat a noble cause, and it all made the web much less usable as a result.
Which, I guess, was obvious from the start, but it isn't obvious to me they
cannot fuck up whatever legal decision they are having with booking.com out
there. And it would be more than a simple inconvenience to me if it turns out
like that again. It would be kinda shameful.

------
serguzest
Booking.com is a parasite of the industry. It was widely used in Turkey as
well. Once, I booked a room through them but there was a problem with the
reservation (hotel's fault) when I called their call-center for help they
didn't even have a turkish speaking staff. I had to speak in English in the
middle of Turkey to solve the problem.

After awhile government banned them to operate in Turkey. That was a good
decision.

~~~
jiofih
Sure you didn’t call the hotel directly? Booking has customer service in every
major language (70+).

~~~
serguzest
I arrived at the hotel. They overbooked the rooms. It was late at night. I
called the booking.com call center. They didn't have a Turkish speaking staff.

------
nojvek
I absolutely love how EU sets corporations straight and advocates for the
customers.

Meanwhile US govt, “we’ll give you bigger tax breaks, just keep on growing
that GDP number, do whatever you want, walk over, track everything and
manipulate visitors if you want, just give us your corporate billions when we
run for elections”

------
atmosx
An interesting question would be "are there any decent alternatives to
bookings.com" ?

Someone mentioned hotels.com which I'm going to try but there must be other
players on this space.

------
scurvy
Unrelated, booking released a nice turnkey utility for tying bird
announcements to health checks:
[https://github.com/unixsurfer/anycast_healthchecker](https://github.com/unixsurfer/anycast_healthchecker)

~~~
hk__2
This repository is under a username that, according to their profile page,
belongs to someone at Elastic. How does it have anything to do with Booking?

~~~
devdas
It's someone who used to be at Booking when the software was written.

------
dazhbog
Next up, all those airline ticket websites like gotogate.

------
jogundas
Not directly related, but still a nudge thing: it is impossible to sort the
offerings by price (eg ascending) on booking.com . Am I the only user finding
this extremely uncomfortable?

~~~
smueller1234
No it is not. How on Earth did you get the impression that you can't sort by
price?

Mobile website and app, from just now:
[https://imgur.com/a/9422eyt](https://imgur.com/a/9422eyt)

~~~
jogundas
Have never used the listing view, thanks for the heads up.

On the map sorting by price is not possible, right? Or does my map view look
different from yours? [https://imgur.com/avyt3nr](https://imgur.com/avyt3nr)

~~~
smueller1234
I suspect you can only filter there, but haven't tried just now.

~~~
jogundas
Yeah, that's exactly the case. And filtering is quite useless in London for
example, where all the reasonable options are in a single bracket.

------
annadane
I really don't understand why companies insist on doing the scummiest thing. I
know, I know. Profit, but they must surely think before doing this stuff
right?

~~~
throw_m239339
Because the people at the top don't just want a profitable business, they want
ALL the possible profit and push the notion of legality to its limits. It's up
to the legislator to crack down on that, but since the fines are ridiculously
small and it costs more to fine these people than doing nothing, they do
nothing.

It's funny how sometimes I wish legal institutions worked more like
businesses, with processing fees on fines /s

But most generally a lot legal systems didn't catch up with globalization and
tech gigantism and are still stuck in the 20th century, which leaves a lot of
room for "legal arbitrage", the whole "disruption" business is built on that
premise. There is the law, and actual law enforcement...

------
taurath
Every time I look at what the EU is doing for their citizens and then turn
around and see the US has... removed all regulations on coal... I can’t help
but think US thought leadership is dying

------
tuwtuwtuwtuw
So essentially booking.com agrees to follow the law? That's good, I guess.

~~~
notkaiho
Yes, unlike, say Uber etc

------
Tempest1981
Interesting, either there are 2 camps on HN, or a nuance I don't understand.

In one discussion, HN readers are upset if Facebook is made to filter
misleading ads. "Let the market be free". And the slippery-slope argument is
often used.

In others, HN readers _want_ government to crack down on false/shady
advertising. Or the negative externalities caused by the gig economy
(Uber/Airbnb).

Can someone explain the difference. I don't think it's solely based on govt vs
private industry doing the control.

~~~
grzm
> Either there are 2 camps on HN

HN commenters come from all over the world and have various backgrounds and
viewpoints. Do you find that commenters always echo your viewpoints? Likely
not, which should be proof right there that there are at _least_ two camps.
Trying to categorize such a large and varied group of people into a small
number groups is likely going to be problematic, as is trying to simplify the
positions of the commenters you read.

~~~
Tempest1981
I guess it's that some discussions lean strongly one way, while others lean
strongly the opposite way. Sometimes there is a debate.

Here, so far, nobody seems to be siding with Booking.com. Small sample size
perhaps. Unlikely to be herd-mentality.

------
underpand
Where's their $100+ million fine though? Why aren't they getting fined like
the US-based tech companies?

~~~
h0h0h0h0111
I'm guessing their tactics aren't _technically_ illegal, hence their quote:

>'ultimately Booking believes in clear legislation and standards that apply to
everyone in the industry'

~~~
LaGrange
...which is pretty big. Back when I was with them (long time ago), a big thing
internally was enforcing hotel prices (i.e. the hotel couldn't offer a room
for cheaper). Basically there was the feeling that it got us a lot of bad
blood (and yeah, was ethically questionable, though TBH at least with the
folks I talked with — mostly IT, though in Booking you _could_ talk with some
C-levels as a grunt dev — that was a distant 2nd concern), _but_ if we didn't
do that then price comparison sites would eat us in no time in favour of
someone who did.

~~~
krick
I don't get it. How does that work? Why would a hotel offering a lower price
(on your platform, I assume) than you want give you a lower rating on a price
comparison site?

~~~
LaGrange
Other way around: if the hotel gives lower prices _elsewhere_ we'd lose out on
price comparison sites.

