
Bad UX: How Booking.com deceives clients - ivan_gammel
https://medium.com/@ilyadoroshin/bad-ux-how-booking-com-deceives-clients-5dc9e9485f32
======
jakub_g
Booking is the website with the highest density of dark patterns per pixel
I've ever seen.

Red texts hurrying you to make a reservation in virtually every <div> on the
page ("only 2 rooms left", "someone just made a booking", "12 people looking",
"Booked N times today", "You're lucky to see this room, normally it's
booked!", "You're lucky to see it for $50, normally it's more expensive"
etc.).

All of those texts are flashing/animating so there's a lot of moving things on
the page.

When you're idle for a while and switch the tab in the browser, after coming
back you get a popup urging you to make a reservation. Basically you're sweaty
after the process.

I reserved my hotel lately with Booking and I will actively try to avoid in
the future if possible.

~~~
justboxing
I see booking.com's BOT posting the same multiple jobs on @whoishiring's
thread every month. Ex: Sept 2017 =>
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148950](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15148950)

Looking at all the negative observations about booking.com here, I'm curious.
Has anyone from here actually applied to any of their job postings on
@whoishiring ?

How has your experience been?

The one positive thing I've seen is that they mention that they sponsor work
visas for their successful candidates (in Europe / Amsterdam location only I
think).

~~~
graton
I've considered applying but I didn't like the idea of becoming a Perl
developer to be honest. If they were looking for Go or Python developers I
would probably have applied by now as I think Amsterdam is a great city.

~~~
hackits
When I was contacted they where looking for over-all experienced developers.
From listening to some of their developers podcasts they found most developer
picked up Perl development and didn't have any problems with the language.

At the time was following `Damian Gryski‏` presentations how they used redis
for their cookie management for such a large web-site. Also was reading into
their back-end systems and over-all cultural inside the business.

Though was super excited about the interview with them although froze up
during the interview process.

Nice to see other people here went through the interview processes and had a
great time. I just suck at interviews.

------
mtmail
Try searching for a hotel room 6+ months ahead. Oslo end of February 2018.

"14 people are looking right now. In high demand! Booked 124 times in the last
24 hours. Latest Booking: 3 minutes ago"

"In high demand – only 3 rooms left on our site!" "Someone just booked this In
high demand!"

"Limited supply in Oslo: 3-star hotels. 4 hotels like Best Western Karl Johan
Hotel are already unavailable on our site!"

"3 other people looking now"

While all true it has no connection to how much the hotel might be booked next
February.

~~~
FireBeyond
Basically exactly this. I looked at Oshkosh WI for the middle of October next
year. Middle of the week, in fact, a Wed night, 1 night, 1 person stay:

"Only 1 room left!"

"Booked 14 times in the last 24 hours!" \- Oh yeah? This hotel in Appleton WI,
with 80 rooms, had FOURTEEN rooms booked for a random Wednesday in September
2018 through booking.com ALONE in the last 24 hours.

Screw dark patterns, that's outright deception, if not fraud.

(edited, I originally said October 2018, when in fact my example was for Wed
September 19, 2018).

~~~
breitling
To be fair, it said the room has been booked 14 times in 24 hours...not that
it had been booked for that specific date 14 times in 24 hours.

~~~
mikeash
To be reverse-fair, they know exactly how people will understand it.

~~~
mythbustah_13
You'd be surprised. Keep in mind it's a Dutch company, Dutch are very direct
and explicit in communication.

------
fizzbitch
I booked a room on booking.com a few weeks ago. There was an accident and I
booked a smoking room---technically my fault. But since booking.com is just
yet another internet middleman, their response is "you should have looked
closer" and the hotel, which didn't have any non-smoking rooms that night, let
me know there's no refunds for same-day online booking and told me to get bent
(after hours on the phone trying to talk to people). I did not stay in the
room, but they already had my money and I'll never see it again...

I really dislike how companies like booking.com (and others) plus physical
merchants enable "gotcha capitalism" like this, where each party points at the
other and they both keep my money.

booking.com: 'talk to the hotel for a refund'

hotel: 'talk to booking.com for a refund'

~~~
dyu-
``` booking.com: 'talk to the hotel for a refund' hotel: 'talk to booking.com
for a refund' ```

Yea I experienced this last March. Charegbacks are not easy for regular
consumers. Their customer service are trained to never give refunds (based on
first-hand experience).

You'd have to be a valued client of your bank to have a successful dispute.
And it is the only way I believe.

Both parties (booking.com and hotel) simply won't budge.

~~~
wikibob
-

~~~
user5994461
Europeans can charge back just fine.

~~~
emn13
Not always. If a firm wants to avoid that, it's not too hard to do so - it's
got to make sure that the transfer was customer initiated, because those
aren't necessarily reversible. There are other exceptions too, some of which
are probably regional, non-EU-wide. SEPA isn't implemented identically across
the EU, incidentally, so not just are the rules locally interpreted, the tech
is too; so none of this is quite as simple as it seems it should be.

And then of course there's the fact that reversing charges doesn't change
legal liabilities, so this isn't a protection you can rely on if the receiver
feels they're in the right and are willing to take (sometimes fairly simple)
legal steps.

It's definitely still a nice protection to have, since at least it places some
burden of proof on the recipient.

------
tudorconstantin
These dark patterns are the result of successful A/B tests. They don't do it
because they enjoy it. They do it because the data says the platform performs
better. And I know this because I met dozens of Perl developers at conferences
and I asked them explicitly about the FOMO spreading.

The question is: how can one measure the long term impact these dark patterns
have on future sales?

I do my best to avoid using booking.com precisely because of these dark
patterns. I love Perl, there are just a few big companies that are still using
Perl as their main backend technology and whenever I can I try to give them
money. Especially when they're getting involved in the community and are
trying to grow the ecosystem like booking does. But when their web site tries
to apply the cheapest manipulation tricks on me, I avoid them.

~~~
brianwawok
You let the backend stack of a site determine if you visit it or not?

~~~
yebyen
Why not? I'd be more inclined to give my money to a company too, if I knew
they were playing nicely in the community, and contributing positively to the
ecosystem of one of my own personal pet projects.

It's not a standard that most people will use to decide, but most people don't
love software... but if you do love your software and it's not leading-edge
anymore (or even if it is, I don't know much about modern Perl development and
I assume that is because it's unfashionable...) you want companies that also
love that software to do well, and keep putting their improvements back into
the upstreams.

------
rixed
"looks like some kind of ab testing bug or round-robin servers."

Definitively AB testing. The website runs hundreds of experiments
simultaneously, on a few pages. Although in theory all the experiments are
independent in practice it is often not the case and some bugs show only in
some combination of 2 or more experiments. Especially, in such crowded web
pages, even technically distinct experiments influence each others UX wise,
which can cause bugs of their own (like, two distinct experiments displaying
two seemingly contradictory messages). Eventually, the mix of experiments a
given user is subjected to can look a lot like an outright lie or bug or scam
or deceptive practice (especially when it's a combination of small dark
patterns of course), and I think that's what's happening here.

------
oskarth
I was booking a place in Budapest this summer on Booking.com, and there was a
specific area I wanted to be in. I searched for that area and found a place
that was marked as having a certain location that was perfect for me. Upon
arriving, it turns out this was just where their "main office" was, and the
specific apartment I was renting was situated in a different area, several
tram rides away. I tried to get my money back for this clear deception but to
no avail.

Their excuse? The real address was available to me in my _confirmation email_
, i.e. after I had already paid. If you can't trust their map, it serves no
purpose whatsoever. A few weeks later I was trying to find the listing but it
appears to have been removed.

I'd switch in an instant if someone built a useful alternative to Booking.
Agoda is the same deal as far as I can tell, and it is owned by the same
parent company.

EDIT: Airbnb is great - I use it a lot, more than Booking - but sometimes you
just want a more professionally run hotel, hostel or apartment. In fact, after
cancelling that place I ended up booking a studio with Airbnb at the last
minute.

~~~
chrisper
When you reserve with Booking.com, they don't even charge your credit card. At
least that's how it has been the last 100 times when I used them. How come it
was different this time?

~~~
lathiat
They offer both types of bookings. Some are paid online immediately, others
are paid at the hotel in checkout.

Generally speaking if it's not a flexible/refundable rate you will probably
pay online from what i noticed but don't quote me on that.

------
minimaximus
I've been burned by booking.com's 'Free Cancellation' UI shenanigans a couple
of times. In both instances I swear that I saw the free cancellation banner
next to the room I'm reserving. Instantly after reservation, I receive an
email saying 'non-refundable', or $400 fee for cancellation. The first time I
thought I made a mistake, but when my wife saw the same thing... well,
something fishy is going on.

~~~
dyu-
It is deception at it's finest. My siblings experienced this first hand and I
told them, no more booking.com, ever.

Also, the cancellation was 1 month away from actual booking but they do not
care. They just want to decieve (scam?) you and get your money.

Luckily, the bank sided with us. The dispute is a sure process as long as they
value you as a customer.

~~~
Udik
Hm hm. Chrome extension that takes a screenshot of every page you visit on
certain sites (and adds the hashes to a blockchain for further proof).

------
usr1106
Using the online travel gangsters has been the worst part of travelling for
years. Extorting business practices against small hotels, high fees, and when
you check the small print/certificate you understand that profits go to a tax
evasion paradise. If something goes wrong for whatever reason their so-called
customer service is of no help whatsoever. Only one room left is not even
technically lying. It just means that small hotels give rooms only one by one
to the extorters, hoping to sell as many of them via a cheaper channel.
Unfortunately it is not easy to find a small hotel directly on the web, search
results a completely polluted by booking sites. In that context dark patterns
on their sites are just a minor detail, I don't expect any better from
companies with such ethics.

------
moondev
The only time I used booking.com, the hotel wouldn't honor my reservation,
even though I showed them the booking confirmation number. They were sold out
and simply said "not my problem, third party and we never got it". Who knows
who's fault it was but with something as crucial as a hotel in a specific
location/date I tend to just book through the actual hotel site from now on.

~~~
lucaspiller
If you are booking with a chain you usually get better perks by booking
through their site, especially if you are a loyalty member (even the most
basic level often gives perks so it's worth signing up). Some are even cheaper
by booking directly (e.g. Accor group).

The place where booking.com really shines is for individual hotels and smaller
properties like bed and breakfasts - often they only use one provider and it's
usually booking.com/Priceline (at least here in Europe). You could just call
them directly once you've found it though...

~~~
petre
They're cheaper directly because booking.com takes 15 or 18% comission.

~~~
Simon_says
You would think so, but I travel a lot and it's been extremely rare that the
price in cash at the hotel is less than Booking.com's price.

------
aluhut
I gave up online vacation reservations this year. This is the second time I
wasted hours on several portals before I've found one that worked in a decent
way and had a useful choice. When I've finally found a destination, I tried to
book the trips I've found and they all have been "sold out". When I tried the
same criteria again, I got the same results but more expensive. Again sold out
when I clicked any of them. Did it one more time, same results.

Went to a travel agency in a mall nearby. Got a better price and even some
useful hints as where to go to when I'm there.

I'll be back when you have that AI travel agent...

~~~
amag
Given the state of affairs with online reservations, going to your local
travel agency is is undeniably the future. Oh the irony.

~~~
preinheimer
I tried to book my honeymoon with a travel agent. We figured we could use some
good advice, and (at least in canada) when you book with them you get some
bonus insurance.

They basically told me it wasn't worth their time unless we were booking a
cruise.

~~~
aluhut
> They basically told me it wasn't worth their time unless we were booking a
> cruise.

How is this even possible? Did you take away their time? Were there people
waiting who would book a cruise?

My experience above is from Germany.

------
pingec
Even as a host using booking.com I dislike many shady things they put you
through but at the end of the day these dark patterns must work in practice as
there is no other platform that delivers even closely as many guests as
booking.com.

~~~
mandarg
What are some alternative sites that send you guests? I have used hotels.com
sometimes (has dark patterns too, but fewer of them). I would definitely
prefer using something that was more...sensible.

I would naïvely think that booking directly with hotels would be cheapest, but
I have definitely seen deals on these aggregators that were unavailable on the
same hotel's own site – which is the only reason I even think about using
them.

~~~
amag
Oh, don't get me started on hotels.com. It's seems to be quite common for
hotels.com to sell you the room _with_ breakfast (in countries where breakfast
typically is included) but when you get the confirmation, there's no mention
of any breakfast and the booking code is for a room without breakfast. So when
you arrive at the hotel and they say: "Nope, breakfast is not included" you
have nothing to prove that you booked _with_ breakfast, in fact, to the hotel
your reservation is the very definition of a no-breakfast reservation.

This happened to me and we had to run through a lot of hoops to eventually get
hotels.com to reimburse us. It helped that we had called them for parts of our
reservation because all calls are recorded and the operator clearly stated
that breakfast was included.

The same thing happened to my father who was a bit more alert and noted the
missing breakfast from the confirmation. He then had to call them something
like five times for a confirmation that _actually_ said breakfast was
included. Each time they sent him a new reservation but it wasn't until the
last call it did say breakfast was included.

------
slipstream-
What do you expect, from an entity that advertises via spreading malware/PUPs?

[https://blog.malwarebytes.com/detections/pup-optional-
bookin...](https://blog.malwarebytes.com/detections/pup-optional-booking/)

~~~
exikyut
" _Potentially_ Unwanted Program"? That's a polite way of putting it.

> PUP.Optional.Booking

> This is the detection for a family of potentially unwanted programs (PUPs)
> that show advertisements hailing from the booking.com domain. This PUP
> predominantly uses scheduled tasks to trigger the advertisements.

Wouldn't mind seeing that looks like. Regardless, "scheduled tasks" definitely
sounds like unsolicited EXE execution, which is firmly on the "no thanks" side
of shady.

~~~
slipstream-
as InfoSec Taylor Swift once said, "potentially unwanted programs" are just
malware with a legal team.

------
dbatten
This happened to me with Expedia. They advertised a lower rate on a different
room at the hotel I was looking at... Didn't catch until after I checked out
that the advertisement was for a different day than my search results.
(Because obviously I'm just as happy to stay at a random hotel just off the
interstate in rural Ohio a week after my trip as during it?)

Thankfully, Expedia has good customer service and fixed things for me, even
though it was not a cancelable reservation.

~~~
bdcravens
Same issue. Went up to Dallas for a few days to avoid Harvey floods, and the
$99 site rate increased to $147 on the weekends.

------
clamprecht
It's a FOMO machine.

I use it to find places, filtering by "wifi available", and then contact them
directly.

~~~
JetSpiegel
Basically this. I use booking as the yellow pages, you search for the hotels
you want and give them a call directly.

Cheaper prices and no cuts for parasite middleman.

~~~
samastur
So parasite middleman is for you a company that enables you to find those
hotels in the first place?

Do you find all middleman parasitic or is there something else booking should
do to stop being in this group?

~~~
clamprecht
I've had some bad experiences with third parties (middlemen) when booking
hotels online. Anytime there is a problem, the other two parties point the
fingers at each other, and you, the customer, is left to deal with it. I don't
find all middlemen parasitic, but in this case, it's less risk for me to deal
directly.

Sometimes only booking.com has rooms and the hotel site itself doesn't, and in
that case, I will still use booking.com.

------
Kiro
Can someone actually comment on the issue in the article instead of dropping
random anecdotes? Sounds like a bug rather than a dark pattern?

EDIT: The submission title said something about Booking.com using dark
patterns but it has been changed now.

------
dchichkov
I think that I've faced a similar issue with a non-cancelable room. The date
was changed into a random one.

Not a big loss, but I've stopped using their services since.

~~~
CareerUnlocks
I’ve noticed they switch between DD/MM/YYYY and MM/DD/YYYY in the date boxes
and so it’ll look right but be there wrong date due to the alternative format

------
Fjolsvith
My wife and I use Windham Group, and use their app. Very nice booking
experience. And if we're driving late we can push a button on the app and a
reservation specialist finds us the nearest available room and calls us with
the booking. The app also gives a maps link.

------
matthewmacleod
Obviously I'm an odd one out – I quite like booking.com. Sure, it'd probably
be a bit nicer if it didn't have all the flashing red shit everywhere, but
broadly speaking I've found it's pretty useful for locating hotels and getting
the details in a consistent manner. I've never had a booking made through it
cancelled or anything like that, and the prices haven't been obviously
inflated versus those offered booking directly with the hotel.

Obviously it sounds like other have had a worse experience…

------
true_tuna
How about calling it malicious UX? Bad is not a strong enough word. Or maybe
hateful, or exploitive.

------
Freak_NL
What are the realistic alternatives to Booking.com though?

When I'm planning a journey the reviews and search by area features of
Booking.com make it possible for me to gain some understanding of going rates
and hotel quality, but the process leaves a lot to be desired for both me, the
customer, and the hotel.

I can search with Booking.com yet book directly with the hotel, but that means
I can't review the property and help others.

------
assafmo
One time we canceled a hotel with free cancelation but the hotel chared us
1100$ anyway. (why the hell did the hotel had our credit card details?!) We
contacted booking.com and asked to get a refund, and they said we are right
but it takes time... So we contacted Mastercard and said that booking.com
won't refund us. Mastercard checked with the hotel and when they didn't get a
good enough answer from them they refunded us 1100$. Then booking.com followed
up on our earlier request for refund and also didn't get a good enough answer
from the hotel so they refunded us 1100$ from their money...

Sometime after that we got charged 1100$ by Mastercard... I think that
booking.com got a complaint from the hotel that Mastercard reverted the charge
and then opened a dispute with Mastercard to get their 1100$ that they
refunded us...

At least now I know to just go and tell Mastercard every time I get a little
resistance from some business who won't rightfully refund me.

------
joeframbach
Could someone explain to me any reason why it would be better to book through
any third party instead of directly through the hotel?

~~~
aianus
It's frequently cheaper through the aggregator. The aggregators force the
hotels to sign a contract stating that they won't sell cheaper on their own
site and since you seem specifically interested in their hotel (maybe you're a
business traveler with a points card) they have less reason to compete on
price.

~~~
mythbustah_13
This is no longer true anymore as EU regulations recently forbid that.

------
cateye
Besides dark patterns, there is something else that annoys me even more: the
cluttered and inconsistency of the UI itself.

It is not possible or really not intuitive to do something like entering a
couple of places you would potentially want to go to, select 2 adults and 3
children, filter them on criteria like free parking, free wifi and sort the
results on price.

While this sounds like a pretty common pattern, the experience is really bad.
Sorting is messed up by sponsored hotels, not consistent on the price of a
room or the room I configured or the price is the cheapest room without
wifi...

On top of it, they run all kind of experiments. This causes more confusion for
me, because I just learned to do something in a specific way.

I still use it, not because of the great usability or great service but
because there are no real better alternatives.

------
dennisjauntify
Ha. As someone on the other side of this, we used to spoon feed availability
to OTAs that do this. Set up a competitive price, and it worked wonders. Now
they just took it to another level, which would make that technique work even
better, Booking sites never know the exact availability of any property. It
could look like only a couple left, but there could be blocks, cancellations,
who knows why the hotel decided not to give all the rooms. That is part of the
inspiration behind priceling getting hotelnija and expedia releasing its own.
Even hostelworld had their own PMS for years. So dont believe when there is
only a few left.

------
feelin_googley
The annoyances described by the author sounded like they relied on Javascript
and graphics.

This made me wonder if the site relies on Javascript or graphics.

As an experiment, I just wrote a small POC command line script for

    
    
      1. searching for hotels by keyword
    
      2. obtaining the hotel ids
    
      3. searching availability using the hotel id
    
      4. printing prices, etc.
    

If anyone wants this I will share it.

Easily adaptable to bulk searching, producing CSV, etc.

Again, this site _does not_ require Javascript or graphics for getting price
lists.

Easy to avoid the "dark patterns" and just retrieve the desired data.

I use a text-only browser.

------
Freestyler_3
I just did a booking through them and noticed that the price changed per the
selected language, the difference was 124 vs 169 (eng).

Booking in english gives you quite the disadvantage.

------
sschueller
I have heard from some people that booking.com takes such a high percentage
that you can call some hotels and get a better price going directly.

------
praulv
Sadly I fell for the various tricks described here and hastily booked a room
on holiday recently.

Having said that, my family of 4 adults with different credit cards made
excellent use of their generous £15 referral reward kicking back both ways to
save a significant amount on the total booking cost.

------
k__
I tried to book a holiday last year and had the feeling basically all booking
sites are broken.

No where did anyone show me the real price of what I was buying.

------
chewz
booking.com is a deliberate scam. Their business model is to lock customer
into reservation that he would have to cancel and booking.com will keep the
money.

Booking.com puts a lot of pressure (through dark UI patterns) to make a
reservation ASAP promising that you can cancel at any time. In many cases
cancellation simply isn't possible - too late etc.. They are just keeping the
money and this is exactly what their business model is after.

~~~
rixed
No this is ridiculously far from the truth.

They make an awfull lot of money selling actual room nights (think Google-
scale a lot, per employee, although the money culture in both firms are
opposite to each other), and actually do cancel bookings and even sometime
refund non cancelable ones. They are definitively harsh on the business side,
especially when negotiating commissions with hotels, especially since it's
always easy to justify ("that's for our users"). But this is not a scam.

You might have had a bad experience. No amount of money spent on customer care
will ever balance out a big firm being 100% money driven as opposed to
reputation driven, and fundamentally not caring for an individual user. So yes
when you are that one user who felt through the cracks it feels bad indeed.

~~~
dyu-
```No this is ridiculously far from the truth.```

Easy to say for someone who haven't experienced their deception first hand.

GP is correct. That is part of their scheme to extract more revenue.

~~~
rixed
I had actually. Once, because of their website insisting on showing dates for
which there are availabilities, I ended up booking for the wrong days,
something that I could not cancel. At the time I though I made the mistake so
didn't complain. Only later did I realize that's how the website works (they
force a date in the web session because it converts better). Had I given them
a call at the time, chances are that they would have refund me, but this also
I learnt only later.

I've also been "stolen" a car booking on rentalcars once, another company
belonging to Priceline. I'm not as familiar with rentalcars as I am with
booking so can't be as confident but even in that case I doubt the business
plan is based on such erroneous bookings. For sure, the incentive to fight
fraud they are victim of is bigger than the incentive to fix the UX dark
patterns that are causing the erroneous bookings and eventually bring them
some extra profit.

Also, let's not forget that companies abusing dark patterns or being slow to
fix "bugs" when they convert well, are not merely soulless organisations
driven by profit. They are made of teams driven by OKRs, which are made of
individuals driven by their desire to fit in the culture (or their perception
of it).

------
basicplus2
Never use booking.com not only dark patterns but when you finally get it
"right" (I was nearly caught out) their price is way higher than everyone else
anyway. Scumbags

~~~
mythbustah_13
This isn't true, I've used it since 2011 and for more than 30 reservations and
even compare using meta-aggregators like HotelsCombined and whenever Booking
has the room and it's same price or cheaper than others. It may happen that
they don't have a room while other websites do.

------
jimjimjim
in my previous trips i have never seen a room rate at one of these booking
type websites that i wasn't able to get by going directly to the hotel website
or by phoning them.

they are parasites.

------
snksnk
Is 'dark UX patterns' the new meme for something that has already been around
for >15 years? <insert bold red marquee here>

