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Comment by smtpserver | Hacker News Reader

Review scores are also a bit offset. I have tried to give the absolute lowest to every metric booking.com gave me to rate and the resulting score was 2.5-ish. I was thinking about making a browser extension that rescales the values accordingly but I just made a mental note that a score 7 hotel is in fact a score 6. With this scaling the scores on the lower end gain more as a 3.3 score becomes a 5. Take this into account if you opt for the lower-middle end.

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I remember a similar thing with Zocdoc. Something like, the appointment was on time (5/5), but my experience was horrible (1/5), so my review "averages to 2.5".

Reminds me of the thing about "it either will happen, or it won't, so that's a 50/50 chance".

Actually review scores are the one thing I love about booking.com. I never book below 8.0 and always skim through at least 20 reviews (takes max 1 minute). I've never really been disappointed by an 8.0+ hotel and everything above 9.0 was really good.

I'd recommend staying away from hotels with very few reviews. But many (even smaller) hotels have several hundred reviews. They're usually very reliable.

Notably, many review sites don't let you score a zero. This will make the resulting number higher and many people are pretty bad at math. They see that it averages a 4 rating and think it can't be that bad, but it's because nobody could rate it a zero.

On the plus side, I learned a new phrase from HN today. I now know what 'dark pattern' means.

Thank you for highlighting this. I used booking.com a few years back when I stayed in London on a budget. I realised something about the site had made the review scores feel really useless but I never realised why until I read your comment.

In the end I just compared on worst reviews until I found a hotel where the bad reviews were about really unimportant things to me. The hotel I stayed in actually had one of the lowest review scores of all the ones I had considered but the lowest-scored reviews described an experience I could enjoy far more than the worst experiences at comparable hotels.

You're right, it's a 2.5-10 scale. For future reference, the median review score for a hotel on booking.com is around 8.1, based on a bunch of scraped data. Varies a lot by location, though. Business travelers also tend to rate almost a full point lower than any other group (family, couple, solo, groups), but I'm not sure if you can break out that information on their UI.

My personal heuristic for using booking.com is rating > 8.0, then skim over the negative reviews for dealbreakers. Bad ratings for restaurants or concierge or whatever is fine for me, but "room reeked of cigarette smoke" is not. Positive reviews don't really have a lot of signal to me, but YMMV.

What the.. That, unlike all of those dark UX patterns they are masters of, actually seems deeply deceptive and potentially illegal, depending on your locale. If this is true they have stepped across a line.

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