Based on the astounding level of UX dark patterns on TripAdvisor's existing design I can't say I have high hopes for whatever "revamped design" they come up with.
Oh my god, booking a hotel on booking.com gives me anxiety. The constant notifications like "10 people are going to book it", "sorry we sold our last room", "you missed it by 1 min", "last room booked 2 mins ago" feel like they want to just scare you to death with scarcity. Wtf, this site definitely crosses the line between marketing and just plain shady.
The reason for these is that they calculate Customer Lifetime value as one time transaction. So they put all their efforts to get a customer to convert on his first visit or so. Booking has a bounce rate of 35% compared to 88% on hotels.com.
Although there is a group of travelers who absolutely despise this, and they would never book from such sites. As a traveler, researching and booking are part of the experience and should not be anxiety inducing.
[1]: https://medium.com/futureoftravel/how-travel-booking-website...
A couple of years ago a friend booked an intercontinental flight, they saved €20 by booking through an agency, but later wanted to cancel the flight due to illness. If they'd booked even the cheapest option direct, they could have paid to do so, but as it was through an agency they couldn't.
You know, when I book my room without breakfast there's a reason for that. For example: I don't eat breakfast and are completely happy with a cup of coffee (offered by most better hotels in your room). So, please kindly stop spamming me three times that you "noted that I didn't add breakfast to my booking".
I also don't appreciate three reminders that I can book some overprized airport transportation service. See, there's a reason I didn't book that. Namely that public transport gets me to my hotel in the same time as your overprized service for 1/30th of the price. And since I travel mostly with hand luggage, luggage is really not an issue. So please stop to spam me already!
But the absolute worst is that after I book a hotel I get spammed with mails that "prices in $WHEREVER" just went down.
First of all it's a brazen lie. How do I know? Because I booked a hotel in Sapporo during Golden Week[1] on short notice. Prizes for hotel rooms during golden week don't go down; ever! So yeah, that's one thing. You're liars!
What's worse, though, is that you fuck over your hotels by enticing bookers to cancel and search for something cheaper.
I for one would call all those practices pretty damn scammy. And if somebody has a good alternative to booking.com I'm more than happy to give it a go.
The economics of all these travel sites is now mainly: pay Google less in AdWords fees than you make in commission and expenses (Booking/Priceline is the number 1 spender on AdWords). Booking is the market leader in their conversion, getting people to convert at about twice the conversion of competitors, and they got this way through relentless A/B testing. They were one of the first companies to push A/B testing so hard. Their high conversion rates mean they can consistently bid more for travel AdWords than competitors.
I hate all these dark patterns too, but the data (and booking's business performance over nearly 2 decades) show that it clearly works.