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Comment by mattgreenrocks | Hacker News Reader

I recall when Booking.com rolled out the false urgency features. I was amazed at how utterly trashy and desperate they were.

The problem is it's not subtle at all; there's a handful of those features that, when combined, end up being overbearing and noisy: "3 people looked at this listing within the past 3 days! 12 rooms left at this rate!" I don't care. I'm looking to book business or vacation travel. If a spot fills up I'll just go somewhere else. It'll be fine either way.

I don't use them anymore for that reason. Old soul (me) is old. (I'm probably in a minority, judging by their advertisement budget.)

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Booking.com (or any other hotel/flight booking sites) are the masters of dark patterns. This is what happens when software is 'finished', companies start to optimize for profit, regardless of customer experience.

But unfortunately, it works.

I've seen friends that I consider intelligent panic buy tickets/hotels, "because prices are going up since the last time I checked!"

Next time you want to book anything, browse around, ignore any of the fake urgency notifications, ignore the price (while staying broadly in your price-range, of course). Then when you found a destination you like, open the page in a private browsing window (or clear your cookies), and you'll see that prices and availability are back to normal.

Interestingly enough, booking this ridiculous A/B testing almost from the start. Super hard data driven company. There is a great book about them, written by 3 journalists, but it’s only in Dutch I think. https://www.amazon.com/Machine-ban-van-Booking-com-Dutch-ebo...

Having worked in the OTA space, every time I see their (sometimes funny) ads, I want to call them Booking.Nope

OTA make comparisons a bit easier, but everything is negotiated and contractually controlled to keep people from just going to the hotel directly. Secret hotel prices (like HotWire if that still exists (Expedia) or Travelocity's Top Secret hotels if that still exists (also Expedia)) are an even more crazy negotiation. Hotel Tonight at least used to contact the hotel chains every day for that day's options, though since they were bought by AirBnB who knows what they do.

These days I just find a nice hotel and book with them/their system directly. Airlines too, since airlines fail to give all their options to the OTAs.

In some ways its sad that aggregators don't work all that well in the main travel industry (Flight/Hotel/Car) but travel is extremely complicated, highly competitive and still very fractured except for airlines. Pricing comparisons are not very useful since they are so mangled and obfuscated that you may as well just go to several sites and do it yourself by hand. For example Spirit Airlines used to give us prices for their tickets at $X and were always cheaper than everyone else; yet once you booked at that price they hit you for everything extra (bags, res, for all I know oxygen) then our customers complained we were fooling them and the real cost was higher.

It's amazing how much this works though. I remember getting a call from my mum saying "the website is telling me London is already 78% booked for these dates!" It felt ridiculous having to say "Mum, it's March. You're staying there in November. I promise you it'll be fine..."

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