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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

This kind of behavior should just fall under fraud laws. If a person intentionally lies or misrepresents themselves for the purposes of gaining money it's usually considered fraud in most countries. This should be the same.

The problem is that there are a lot of laws that in practice only apply to not-well-connected individuals. When done by companies or well-known people it's considered good business acumen.

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In the Netherlands it probably does (“oneerlijke handelspraktijken”). The main regulator for the European activities of booking is in the Netherlands. If GP were to document this and submit it to the ACM [1] this might be picked up. The maximum fine is a puny 900 k€ though. They already got a few of these and don’t seem to care much.

And that just shows the problem with regulating these large platforms - local regulators with their hands tied against billion dollar platforms. The EU should just step in and regulate these monsters directly and pro-consumer. Or regulators should grow a pair and try to get the CEO / board replaced (a theoretical possibility when they keep getting administrative fines in NL). That will shake up the stockholders enough to shake some sense into these firms.

[1] https://www.consuwijzer.nl/doe-uw-melding-bij-acm-consuwijze...

Well if you made 5 mil with this and payed 900k fine you still made 4 mil, so yeah.

In the UK at least, they've tried.

https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/online-hotel-booking

Booking.com, amongst others, gave enforceable undertakings that they'd change their practices.

i've started flying recently a lot and in this one particular circuit i see loads of dark patterns.

1. there was this snow season last month and the roads stopped working and suddenly the air prices skyrocketed. (as is now expected), i had to buy a ticket in emergency which i paid 4x the reasonable rate with all websites saying "oops, the fare has increased" trick.

2. many websites did the "just 1 seat remaining" trick and i jumped the gun.

when the next day i traveled, the plane was half empty.

what happens is, travel agents buy up tickets well in advance and then sit on the bookings, they either sell directly or wait for online portals to sell them.

these travel agents having purchased tickets in bulk then say "oh, the ticket is priced $100 on kayak, i will sell it for 95. lets give you some discount" all the while having purchased the same for like 20.

these people are willing to forego tickets because its more profitable to keep the prices high

Usually, the notices I have seen actually say "only 1 ticket remaining at this price". Which they can technically make true by simply setting their pricing algorithm to sell the next ticket for a penny more or a penny less.

They're gambling, because there are actually fines for those sorts of behaviors if they don't clear the unused bookings in a reasonable time or if ARC (the Airlines Reporting Corporation) or the distribution systems detect a fraudulent pattern.

I'm actually building an internal tool for such fines (called "debit memos") for a company with several thousand travel agents, and they're not uncommon at all.

I wonder if the fraud is a two way street.

Could I just craft a POST request and book what I want?

Each of these companies are only allocated a certain amount of inventory so the availability is probably there, especially at the larger hotels

Additionally do they float the price and if so can I edit that also in the post request and name my own price?

If their interface has a fuzzy relationship to reality than maybe you can fuzz it your way

I'm not a criminal but I'm still curious.

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