>'It "just works"... except when reviews and ratings and inventory ("just 1 room left!") are bogus, as I experienced last week.'
These are all the reasons to just avoid booking.com. The whole site is like a shady used car salesman - for example returning search results that say -"You just missed it", then why tell me about it? Or "5 people looking at this right now", seriously who cares? Do people really liked to feel pressured? Or how booking.com returns properties with the red "sold out!" in search queries for hotel rooms? Booking.com is one of the most miserable user experiences on the internet and the UI? What a total 1990s looking shit show that is. And of course the reviews seem dubious as you mentioned.
I've been burned by them more times than I care to admit and prepaying means you are stuck with it.
I found similarly bogus ratings issues with both Booking.com and TripAdvisor.
Had I taken a closer look at the patterns of reviews (as I've learned to do with Yelp), I would have realized the preponderance of fakes. Ratings are all over the place. Numeric scores are inconsistent with comments. Vast majority of 8+ reviews are one-time reviewers, and a bad review is immediately followed by multiple high reviews the same week.
In the Booking.com case, the primary photo is phony (a different property -- room is wrong configuration). Many reviews refer to nonexistent features. The few negative reviews paralleled my experience very well (this place was a D-I-V-E, by far the worst I've stayed in anywhere in North America).
TripAdvisor used to show photos of the properties taken by what looked to be actual past visitors, in all the cases I was involved in those photos matched my ulterior experiences with said places. And, yeah, like almost all the reviews-based websites out-there you have to learn to filter through the fake reviews. I'm European and as such travel mostly to non-English speaking countries, and you can spot those fake-reviews pretty well if they come from the owner or his relatives/friends, as they tend to make the same grammatical mistakes. I admit, in North-America things might be different in this regard.
If you suspect a fraudulent property, ratings or images on booking.com, please report that. Personally, I've never come across any, but I know we've had such cases. In all such cases I'm aware of, the fraud was dealt with quickly and effectively.
Disclosure: I work for Booking.com albeit neither in the hotels facing department nor customer service. Managed fraud ops and security ops and eng years ago. Do not speak for the company.
>Booking.com is one of the most miserable user experiences on the internet and the UI
Their search by map or whatever is called it's actually pretty handy. It keeps the filters you have already selected on (which is a big thing in this day and age) and you can "travel" through the general area you're interested in staying, showing the prices on map-pin mouse-over, if I remember correctly. I tried doing this on GMaps directly and the experience was clearly inferior (no clear way to filter for price and rating, a lot less available properties), or maybe Google has another travel-like interface of which I don't know anything about.
I admit, there are tons of dark-patterns, some of which you mentioned, but I got used to them and learned to ignore them, the same as I do with online ads.
Yeah, I've recently noticed the "just 1 room left!" thingie, I generally tend to ignore it, as I travel by myself or with my gf. The reviews have held up for me, though. Granted, I also look at the number of reviews and at way those reviews are written, if it seems like there's something fishy I just skip it. On top of that I use TripAdvisor, which is really holding up pretty well for me in terms of traveler reviews.
