> Everything on our website, including how we display prices and payment policies as well as the availability and popularity of specific properties, among other features relevant to the customer booking experience, is intended to help customers
Is this a joke? The last time I looked at their site I had a dozen different types of modals saying ONE ROOM LEFT!! ALMOST OVER!!!, large-text prices with fees and taxes (30-50%+) hidden, continuous streams of alert boxes on the bottom saying "x just booked the room you were looking at! Only 3 left!"
I've mentioned this before, but I worked at a competitor to booking.com which had similar kinds of notices.
While I can't speak to booking.com's implementation - the code we were running was actually legitimately implementing these things based on actual data (views/bookings/inventory).
One person got particularly angry that we showed a "last room" tag for a hotel, and then when calling the hotel was told there were plenty of rooms available - and cheaper rooms, too. In that particular case it turns out that hotel was restricting the availability of rooms/rates to us, but not disclosing that.
As for the fees+taxes thing... that's always been a personal annoyance. I forget all the details, but it's very much a market specific things whether it's better to hide/show taxes/fees/etc.
Large portions of people from the US just assume that they are not included in prices, and compare based on that assuming it'll be some percentage higher when actually paying. Showing an all-in price gets you skipped over/ignored for being too expensive.
> hotel was restricting the availability of rooms/rates to us, but not disclosing that.
not disclosing to you, perhaps, but well known practice across all hotels. clearly instigated by one of the first online hotel room marketplace sites. "just feed us 3 rooms at a time ... we'll promote them as running out ... wink wink". as a competitor to booking.com you should have known about this practice.
you're going through some contortions to justify vile practices on behalf of the online booking agents.
they've already been fined. They are a EU company based in Amsterdam so there's no getting away from it simply by closing shop in the country where they got fined...
Is this a joke? The last time I looked at their site I had a dozen different types of modals saying ONE ROOM LEFT!! ALMOST OVER!!!, large-text prices with fees and taxes (30-50%+) hidden, continuous streams of alert boxes on the bottom saying "x just booked the room you were looking at! Only 3 left!"
This has been done for years[0][1][2]
[0] https://ro-che.info/articles/2017-09-17-booking-com-manipula...
[1] https://medium.com/@ilyadoroshin/bad-ux-how-booking-com-dece...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15152439