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by _wmd 3045 days ago
I feel your pain. I've been travelling for the past 6 months, and have become the world's foremost critic of booking.com's UI in that time. That site, despite dominating the entire planet when it comes to such things, has no option to select [x] I REQUIRE A DESK TO WORK FROM

It's unbelievable how far gone these sites are from scenarios like yours and mine, and it'd be so easy to fix up.

Or they lack any understanding of the areas they market. I'm currently in Kathmandu, can I filter hotels by those that have a heater and hot running water? Of course not, but sure, I can filter by 100 options like "Airport shuttle", "24/7 front desk", and differentiate between a "hostel" and a "lodge", or whether the room has "soundproofing", 99% of these of which every hotel will tick yes to.

Another pain point -- WiFi. There are 100 ways they could measure this, but not a single one implemented, even a sliding "how shit was your connection? during the review, or, say, a surreptitious "How was your check-in?" e-mail that runs a miniature JS speed test in the background

Another travelling scenario - short term contracts around London. I don't care where I sleep, I care about rail and bus routes _only_. Can I search by that on any site? Of course not

Meanwhile I actually built a niche site around that last one, but it can't stand on its own -- it'd never become popular or turn any kind of profit, the only hope is that a big site with roaring revenues like Booking.com would somehow see the need, and spend a few working days worth of developer time on it. But that'll never happen, because the improvement to their bottom line would most probably be minimal -- I'll still use booking.com whether or not they implement the feature, because there are so view viable alternatives in this sector

1 comments

Would love to see your site. If you want to get in touch - I have put my email on my profile.