This. I still (grudgingly) use them because they also seem to have figured out that its important that your booking process works and it's friction-free, and they often do have the best price.
But if I find an alternative that has the same width of offers and a booking process that doesn't feel like a drill sergeant constantly yelling "BOOK NOW YOU WORTHLESS SCUM, BOOK, BOOK, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR YOU IMBECILE, CLICK IT, BOOK, NOW, NOW" - what do they think will happen?
Booking.com A/B tests everything: the drill-sergeant-like funnel probably has higher conversion rates than any gentler variation. So to answer your question - they think you might not book through them without the shoutiness.
> But does it have higher customer retention over the long term?
I'm going to guess the answer is no - which is why organizations have to be careful which metrics they measure and incentivize on. Granted, this failing is industry-wide as the longest view on most orgs' dashboards is YoY. When that metric starts freefalling, it most likely will be too late to do anything about it, but most of the staff (up to the CEO) will have padded Resumes with amazing numbers for improved conversion/revenue which will get them to the next job.
Booking is obsessed with maximizing conversions, which just leads to dark patterns.
One lessons from all these things is they maximize for what’s easiest to measure, not what’s most important. Conversions aren’t the end all be all, nobody wants to come back to a store with the pushy salesperson.
Oh, absolutely! How can you measure "I'm sick of being tricked into buying", "I wish this site treated me with respect", "I'm the client, and I feel like the product"?
They do/did have a customer satisfaction survey somewhere at the end or after the booking process.
I made sure to provide feedback.
When people book with you but give you 1/10 stars, that's probably a pretty strong warning sign that the customer isn't happy with the site and the first usable competitor that they find will get their business.
If the assumption is that the user is looking for the cheapest option regardless of how he's been treated, this strategy makes sense.
But that leaves you at the mercy of the competition, which in an open data business (I mean, airlines are more than happy to tell you which flights they have available) implies that your product is undifferentiated. So eventually you resort to this tactics: as soon as a user gets in, do anything that's humanly possible to convert that sucker.
That's in essence what's wrong with Booking. This trickles down, unfortunately: Ryanair hides most of its costs in effectively forcing you to upgrade to Premium in order to be treated as something just a bit more than lifestock, because the assumption that travelers' main concern is price pervades the industry, even if the price they are shown isn't the price they pay in the end.
That's putting it lightly. It's an abomination of a website. Truly an assault on the senses. Just booked through them yesterday, to save a few bucks-- never again.
Now I understand why it's so bad-- "user interface optimization models"
I refuse to believe this brings real value. The more plausible reality is, they have fantastic SEO and a tightening stranglehold on marketshare, and some AI to squeeze a few more pennies out along the way. Whatever metrics they are seeing, it won't be worth it in the long run. This kind of UX and product won't last.
Apart from the seo, they use a lot of money from the cut they get from the hotel to outbid the hotel on paid ads. They are more than anything a marketing agency.
I've learned to ignore the dark patterns. Still use them because their free cancellation booking process takes a lot of the pain out of picking a hotel.
Deceiving, tricking and pressuring users into taking actions.
For example, LinkedIn having a flow that has an e-mail and password box, which will get a less attentive user to just re-enter their LinkedIn credentials. But it's actually a phishing form for your e-mail, so if your LinkedIn and e-mail password is the same, you have now "consented" to have your address book scraped and your contacts spammed.
Or, in the case of Booking.com:
* Every step has items designed to pressure you to book NOW because it'll be too late otherwise:
- "booked x times in the last x hours" on the listing, or
- "Only 1 room left!" (they now add "on our site" after they lost a consumer protection lawsuit)
- Showing booked-out listings "You missed it"
- Various notifications like "last booked X minutes ago" and "limited supply" popping in while you're scrolling to raise the pressure
* Misleading or deceptive claims
- "Jackpot, this is the cheapest price you've seen" (emphasis should be on "you've seen", this will be shown even if you look at overpriced properties)
- They seem to have stopped the "one person looking at this property" thing (to make you think that it may be gone if you don't book now - that one person is you), probably after being forced to do so by court
- a misleading rating system (the lowest possible rating is 2.5/10, and you rate category-by-category, which means that if the staff is friendly and the hotel is in a good location etc. but the rats and cockroaches ate your luggage while you slept, that's an 8/10 property - in practice, you should assume that anything below 8 is not good, below 7.5 is bad, below 7 is catastrophic, below 6 you may not survive)
- I'd also assume that they mess with the reviews in various ways, like showing mostly positive ones etc., but I haven't verified that.
Overall, I like to compare the booking experience with a drill sergeant yelling into your ear to convert (book) right now, NOW, DO IT, NOW, YOU MAGGOT! They seem to have improved significantly over previous experiences with them, probably due to a combination of me getting used to ignore the yelling, or because they realized that such a bad experience pushes customers away, or because their practices got banned one by one.
It's a shame, because other than the drill sergeant, their site is great.
For a while, somebody (not me) in the infrastructure department was maintaining a greasemonkey (I know) script that would remove the urgency messaging elements from the site. They used it both for themselves and to make a point about how much more pleasant the site was without them.
Reviews have changed now and you can leave an overall rating (at least somewhere, they may be A/B testing).
The reaction from Hosts has been negative. They should read your comment as they fail to understand the logic behind the change.
If I'm cancelling amazon prime because it "costs too much" but you say "are you sure you want to miss out on all the fast shipping" someone who is easily manipulated may continue to subscribe because they are weak willed.
Ben Edelman (Harvard, Microsoft) published a study [0] about how dark patterns in the online travel industry help them reach margins up to 25%. He also mentions the consolidation where most well-known booking sites are owned by just two large groups.
Sounds like travel agents are becoming more and more cost effective every day. I mean, what does the Hyatt website do that a phone call 30 years ago couldn't?
i just want to note that "dark patterns" appear because it could be just one more A/B test that booking.com obsessively implements again and again. If the tested pattern does not help to increase conversion rate, it will be shut down. what's wrong with that?
But if I find an alternative that has the same width of offers and a booking process that doesn't feel like a drill sergeant constantly yelling "BOOK NOW YOU WORTHLESS SCUM, BOOK, BOOK, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR YOU IMBECILE, CLICK IT, BOOK, NOW, NOW" - what do they think will happen?