[softwaredoug]

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.

[duxup]

I'll get the phrasing wrong here but "What is easy to measure will be deemed important what is difficult to measure will be deemed unimportant."

[ohduran]

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"?

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

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.

[fludlight]

Lifetime value (LTV). It’s tricky to measure in the travel industry because users only transact once every few months or even years.

[ohduran]

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.

[commandlinefan]

> maximize for what’s easiest to measure

Just like the unholy abomination that professional project managers have turned “agile methodologies” into.

[rhizome]

If everything in this post and comment threads are true, I'm not sure what good it does to post on HN.

I bet a "How to dox and stalk people with Python" post would be flagged down, so maybe I'm just complaining about the prevailing ethics on the site.