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by NumberCruncher 1594 days ago
> several of the dark patterns don't

The "only x room left with these conditions" false claim is used also in the EU.

2 comments

Yep, cannot understand people still fall for that though. But I guess if you are a first time user…

As it is a lie, it should not be allowed.

Yeah, and 20 people looking at this room, booked 10x in the last hour, last one left.

When you go to the hotel website instead, you see plenty of rooms left and sometimes with a nice offer.

Agree, but the hotel will not alocate the all the rooms for booking/other platforms, just N rooms at Y$ price.
This is true, but I remember reading an article where the journalist compared the "only X rooms left with these conditions" claim to the system of the given hotel in real time. Well, as it turned out, the hotel had more than X free rooms with those conditions allocated to booking.com...
Booking doesn't care, though. They'll happily overbook the rooms you assign them sometimes.

Edit: It might have gotten better since, but I still remember all those sad/defeated/angry faces of people who had booked trough Booking.com that I had to send away / find alternative hotels for because we were full. Back then when.

I had that in Asia quite a lot with Booking; that's not my problem though; it's theirs. But that's why I do not use them (booking) whenever I can prevent it. Hotels.com has this rarely but when they have it, they make sure you are well taken care off; I got much better and far more expensive hotels for the same price in those cases. I discovered ny favorite hotel in the world (so far) by a double (double double; the overbooked twice for the same room) booking; everything was full so they booked me in a hotel in the middle of a nature reserve which was much more expensive at that point, but I paid nothing more of course. Very nice for a business trip where I was supposed to sleep in a concrete bunker in a city.
I understood that airlines and hotels have a tiered system fist x at this rate next y and rate*y … etc I have booked directly with Marion and IHG last minute and they both had prices change the next day when I took a peak. Assuming the thread isn’t about some random number generator

Beware, Marion had a higher price after I visited trivago