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I agree with the “unneccessary urgency” observation: this is a clever trick. I never knew the actual last time was shown in the tooltip. However, I do like the fact that this urgency allows you to make quick decisions and book sooner: otherwise, you might spend a lot of time pondering your choices.
Perhaps this post should be taken with a grain of salt: the author clearly booked a hotel which was not nice. However some guests prefer to stay in these kinds of “party-goer” hotels and might give a very high rating. So it seems fair that Booking shows these positive reviews:
9.6: “Great location for canal street night out” 10: “… Had an unforgettable after party” 10: “Great place to stay, especially to party”
It seems that guests that go to sleep at only 4 o’clock don’t mind the bar below. The blog author finally reconciles and takes the blame: “To be fair, this is more of the hotel’s fault than Booking’s. Also, I should have read the fine print.”
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I think the point of that anecdote was that the categories skew ratings very high. It’s almost impossible for a hotel to get less than 2-3 stars as they’ll all have at least some redeeming qualities. With a traditional 5 star rating system you can bet there would be a lot of 1 star reviews due to the noise, but that’s not the case here because the staff happens to be friendly. It also seems like booking.com only displays the most positive reviews (which is common practice on many sites.. but still).
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They don’t (we use them constantly). You can also filter reviews by guest type like family, business traveler etc. to find those that are more likely from those with similar expectations. It is always a good idea to ignore best reviews and check those with lower scores (can filter on that too).
Reviews are not completely reliable (are they anywhere?) and booking certainly uses a lot of dark patterns, but I don’t think it is that difficult to have a generally positive experience. Unless my wife and I are so much luckier or more capable than others, which I doubt.
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Wow, these are actually surprisingly convincing. My position on fake reviews has always been that they are a great signal to permit on your website so long as you penalize them silently in search results. When Amazon started removing the “honest and unbiased” reviews, they actually made it harder to avoid fake products, and so I was in favour of leaving them in. They’re obvious enough even for people without Fakespot and stuff like that.
But something like this:
I love this place. I love their asparagus. The scallops and pasta are also delicious. I will continue to come here anytime I am in town.
That’s almost convincing except who on earth remarks about the asparagus. I’d still chalk it up to people just being oddly specific in their tastes.
This is pretty crazy.
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I’m trying to plan out how much sunlight our new flat will have. Two balconies, one is north-east facing, the other south-west. We’re pretty north (Warsaw, Poland), and there isn’t much sun in the winter, but we’d still like to have a greenhouse of sorts on the north-east facing one.
As of the time I’m writing this, there are now five critical security vulnerabilities on the front page of lobsters, and they’re all completely unrelated to each other.
Computers were a mistake. Let’s go back to slide rules.
I like the built in assumption that we were secure before computers.