Comment by twiss
18 hours ago
How so? At least Booking.com shows me the total price for an accommodation up front, without any additional fees or surprises coming up later in the booking process.
The same cannot be said for AirBnB: if I go to the home page right now it lists a bunch of bookings for e.g. "€ 80 for 2 nights", while when I click through the total price is €160. So apparently what they meant is "€80 per night". I'd call that much more of a dark pattern than anything I've seen Booking do.
Bookings.com runs some incredibly evil tactics. Generally they take about 20% of the booking fees. But they will do things like delist you if you have lower prices anywhere else, and then undercut your prices on their website.
My parents ran a small motel - the only hotel for miles around. But on top of the fees, if they weren't paying for additional promotions Booking would find unrelated distant hotels even when searching in the area. People would sometimes mistakenly book for a motel states away.
Fair enough, I'm willing to believe it's doing evil things to hosts on the platform, indeed.
But FWIW, the EU is at least making an effort to regulate the company: https://nltimes.nl/2024/09/19/eu-court-says-bookingcom-wrong... (which claims that Booking can no longer prevent hosts in the EU from offering lower prices elsewhere).