De-stressing Booking.com
A commentary on the overuse of persuasion tactics in e-commerce, and a Chrome Extension to reduce them.
Project: Opinion piece, Chrome browser extension
Role: Concept development, product design and engineering
Illusions of scarcity
I use Booking.com quite a lot. Since moving to the Netherlands my family, friends and often my work are an overnight stay away. And it’s great– there are a huge range of options, and a simple booking process. I’m pretty reliant on it a lot of the time.
But using Booking.com makes me stressed, because regardless of how far in advance I’m planning, how many hotels are actually available or how off-season I might be, messages like the one above do their very best to make me feel like I’m dangerously close to sleeping on a bench for my forthcoming trip to Munich unless I click the button NOW! NOW! NOW!I’m sure it didn’t start like this. Airbnb for example also uses messages to indicate how busy a certain destination is looking, but theirs tend to feel factual and informative, not deliberately stress-inducing. I guess it started this way at Booking.com too and in fact some of the messages shown on their site are kind of helpful…
Though alarming, this message on Booking.com is useful. I can see there are two rooms left, and the last booking was less than a day ago. I need to get my skates on if I want to book this one.
A more straight-forward message from Airbnb.com
But somewhere along the line perhaps these informative messages proved too effective in raising conversion rates to resist pushing further. They started to move into a darker territory, deliberately attempting to create a sense of scarcity where there really wasn’t.
Consider this one:
What are we saying here, Booking.com? Some properties were just booked in Yamanouchi. Ok, when? For the same dates as me? And properties like the one I’m looking at have been booked. So not the one I was looking at, just one like it.
This is not helpful data, it’s a tenuous statistic dressed up to make me think my accommodation options are running out.
The HTML code on the page marks out many of the messages using CSS classes the developers have named ‘persuation’ (sic).
This doesn’t feel like a healthy way of selling. Apart from raising my anxiety levels during what should be the enjoyable process of planning a trip, if I’m being presented not with clear availability stats but unqualified red-alert scarcity warnings then I start to mistrust the site.
Of wider concern is that this approach is being increasingly emulated across the web,
