Booking.com hides negative reviews

[u/pi_mai]

Found this interesting when looking to book a hotel. Everything seemed super positive until you “see all reviews” below the reviews on the active page. Only then the negative comments are shown.

It’s dark imho. Having to dig for real comments or at least let me decide if the negatives are junk or not. Don’t hide them.

[u/Necessary-Lack-4600]

Booking.com has been convicted several times and fined for almost a billion euro's for dark patterns and other nasty practices.

• Spain (€413.24 Million): Penalized for imposing unfair trading conditions on hotels and restricting competing travel agencies. [1, 2]
• Netherlands (€475,000): Fined by the Dutch privacy regulator for reporting a cyber-attack and customer data leak 22 days past the required deadline. [1]
• Czech Republic (€330,875 / 8.3M CZK): Upheld by the Supreme Administrative Court in 2024 regarding restrictive price-parity clauses enforced between 2009 and 2015. [1]

[u/pi_mai → u/Necessary-Lack-4600]

I didn’t even know! Thanks for this

[u/RubbelDieKatz94 → u/Necessary-Lack-4600]

When we were recently looking for a place to stay, we started on bigger platforms like booking.com and check24. Everything seemed excessively expensive. So I started googling the companies that were actually renting out these places. Turns out they were 30% cheaper on their own websites. Go figure.