It may be a new decade, but hate-selling by the travel industry remains a consistent problem for travelers.
In 2015, Skift coined the term hate-selling to denote the anti-consumer techniques deployed by online booking sites to place pressure on users to spend money.
“The term ‘hate-selling’ came out of my frustration of juggling between horrendously designed car rental booking sites, being hit with all kinds of surcharges for booking on Avis.com, over-aggressive upsell by on airline sites (specifically Delta.com with the most passive-aggressive ‘restrictions’ overlay I have ever seen), to being bombarded with ‘buy-now-or-else’ false-sense-of-urgency prompts on online booking sites,” wrote Skift CEO Rafat Ali. “The lesson, if any, from all of this: This is what happens when you let conversion marketers run amok with customer experience. They made it a science, but forgot about being human.”
Five years later, the rise of Google as a digital travel booking site has led established players, both online travel agencies and travel providers themselves, to put even more pressure on travelers to book through their channels
There are many methods used by travel retailers to pressure consumers into buying particular products and packages. Some of the most popular involve social proof (14 users recently booked this property) and the dreaded countdown clock which pressures a user to book now or lose their access to a product.
These techniques are colloquially known to marketers as dark patterns, which manipulate the users of digital tools into making specific choices without understanding why they are making them. Misdirection and hidden pricing are two of the most common hate-selling techniques used by online travel sellers.
Sure, fares do change and other travelers may book the hotel room or flight you’re looking at. Yet they don’t change as quickly as booking sites would like you to think, especially since airline seat assignments are almost always made after booking on third-party sites and hotels offer a variety of similar room types.
In the eyes of consumers, this phenomenon is only getting worse. Research from SimilarWeb conducted in the third quarter of 2019 found that potential customers conducting searches on desktop often visit multiple sites selling lodging products on the same day. The same research found that online booking sites are often “viewed as a research channel” for flights since travelers will often end up booking directly.
