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A comment on How Booking.com manipulates users. Parent comment

Re:How Booking.com manipulates users by what_ever on Thursday September 21, 2017 @01:52AM (#15300881)
Why not use TripAdvisor? Not owned by Priceline or Expedia (yet!), nowhere as manipulative as Priceline, and you can actually compare between Priceline and Expedia offerings on the same page. The reviews are much better, rating system is not complicated/hidden and you can sort of ranking/reviews and much better UI with the new redesign.

Disclosure: Ex-Tripadvisor engineer.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:How Booking.com manipulates users by bogomipz on Thursday September 21, 2017 @07:32AM (#15302332)
Why? Trip Advisor is actually one of the biggest contributors to scourge the fake reviews! Anyone can't post reviews on Tripadvisor you don't need to be a verified guest.

'“The effects we find in our study are actually not that small. For example, the mean hotel in our sample has thirty negative reviews. We find that a hotel that is located next to an independent hotel owned by a small owner will have six more fake negative Tripadvisor reviews compared to an isolated hotel.”'[1]

Here is PDF link to the report: "Promotional Reviews: An Empirical Investigation of Online Review Manipulation", which is worth a read:

http://www.nber.org/papers/w18340.pdf

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/avaseave/2014/01/27/when-online...

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Re:How Booking.com manipulates users by tallanvor on Thursday September 21, 2017 @05:38AM (#15301856)
TripAdvisor used to be part of Expedia. They were spun off in 2011.

And, of course, TripAdvisor has their own issues that they don't really care to deal with (fake reviews are a constant problem since they have no way to verify that someone actually stayed there).

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