Deceptions for years to attract customers
JM | August 16, 2023
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RELATED TOPICS: Booking, Fraud, Hilton, Holland, Hyatt, Marriott, Texas
Real example: a night’s accommodation at the JW Marriott Hill Country Resort & Spa hotel appears on Booking at $409. We don’t know the hotel but the prosecution says that this is an excellent price for a hotel that costs much more. So, as usual, whoever is looking to stay there, starts to make a reservation. When it is about to finish and there is only the payment left, a hotel charge of $56 appears and another of $81 in taxes. So the final price is $546. But the client is already at the end of the reservation, he has already entered all the data and, in many cases, now he is too lazy to change. In any case, in the competitors the price is the same, but from the beginning.
Thus, Booking attracts customers who, otherwise, if they saw the same price as on other pages, would not visit the portal. And they would not book (Booking, naked: the book that reveals the lights and shadows of the booking platform is already available in Spanish).
The Attorney General of Texas, United States, has filed a lawsuit against Booking for this reason: it offers deceptive prices to attract customers, omitting some accessories and taxes that are unavoidable.
“For years, Booking has been deceiving customers by hiding real prices in their advertisements. The price of the lodgings –says the lawsuit- was not real”. The lawsuit says these practices prevent customers from comparing prices, allow Booking to entice customers with artificially low prices.
These practices do not only occur with this hotel chain but are widespread on the Booking Holdings website, the American company that is based in the Netherlands, as verified REPORTUR.us.
In addition to Booking, the prosecution has opened similar proceedings against Hilton on its own website. Marriott, regardless of what Booking did, also carried out this deception on his own website, but when he found out that the prosecution had discovered it, he reached an economic agreement to close the case, a very normal (and expensive) practice. in United States.
