Hate-Selling in the Age of Google Travel
Skift Take
Online booking sites still treat potential customers with disdain using manipulative marketing tactics. As airlines and hotel chains have adopted these methods, it calls into question what a world without them would really look like. Google offers a hint.
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 establishe
