[runn1ng]

I won’t cry for TripAdvisor and Expedia, their websites were awful.

Booking Group websites (booking.com and agoda) are still doing great in 2019 as the article states, because they don’t suck

[OkGoDoIt]

Personally I find booking .com and related sites to be so aggressive and downright manipulative (“40 people are viewing this right now!” “Your dates are super popular, 70% of hotels in this city are sold out!” Showing 5 hotels that are sold out first in order to make you feel desperate to find and book anything!) that I hate using it even though they often have the best prices. So I will do my hotel searches elsewhere and the only go to booking .com once I’ve already made a decision, to check it they have a lower price. See also agoda, trip .com, etc

[matheussampaio]

I hate those manipulative sites. We should give more attention to browser extensions that clear and remove those things. ManipulativeBlock.

[naravara]

At some point I gave up. It just stopped being worth it for me to save $10 here or $20 there for how much of a navigation PITA these sites are. I just stick to Kayak for booking most things now. It's simple, clean, and straight-forward and they do their best to de-bullshittify the manipulative fees that some airline portals use to artificially make the fare seem low.

[novok]

Really? Even with all of this crap? https://ro-che.info/articles/2017-09-17-booking-com-manipula...

[hnick]

Maybe I'm kidding myself but I just tune that all out. In the end I read some reviews, look at what we have (and pictures), and check the price. I've generally had good results which is why I still use them.

[jakobegger]

But Booking.com does suck!

They manipulate you by showing only positive reviews.

When they ask you for a review, they ask you what you liked about the stay, and what you didn't like.

Then they just show the positive stuff to people.

I've booked on booking.com a handful of times, and every times the reviews were either just wrong, or misleading.

[arkades]

What’s better than TripAdvisor for finding sights and experiences?

Very much not a rhetorical question.

[massysett]

Buy a guidebook on Amazon. It’s worth it before a significant trip and saves time compared to sifting through dreck on the Web.

But if you’re in town for business and you happen to have a few extra minutes and you think “hey, what is there to see around here,” TripAdvisor works well enough.

[basch]

Yelp, Google, Facebook, Foursquare, are all alive and well, as is a lot of local journalism. Subreddits about specific cities also hit well sometimes.

Now if i could just aggregate all their results into one listing per event/location.

[Spooky23]

The Google Maps app.

[jimbokun]

Rick Steves.