How I Won Booking.com Manipulations
I Love Sinai. The amazing Egyptian peninsula with the amazing beaches and the best atmosphere you can find in the middle-east. So, after all my regular accommodation options were fully booked (I called each one of them…), I’ve decided to book online, see what Booking.com has to offer, right?
I don’t know when booking a vacation or whatever, became such a stressful experience. Most of the booking sites pull all their heavy cannons in front of you. ”Only two seats left!”, “35 people are watching this room! hurry up!”, “This room booked twice in the last 10 minutes!!!”
All these exclamation marks, red backgrounds and blinking crap. Goddammit, instead of planning my next vacation quietly, I felt like sorting a complex puzzle in the trenches while corporates shooting at me, and the funny thing is that I was calling my wife, passing the pressure to her: “Listen, sweetheart, we need to decide now, there’s only 1 room left! it’s a very popular place”
It’s Time to End This!
-“What if all these messages could just disappear?”
-”Yeah, that would be great”
-”Wait, I CAN do it..”
So, after having this imaginary dialog in my head, I sat down and after several hours I’ve deployed a tiny tool that literally hides all these messages. Not the informational messages, just the annoying ones. Just the messages that have nothing to do with your booking, but have a lot with making you more stressful.
And then, there was a silent.
No Stress Booking — How it works:
This is how it looks when searching for a room in San-Francisco:
And this is how it looks after clicking the guy on the left:
And this is just the example. This tool removes almost 99% of all the annoying messages that will keep coming through the booking process. I was so thrilled so I’ve sent it to my friends (it didn’t have the nice guy on the left. Just an ugly on/off button) and they were thrilled. So, I made it official and uploaded it to the Chrome Webstore as a free extension. After a couple of days, I’ve added “blockers” for Agoda.com,Hotels.com, OpenTable.com, expedia.com, kayak.com, and others.
Now we can sit all and relax.
P.S.
There’s no tracking, cookies, affiliation, promotional offer or any other shit on this extension. Enjoy it, it’s here, waiting for you: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/no-stress-booking/kkfmoaflbacidmgmkddkhjfdepckmggg
