this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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Europe

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[–] Sibbo@sopuli.xyz 37 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I tried to delete my account there for two or three months every few days. It never worked.

[–] Saleh@feddit.org 38 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

If you are in the EU write to their data protection contact that you demand your right to deletion under the GDPR to be upheld and otherwise would launch a complaint with your national data protection office.

Also make screenshots along the way, in case you need to escalate it to the last step.

I know this sounds tedious and it can be. But it can often help directly if the companies react or it helps building a case against them to get fined later.

[–] x00z@lemmy.world 12 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I got some companies in trouble with GDPR complaints.

It takes some work but it's really fun.

[–] aaa@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 7 minutes ago

that's interesting, can you give more details, i'd like to hear.

[–] Sibbo@sopuli.xyz 7 points 9 hours ago

Yeah, I honestly have given up and stopped caring. But if I feel like it, I will.

[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 21 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Genocide profiteers who accept Israeli settlement money are assholes, more at 10.

[–] kebab@endlesstalk.org 11 points 10 hours ago (5 children)

The biggest alternative is Chinese Trip.com. Booking.com, despite its flaws, is still one of the European-based big companies that are successful globally

[–] amol@communick.news 3 points 2 hours ago

I have been using Opodo for a while, they are European and work well enough for most of my needs

[–] Szewek@sopuli.xyz 10 points 7 hours ago

Booking.com is owned by American Booking Holdings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booking_Holdings

[–] Obi@sopuli.xyz 7 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

That platform should be open source/free/public. There's no reason they need over 24 000 employees to manage what is basically a listings website. They only succeed by meddling with transactions between two other parties, and their actual role is extremely limited. I just need to find the place and see price and availability, and the hotels just need to be shown to customers, that's it that's the need, everything else is just tech bro nonsense to squeeze as much as possible out of both customers and hotels. I'm glad they're a big European company but they shouldn't exist at all (same with Uber and all these other platforms).

[–] newram@feddit.org 24 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

Well if the hotels would provide their prices transparently, booking.com would die quickly. The value booking.com adds, in my opinion, is to force hotels to actually provide information in machine readble format to booking.com who then have a decent interface across all hotels.

[–] SorryImLate@piefed.social 5 points 8 hours ago

Agreed, their site offers much more than just a simple listing. It is so tedious to have to navigate multiple different websites, trying to find the relevant information. Having a single, straightforward, centralised source showing availability, options and prices was amazing when they first started. Hotels have improved their online presence a lot in the last 20 years, but being able to filter consistently for detailed parameters is still valuable, as are their reviews.

I just wish they had stuck with their core business; I don't want to be offered insurance or car rental or any of the rest of it :/

[–] Obi@sopuli.xyz 2 points 9 hours ago

Sure there's value there but does booking really need 24k employees and billions in revenue to make that happen?

[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 3 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

First I'm not sure why it's okay if it's a European company profiteering from ethnic cleansing, second Gotogate exists and is Swedish.

Edit: Turns out Gotogate doesn't do hotels.

[–] Szewek@sopuli.xyz 3 points 7 hours ago

"Stays" on Gotogate redirect you to Booking.com. Similarly, most listing from HomeToGo are just cross-links from Booking

[–] reev@sh.itjust.works 3 points 9 hours ago

Tried to check out the hotel offering and it redirected me to booking

[–] kebab@endlesstalk.org 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

It’s not okay but the competition when it comes to hotel comes from a country hosting world’s biggest internment camps in Xinjiang, which, I would say, is worse than taking a cut off hotel bookings in a country that does bad things. Gotogate only sells flights as far as I know, not hotels

[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 3 points 7 hours ago

It’s not okay but the competition when it comes to hotel comes from a country hosting world’s biggest internment camps in Xinjiang, which, I would say, is worse than taking a cut off hotel bookings in a country that does bad things.

You've got that mixed up. Trip.com pays taxes to China, which is bad, but on the other hand Booking.com actively incentivises ethnic cleansing with its Israeli settlement listings. Benefiting people who are also doing bad things isn't quite as bad as actively helping alone the bad thing. If Trip.com somehow helps the Uighur genocide I'll change my position, but I don't think that's a thing.

[–] logi@piefed.world 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

There is agoda.com which I used in Asia a lot but seems to work here in Europe. (I won't be booking anything in the US, so haven't checked.)

They're mostly based in Thailand but registered in Singapore. Neither is a shining beacon, but I've not heard of concentration camps.

[–] kebab@endlesstalk.org 5 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Agoda is owned by Booking.com

[–] logi@piefed.world 4 points 8 hours ago (1 children)
[–] BigShammy80@feddit.org 1 points 1 hour ago

Yeah, they just buy everything noteworthy and competition is done.