Booking.com just spammed me with an email that claims that I were a “frequent traveller” (which I am not), and thus would get “Genius” status, and rebates (which means they are going to hide some non-partner search results from me…) - I hate such marketing spam.

What a big rip-off.

I have rarely ever used Booking.com, and in fact I have last used it 2015.

That is certainly not what you would call a “frequent traveler”.

But Booking.com sell this to their hotel customers as “most loyal guests”. As I am clearly not a “loyal guest”, I consider this claim of Booking.com to be borderline to fraud. And beware, that since this is a partner programme, it does come with a downside for the user: the partner results will be “boosted in our search results”. In other words, your search results will be biased. They will hide other results to boost their partners, that would otherwise come first (for example, because they are closer to your desired location, or even cheaper).

Forget Booking.com and their “Genius program”. It’s a marketing fake.

Going to report this as spam, and kill my account there now.

Pro tip: use incognito mode whenever possible for surfing. For Chromium (or Google Chrome), add the option --incognito to your launcher icon, for Firefox use --private-window. On a smartphone, you may want to switch to Firefox Focus, or the DuckDuckGo browser.

Looks like those hotel booking brokers (who are in a fierce competition) are getting quite despeate. We are certainly heading into the second big Dot-com bubble, and it is probably going to bust rather sooner than later. Maybe that current stock market fragility will finally trigger this. If some parts of the “old” economy have to cut down their advertisement budgets, this will have a very immediate effect on Google, Facebook, and many others.