Exactly. People use a service and then decide not to pay for it (by booking their accomodation or a ticket).
Although there are a certain number of people who use the service and then complete the purchase, that is enough for the business to thrive. I was just asking about the moral aspect of the matter. Because if you use a service, it would be right to use it till the end and not abandon it once you get all the information you needed.
As I said, it's a fair point of view.
Personally I feel that the amount I do end up paying Booking dot com, more than offsets my use of the site as a personal research tool at times. Maybe an attitude of "I've paid my dues".
Not in defence of my own use of the site. If indeed it needs defending.
But as an example, in my own business we are frequently asked to provide 'quotes' for work, that take days and days of effort to prepare, only to find out it was a window shopping or price comparison exercise, and the potential client obviously had no intention of making a purchase. It's all part of the 'cost of doing business' and is factored into our overheads.
In the case of a site like booking dot com, there is no actual cost to provide the site to someone merely researching. OK, we could argue a proportion of the site hosting and maintenance, but that would be a fraction of a cent per visitor. Aggregated, it would be a larger number, but this is factored into business overheads.
Back to the moral / ethical question. Personally I'm OK with it. Because I actually pay the company a fair amount in commissions each year with all our business bookings. And so some personal research use of the site seems trivial in comparison. And I see it as a trade off for being a good customer.
But then my browsing without purchasing is still adding value. Traffic, rankings, ad revenues etc. I know the value of these things with our own business.
Perhaps the real question here, is the 'value' being consumed.
Taking another example. Would I go into a cafe on the Camino, use the bathroom, top up my water bottle and sit outside to use their WiFi, without purchasing something? No. Never! To me that is akin to robbery. I'm consuming their resources, and giving nothing in return.
I wonder how many people use Wikipedia, and don't contribute to its funding? Many are probably not aware that you can make a small monthly contribution to keep them going.
These situations are around us every day. And we need to make a judgement call on them.
I take your point, which is a fair one. And in this specific case, of booking dot com, I feel OK about it.
