Omim: Switch on/off Booking services

[Codain]

For both power management and data management (which may means cost) reasons please add a global parameter to switch on/off the Booking feature.

When viewing an hotel, a button can be put to manually download data of this (and only this) hotel in case the global parameter is set to 'off'.

Nota: If Maps.ME is so spread it's amongst other because it is an offline app at the origin, with all the advantages that it means :).

Thank you!

[burivuh]

Hi! Can you please explain a little bit, what this parameter will do and what problem can it solve? Neither power consumption nor mwm size are much affected with an ability to book Booking.Com hotels.

[Codain]

If the parameter is off: the app would no longer connect by itself to Booking to retrieve data on hotels and consequently will not display them to the user. Proposal: A button on all hotel details could be used to explicitely download data from THIS hotel.
If the parameter is on: it is the actual behaviour, prices and so on are retrieved from Booking.

I understand perfectly that the mwm is not impacted and it's a good thing. But it's not my concern here.

The idea is:

1. to not consume data from my data plan to get information I most of the case don't need,
2. to keep my CPU and battery for doing other things than running the Booking service. Even if it's a tiny little part of the consumption it is still consumption.
3. to not being tracked by Booking or another service.

Then once again Maps.ME is well known for being an offline app (which means that it doesn't need to access online), which is very handy and costless while abroad, so it would be nice to keep this capability. I would have said the same thing with a live traffic system, a live weather forecast system...

Thanks for your support.

[utack]

data management

It seems to be integrated into the .mwm files, at least I can firewall the app and the booking.com hotels still show up normally with all the information

However the merging of booking.com data and OSM data could be a bit more agressive

[burivuh]

utrack is right. Booking hotels ARE integrated into MWM files, so they could be accessable when offline.
There is a small functionality to get actual hotel pricing for an opened hotel when online. So basically there's no overhead except MWM size and it is very-very small.

Also, you're not tracked by Booking.Com, because even when we call some Booking.Com API we provide no credentials or some kind of personal identification.

[burivuh]

However the merging of booking.com data and OSM data could be a bit more agressive

We're working on our matching algorithm right now

[rugk]

As for the tracking aspect you can of course still be tracked by your IP.
That's also why I would like such a button - if users just don't want to use that feature they should not forced be to use it.

So if you can add an option which just hides all booking.com stuff it would be useful. So here some things why one might disable it:
*tracking via IP
*one does book hotels online it does not like such platforms in general
*one hates Booking.com and rather wants to use the competition

If you are not allowed to do this (because of a contract with booking.com - do you have one?) you may at least address the privacy aspect by providing an option to disable the price lookup (or any other lookups related to booking.com).

[burivuh]

We will think about switching on/off online requests to the integrated partner services as a setting. This is the only thing we can do in this case.

[Codain]

After some time using MAPS.ME I understood better how the Booking integration works. If I get it right your algorithm tries to match OSM hotels with Booking hotels and, if the match fails, add a new hotel in the mwm file.

The side effect is that many hotels appears twice in MAPS.ME. I'm aware that the algorithm can't be 100% true, that's part of the game and it can be improved. I find this feature useful when OSM doesn't know an hotel but annoying when the matching does not work and there is a duplicate on the map.

Consequently I understand that information on hotels are stored offline. However I would still like to have the ability to disable (may means 'hide') the feature in-app.

Moreover, you may want to update the offline informations with online data one day! (or is it already the case?)

Thank you

[burivuh]

Hi, Codain!

I don't think we can switch on/off offline hotel data from booking. That will require too complex and brand new working scheme.

Then again, we're improving our quality metrics with every release. And you can check it by yourself in our today's 6.3.5 version.

As for updating... we currently have a very epic research going on. Let's talk again in several months )

[rstephant]

hello
I've tried as well to ask this feature trough normal mapsme support mail. On some part of the world, having all the booking location displayed make the map unreadable (too many hotels and B&B displayed. We really need to be able to switch off that layer of information

[uburuntu]

Up. I wanna see museums and other intresting places, not booking.com stuff.

[nmtitov]

I second this. Booking hotels all over the map are really really annoying. The map becomes unusable 🤔

Also, UX is pretty poor here: when I arrive at some location I already have booked a hotel or an apartment there. I don't need another one nor it's possible to change apartments in the middle of the trip!

Please add a switch which would disable Booking advertisements.

[tatiana-yan]

What data version do you use? Settings -> About application -> Data version

For new data version (190419) it must be much better cause it was a bug in our geometry generation and it was fixed.
https://github.com/mapsme/omim/pull/10150

[tatiana-yan]

screenshot of the same place with the same zoom level now looks like this:

[nmtitov]

@tatiana-yan thanks for the quick reply!

Looks like I have the same version 190419. Still, I see Booking apartments everywhere 😢

[tatiana-yan]

It's not about removing all the hotels. Not all of our users bookmark their hotels prior to arrival and we receive many issues from users who have difficulty finding their hotels.
The bug was that hotels were indexed in our geometry index at low zoom level and therefore they displaced too many high priority objects (train stations, subway stations, attractions, etc. see @uburuntu screen).
At high zoom levels hotels/cafes/shops have similar priority (displacement depends on rating, relative placement, what did you click before, etc) cause typically people use more cafes during the trip but find the exact hotel one is going to stay is typically more important then find the exact cafe.

[nmtitov]

So how to remove all Booking hotels and apartments from the map then?

[tatiana-yan]

We do not have special option which will do it automatically but you can use our osm-only maps build:
http://opensource-data.mapswithme.com/regular/weekly/ (put it to the root of maps.me folder, not yymmdd).

[majhi33]

We do not have special option which will do it automatically but you can use our osm-only maps build:
http://opensource-data.mapswithme.com/regular/weekly/ (put it to the root of maps.me folder, not yymmdd).

Does this remove points of interest, restaurants, etc. too? I'd like to keep those when I travel, but the map is too crowded with hotels and apartments. Data version is 191019.

[tatiana-yan]

Does this remove points of interest, restaurants, etc. too? I'd like to keep those when I travel, but the map is too crowded with hotels and apartments. Data version is 191019.

It does not. All POIs from OSM (cafes, restaurants, attractions and hotels/apartments from OSM) present in opensource data. There are no data from 3-party sources like booking.