Booking.com is better at this.
Do you accept Terms and Conditions without actually reading everything? Well, it turns out that if you were to read them, it would take hours to go through each point, per an analysis by Secure Data Recovery.
Among the 100 companies it scored, TripAdvisor has the most complex fine print, while Booking.com is the easiest to comprehend.
Secure Data Recovery used word counts to understand how long an average person will take to read the legalese, assuming a reading rate of 200 words per minute. Then it applied the Flesch Reading Ease Formula to analyze the readability, scoring T&Cs from “Very Difficult” (with a score of 0-29) to “Very Easy” (with a score of 90-100).
The data company advises that although it may be hard to understand terms and conditions, the text can tell you how a website uses your data and what permissions you’re agreeing to, warning: “Ignoring this text can have significant consequences from data breaches, privacy infringements, and missed updates that can impact your security.”
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The Most Confusing Fine Print
The 100 companies analyzed by Secure Data Recovery are across industries and includes everything from AT&T to Snapchat.
Booking.com is the only company in any indystry that had a “Fairly Easy” to read fine print. It scored a 62.48 (on 100) on the Flesch Reading Ease Formula, which provides this score based on sentence length and word length. On the other side of the spectrum was TripAdvisor, with a score of 25, the poorest. The travel company’s fine print is the most complex on this list and “Very Difficult” to comprehend.
Other difficult reads in the travel category are Southwest Airlines, VRBO, Lyft, United Airlines, Yelp, Uber, Airnb, Spirit, and Delta.
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The Longest Fine Print
The longest fine prints tend to belong to dating companies, many of which have 15,000+ word terms, which would take around 1 hour and 17 minutes to read. On the other hand, fitness companies have the shortest fine print at 6,000+ words and reading time of 32 minutes. Travel websites fall somewhere in the middle with 10,000+ words and 52 minutes of reading time.
Airbnb has the longest fine print in the travel category–there are 23,585 words that the company makes you accept when you sign up and book with them—that’s 1 hour and 57 minutes worth of text. Lyft is a close second with 20,381 words. However, both are still half of what AT&T presents: 56,615 words, and almost five hours of endless scrolling. By comparison, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is only 47,094 words, and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut is only 49,459.
Airlines are actually keeping it short and sweet. You can read Delta’s fine print in eight minutes (1,731 words), while United is just 12-minutes worth of text (2,558 words). However, both scored as “difficult” to comprehend, so while short, it’s not necessarily sweet.
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Trip Advisor has appalling customer service and doesnt even adhere to its own guidelines. Some time ago I asked them to remove comments from a hotel that mentioned me by name - which is supposed to be against the rules. They didnt. But Booking.com is no better. A customer service person I spoke to recently blatantly lied to me. I then contacted CS by message and was promised a response within 24 hours. That was three weeks ago, I'm still waiting.And dont get me started on AirBnB. A pox on all of them