It is lying. They claim something that they have no evidence for. Whether the number truly is 38 at that moment is irrelevant in this case. Because if the number was 0, 42, or 1437 they still would have made the claim that 38 were looking at that flight.
In any negotiation, nobody should take (at face value) the reported interest of the other party. A real estate agent could say a dozen people dropped by the home earlier today. You'd be foolish to believe it. You'd be foolish to believe Booking.com saying there's 1 room left, or the number of people currently looking at a webpage.
It isn't controversial. But we should teach people to think independently, rather than devaluing education and critical thinking. Why not have both? Businesses should have integrity and consumers should be able to apply a basic level of critical thinking. I don't think I placed blame on the victim, either. I'm merely pointing out people should think critically of what they read, because that has a lot of valuable applications in life, beyond outside of protecting yourself from people who will lie to you.
I think we should also teach people some epistemological self-defense. People caught on lying should be punished, hard. Lying to others is an inherently hostile act.
That's good, but I'm talking about lying outside of deceptive advertising. There's plenty of lying going on in sales&marketing that doesn't reach the level of being illegal. Puffery comes to mind.
