Regretful Experience with Booking.com in Hotel Booking

Countryboyperth on 02/12/2024 - 22:33
Last edited 03/12/2024 - 00:31 by 1 other user

Hello fellow OzBargainers,

I would like to share my extremely disappointing experience with Booking.Com. Before I left Australia on a tour to Italy in Oct 2024, I used Booking.Com to book 4 nights in Rome. I paid for that city centre hotel plus city tax on Booking.Com 3 months in advance. 2 days prior to my arrival in Rome, Booking.Com sent me a message that hotel is cancelled and they can refund the money. I made call to Booking.com agents using my roaming phone, and it took over 1 hour to speak to someone on Booking.Com who organised a new hotel 30km away which I declined. After multiple phone calls Booking.Com rebooked me in a city central hotel costing extra $300 for 4 days. Upon my insistence, they agreed to bear the difference but asked me to pay for the new hotel and claim it back which I did.

After paying for the second hotel, I demanded the first hotel payment and the difference. It took me over 30 phone calls to Booking.Com and over 30 emails before I got the money. In each of those 30 phone calls lasting over one hours each, different person took my call, and I had to repeat my story every time. It was very frustrating. The call centre in the Philippines is hopeless.

I could not find any email address or phone number (other than call centre) on Booking.Com website where I could escalate or lodge a complaint. I looked up on Facebook and see that there is a big group of over 16,000 members who have been wronged by Booking.Com.

The purpose of this post is that please stay away from Booking.Com and they are incapable of handling your concerns with some respect. Whole Booking.Com sucks and have no responsibility at all. They don't have complaint resolution process as well. How is Australia permitting them to operate here and don't insist on customer protection?

Where possible, please share my real case of extremely poor service by Booking.Com. with your near ones and friends. Backlash of customers is one way to improve the service.

Thanks for reading my post.

Related Stores

Booking.com

• 

  FoxJump on 02/12/2024 - 22:38

  +1

  This is why, if possible, you only book places where you can pay when you get there.
  This is why, if possible, you airbnb/booking to find a place with space, and then google them and book directly.

• 

  this is us on 02/12/2024 - 22:50

  +1

  Genuine/philosophical question: was it worth going through the hassle and wasting so many hours of your life dealing with terrible customer service? Looking back, would that be better option to just take the refund and find another hotel yourself, even if more expensive?

  Having to deal with these companies is exhausting, and having your holiday plan changed last minute is obviously frustrating, but you probably increased your suffering exponentially by trying to get them to do what you think is reasonable.

  • 

    sonicentropy on 02/12/2024 - 22:54

    +2

    Exactly..

  • 

    Countryboyperth on 02/12/2024 - 22:55

    +1

    Very true. It was first time I booked through Booking.Com and believed their agents who made it sound like it is very easy just few clicks the money is refunded. Lessons learnt.

  • 

    Countryboyperth on 02/12/2024 - 22:56

    +1

    Learnt my lesson and thought of sharing with others before they learn the hard way. .

  • 

    nwa on 03/12/2024 - 08:49

    +1

    That's the lesson. Nothing wrong with booking.com. Cancellations happen, just don't make special deals and non standard arrangements with them. Get your refund and move on.

    Same can be said for booking.com. No where does it say compensation for cancellations. If they stood firm on original refund only there is probably less to complain about as that was the contract.

• 

  stirlo on 02/12/2024 - 23:54

  Booking.com is the largest travel site in the world. Like all online travel companies they make their money through their commission on the 99% of bookings that work correctly. They're cheap and simple and extremely popular. In 2023 they booked over 1 billion hotel room nights so the fact a mere 16,000 people joined a facebook complaints group astonishes me!!!

  For the 1% of bookings where there are issues no online travel site is going to provide good service. They all have terrible customer service. If you want a phone number to call a real person to solve your issue you will need to book direct or through a real travel agent (and likely pay more).

  Where possible you should google the hotel name and make a direct booking with them (to save commission costs and sometimes get upgrades) but Booking.com is a perfectly fine service 99% of the time and makes it so easy.

  Next time book yourself something new yourself and claim on your travel insurance if it disrupted your trip.

• 

  sumyungguy on 03/12/2024 - 00:39

  +2

  Like you OP, I tell everyone I know to switch to their competitors. The hook for me used to be refundable rates (for select properties) when the hotel's comparable rate was non-refundable. Then I experienced how last-minute they advised a hotel had cancelled but checking with the actual hotel this turned out to be false. I also had a dispute with a property over early check-in (long story), Booking.com failed to negotiate my refund yet I achieved a satisfactory resolution by contacting the hotel myself. All good, they have lots of competitors.

• 

  relentless on 03/12/2024 - 01:52

  +2

  Could this be covered by travel insurance if you can prove you were not at fault?

• 

  DingoBilly on 03/12/2024 - 08:56

  -1

  It sounds like you got the exact outcome you were after although it took a while. I'd suggest this is you being a bit entitled here as opposed to the company being shit, albeit sounds like the customer service part wasn't great.

  I would have gone with the $300 for 4 days without paying extra myself. Seems like a reasonable compromise from them given its not their fault the hotel cancelled on you. As others have pointed out, way better use of your time. Booking.com didn't have to compensate you the $300 at all but did… So you did better than most people would have and I'd say the company did more than they had to for you.

  I personally really like booking.com. Have only had good experiences and their flexible cancellation policies are great for someone as undecisive as me.

  • 

    ryefig on 03/12/2024 - 09:37

    Agree with you DingoBilly, I have made many bookings with B.com and had no issues whatsoever. The website/app is easy to use and makes finding hotels much easier than trying to google and scrolling through hundreds of results.

    Though OPs experience was an unfortunate one, I hardly think this post on OzBargain will get people to move away from them.

• 

  brandt on 03/12/2024 - 10:21

  There is something weird going on with Booking.com. This is not the first time I've heard this happening, and have heard of fake hotels and the site selling rooms that don't exist.

  Recently I saw a booking.com ad on instagram which caught my eye it was a series of images… first was a picture of a hotel room after a fire, the second was a dull looking motel, the third was an absolutely filthy pool.. I can't imagine who would ever approve the use of those as marketing material. I'm guessing they have implemented an AI model that picks images off from some database and puts them in a preapproved template and programmatically displays them on insta.. except the database must not be purely marketing and its just randomly selecting images and launching them into the world with no human approving copy.

  The whole thing was so weird I actually thought it was a scam site pretending to be booking.com but nope it was the real deal.

• 

  McFly on 03/12/2024 - 11:06

  Not saying your experience doesn't suck, but I've used them locally and around the world 16 times over seven years with zero issues.

• 

  sam-1966 on 03/12/2024 - 20:40

  I have been getting heaps of emails from people that have allegedly booked a room from me… even though I don't have one!

  Took ages to find a way to contact Booking.com to sort it out. And then it was a case of 'well we don't know anything about it'…

  Deleted them immediately.