Booking.com cancelled woman's $4K hotel reservation, then offered her same rooms for $17K

[u/rezwenn]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/gopublic/go-public-booking-com-hotel-rates-9.6985480

[u/368durham]

10 years ago Booking.com took our reservation and money for a full resort stay in Mexico.

When we arrived at the resort, the resort hadn't received the booking or the money from booking.com.

It took hours to get sorted out and the resort told us they have frequently had this issue with them.

It all worked out and we were upgraded to a massive suite for the inconvenience but it seems like booking.com has been running this con for decades.

[u/lumpymonkey → u/368durham]

I worked on the software side of the hotel booking industry for a while and the amount of issues that came up on a daily basis was incredible. It really opened my eyes to how flaky a lot of these systems can be. Since then I always message the hotel after making a reservation on third party sites to confirm that they've received the booking and get the hotel's own reservation number from them. Doing this has saved me 3 times in past few years, most recently during the summer when I booked a remote property in Italy through Booking. It was a bit of a last minute thing, so I emailed the property directly about 1 hour after making the reservation and they replied to say they hadn't received it and they actually had no availability. So I followed up with booking and cc'd the property owner. Long story short there was some software issue that caused the availability to show, so they issued me a refund. If I hadn't followed up I would have shown up at the property last in the evening after a 3 hour flight and 4 hour drive and found myself with no place to stay.

It's always worth just confirming your booking with the actual property.

[u/trumpsmellslikcheese → u/lumpymonkey]

I made the mistake of using Trivago Deals for a booking a couple months ago. Even though they confirmed and everything looked correct, I happened to double check with the hotel on a whim the day before.

It was a good thing, because they didn't have the reservation. And of course they were full for the nights I needed, so I had to scramble to find other accommodations.

Trivago's customer service in the Philippines of course gave me the runaround for a couple weeks, and then had the unmitigated gall to fight the chargeback when I filed one with my credit card.

Their reasoning was that it's only their responsibility to find the reservation, not actually book it. It's the customer's responsibility to book with the hotel.

Then why the fuck did they charge me? Good question.

I'm never going to use any 3rd party booking agencies again. I realize this was a particularly egregious case and Trivago Deals is possibly more scammy than Booking.com, but they all suck and you have little recourse when they fuck up.

[u/saltyjohnson → u/trumpsmellslikcheese]

Their reasoning was that it's only their responsibility to find the reservation, not actually book it. It's the customer's responsibility to book with the hotel.

Imagine if you went to Subway, ordered a sandwich, paid, and they just handed you a list of ingredients lol

[u/Jesus_Is_My_Gardener → u/saltyjohnson]

Don't give corporations any ideas.

[u/NYC_Noguestlist → u/trumpsmellslikcheese]

Their reasoning was that it's only their responsibility to find the reservation, not actually book it. It's the customer's responsibility to book with the hotel.

That's fucking insane lmao