Booking.com hotel didnt have our confirmation - cant contact anyone to help

[growgrowinggrown]

Arrived at our hotel late last night in Greece -

Night receptionist told us we have no booking with them and was really dismissive, shrugged his shoulders and told us we needed to leave as it isnt safe for his guest to have non guests there that late.

Our taxi driver noticed us having issues and came in to help. Eventually he convinced the receptionist to call a manager, who confirmed there was no booking showing but he could put us up in a sister hotel 30mins away. He would call us in the morning to arrange transfer back to the hotel.

At this point it was gone midnight and I just wanted a bed for the kids so off we went.

Sister hotel is up a really steep hill, no family suite, no where near the beach and very dated.

Hotel have now said we cant be transferred to original hotel and need to stay here. The 4k I paid for the room is 'missing' and I need to pay again.

Booking.com have online chat -24hr response time, phone number goes to AI robot who is all but useless.

Im extremely tired and cant see the wood for the trees at the moment

Any advice on how to proceed? Whole thing feels like a scam

Definitely sounds a scam, was the taxi driver possibly in on it too? Don't you have emails showing the booking and payment?

Have you got evidence of the booking in booking.com?

What do the Ts & C's say about at what point the booking is confirmed?

Taxi driver was pre-booked separate company so pretty sure that was all legit.

Booking.com have my booking confirmed, emails sent to be with references, and the hotel had even done an automated reply to the chat feature when you put time of arrival after confirmation.

'Out of hours check in confirmed, we look forward to you staying with us' so from my side all legit

Can't get hold of anyone from the website to confirm with but I've booked over 200 hotels on this account and always get the same email chains.

Hopefully it will get sorted today when full staff on, last night probably only had minimum night staff on.

Sorry to say that my experience with booking.com is shocking. After years of having no issues we refused to use them again after one of our flights got moved to days earlier, they didn’t tell us, we obviously missed the flight and on the day we were always intending to fly they took so long to even acknowledge complaints or issues, putting us on hold, and generally fobbing us off that we had to find our own flights from a different city and pay for transport despite having been in touch at 8am and there being plenty of flights available locally if they’d bothered to sort it out. When we were looking at reviews it wasn’t just us in that boat either! After that I’d never trust them with a hotel again either. They’re fine until something goes wrong (usually at their end…) at which point they are less than no help at all.

The only way we managed to get someone to actually call us was by going through the chat bot and then threatening to pay for our own expensive flights and stating we’d come after them for costs. After over an hour and a bit being fobbed off with “I’m investigating” messages they suddenly rang within a minute. Unfortunately it was a call centre who were incredibly unhelpful and if you ask for it to be escalated, their manager will call back “within three business days”.

To me it doesn’t sound like a scam so much as more of the same sheer incompetence. Really sorry Op. Your contract is with them so it’s booking.com you need to sort it with - I hope they were more helpful for you than they were with us. I wouldn’t put much hope in them arranging a suitable alternative hotel but maybe they will manage. They should refund (they refunded us but no compensation) but it may not be soon enough to cover the upfront cost of a new hotel.

Really hope you’re able to get sorted and enjoy the rest of your trip.

Hope you get it sorted. I had something similar but I think it was a Hotels.com. In my case somewhere between the booking website and the hotel IT the reservation got allocated as an Expedia one so they couldn’t find it when we arrived -late so skeleton unskilled staff on duty. I had to pay again before they would give me the room key but it was only one night and we were tired so I did. It then took a week or so of emailing to get it sorted but I did eventually get a refund.

I've only had a couple of issues with booking.com and used them for hotels numerous times. Both issues were the hotel spelling my name incorrectly on their system.
Try one of these numbers for booking.com
+44 2033 202 609
0203 684 7923

Go back to original hotel again and show them the confirmation that you automatically received from them absolutely do not accept a less good room.

I’d never use booking.com again as they are absolutely useless if anything goes wrong. I paid booking.com for a hotel, arrived and the hotel said it wasn’t pre-paid, I had to pay again. So £800, then £800 again, then another £800 was held on my bank account. It was a nightmare and I didn’t receive the money back until a week after, it was just lucky I had that much money in my current account. Helpline etc was useless, I expected them to clarify with the hotel that I had paid, but no, nothing.

Sorry OP, no advice on your situation except to go back to the hotel again in daytime with your emails.

Thankyou for the replies, has made me feel a little less alone and panic stricken.

Got back to the original hotel who are adamant they haven't received any money at all from booking.com despite over 4k having left my account.

They've taken 500£ 'deposit' and given me the room whilst things are sorted out.

Spoke with booking.com who said they have paid the hotel and pretty much fobbed me off.

I've contacted my back to dispute the payment and will use that to pay again.

Not the best start to a trip and so shocking to see so many with a similar experience. I just assumed with such a big name id be safe

Are you 100% sure you're at the right hotel? This happened to a friend and she was at the wrong hotel. Many have very similar names.

Booking.com is currently being sued in a class-action lawsuit by 10,000 hotels because of their dodgy practices. And they‘re notorious for their shite customer service. So it‘s not necessarily a hotel scam. I book with them very reluctantly if there‘s no alternative. Hope you find a better solution for tonight.

Booking told us payment would be taken automatically for our Uk mini break. As I left the hotel I asked if I needed to sign anything. They said no and sent us on our way only for us to be phoned an hour later on the motorway to say they’d not been paid. I was so embarrassed. Both hotel and booking to blame I think.

The issue is that booking.com is just a booking service - if a hotel is trying to pull a fast one then they need to unpick what happened. When I had similar happen (though in uk) I was able to get help from uk based staff who did sort the issue - yes booking.com had passed on the money to the hotel chain but the chain hadn’t posted the money to the individual bookings so bookings had been cancelled at 6pm on arrival day. Never will stay at Britannia hotels again!

Hotels.com is owned by Expedia, as are quite a few other smaller sites, most of the big sites like booking.con (and no that's not a typo!), Expedia, Air BnB can feed directly into the most popular booking systems that the places you're booking themselves use to manage bookings, so you make your booking and it appears on the place's booking system automatically. So your booking probably showed in their system as Expedia, and generally Expedia bookings don't charge the guests, the hotel does, but it does happen where they have charged the guest, only there's nothing sent through to tell you that, even checking their portal it's not always easy to decipher if they've taken the payment or not.

And bookings that never make it through, or that have been added when the hotel is full and something has gone wrong their end and the hotel ends up dealing with a pissed off guest who has a booking through a 3rd party that never actually made it to the hotel at all.

They're a nightmare to deal with from the other side too, and like to make out that any issue has been the other parties fault in the event of an issue even when it's blatantly obvious it's theirs.

They create more work, pissed off customers that and charge places a bit insignificant commission for the trouble.

But people use them because they're convenient, I use them as a search engine and then approach places direct because 9 times out of 10 the booking process is more straightforward, and it's usually cheaper or with an upgrade offered when booking direct.

I have no idea why my comment has been hidden! I wasn't offensive in any way, and other people have used the site names I did.

How is everyone booking their holidays then for future reference?

I used to love airbnb but reluctant to use them now given all the issues it is causing for locals.

I totally get it's booking.coms fault, but not being able to speak to anyone human, and then it being a call centre who are totally uninterested and struggling with understanding me made is a million times more stressful than needed.

At least the hotel I have now is spot on, gyros in hand and ill deal with the rest at the end of our stay.

I've stopped using booking.com @growgrowinggrown , there have been so many stories like this - I always book directly with the hotel now and I don't use airBnBs at all.

Book directly!

Go directly to the hotel, a lot will have their own online booking site, or at least a phone number and email address, I get when there's a language barrier it's more difficult but we bend over backwards to help guests to book direct, using Google translate and such, and not just because we save commission (which means prices stay lower too) but because there's a lot less chance of something going wrong and if it does then you are dealing with the people you need to rather than having to relay through a 3rd party and wait for them to get their act together.

It's not great for the hotel to deal with annoyed and disappointed guests when you have done nothing to cause it and are limited in ways to solve it but are the ones getting the hassle for it.

Look on TripAdvisor, ask for personal recommendations, check out the online presence of anywhere you want to book, do a bit of research, at the end of the day these sites are supposed to offer you back up when something goes wrong and do those checks for you, but increasingly they're not or they are absolutely no help when something does go wrong or they're the ones causing it! You're paying indirectly for that service, the place you book gets charged commission for the service they provide, which is baked into the price you pay.

Book directly or an ABTA bonded agency. Not booking .scum

A question for those that do book directly - do most hotels offer free cancellation in the same way that booking.com does? That's the main reason I use it and in year and years have never had an issue. After reading this thread I think I'll stop.

I used to be a regular booker with them but have heard so many stories similar to the op as a solo traveller I am not willing to get to my destination and not have a reservation. As another poster said I use the site to research hotels etc in the area I want to stay in and then book direct.

Yes, they seem to now all have started doing this - that was also the reason I used booking.com but hotels have now caught on.

Surprised at these as have had good experiences over many years of booking with booking.com on lots of countries - occasional issues arriving have been sorted rapidly and effectively.

There are usually two prices. One for non refundable and a slightly higher one with cancellation rights.