Is Booking.com too scammy to trust now?

[Icanseeasquirrel]

Or have I just been unlucky? Sorry this is long. I’ve been using Booking.com for years without issues. Have used Airbnb a couple of times but I’m not a fan of them because of all the accommodation they have removed from the rental market and all the bad reviews about scams . I have excellent reviews on both sites and leave good reviews.

I have tended to book hotels on Booking.com and it’s always been fine but for an upcoming wedding needed a few rooms for a two night stay for a family wedding group so looked at whole houses.
It’s a Northern town three hours away with around six big hotels.

Attempt 1. Booked a house with booking.com. Months ago. Payment to be made a week before stay. The wedding is this weekend. Ten days ago I get a message. ‘We have been trying to reach you. The property is not available. Please cancel on the site’
Why don’t they cancel it? Anyway I cancelled it. Immediately tried to find another house and of course that one came up as available. I messaged them and they said thanks for letting us know. It’s still listed! (Same price).

Attempt 2. I found a smaller worse option. Booked. Confirmed. Sent a message querying something. They came back ‘We are not available on those dates. Booking cancelled’. Brilliant.

All the twin rooms in all the hotels are gone now. I book an expensive house on Airbnb. Immediately cancelled. ‘Sorry this listing should not show as available on those dates’.

Attempt 3. I book another option. Booking.com again. The last place in town with enough beds for us all. It’s a new listing with no reviews. Less than a week now so paid up front. Yesterday I got a message from Booking.com portal. ‘We need your email address to take the deposit as we are unable to do this on the site’. Gave my email on the site then googled this as a possible scam and yes it is a scam. Appears that the site chat is very easily hacked so messages appear to be from the hosts but aren’t. Does the accommodation even exist?!

The message said entry was via pin pad and would only be released when deposit is paid. So I try to contact the accommodation to query the scam. Don’t trust the messaging system so use the phone number. Recorded message saying to contact them via WhatsApp. It’s some agency in a different Northern town.

Booking.com ‘customer service’ is a chatbot. Completely unhelpful.

So I am not confident that after a long drive we will arrive to have anywhere to stay. I spent last night googling these issues and it’s massive. So many people scammed and unable to do anything via Booking.com to get their money back. People stranded. Fake listing. Constant hacks. Has it been enshittified so much it’s no longer usable? Maybe for hotels that have some security and oversight but not for private listings.

Anyone had this portal messaging scam but still found their accommodation exists? I guess that if we can’t get in we will have to try and contact people out of hours and gather some evidence to try and get a refund but all my searches tell me booking.com are impossible to deal with and I have no chance.

Even if nobody on here can help I wanted to send a warning. Honestly don’t use these sites if you can avoid them. I will be booking direct from now on.

I’ve booked with them loads over the years with no issues, however for our upcoming trip, we got a message saying booking.com had been hacked and to ignore any messages not through the message channel for them…I’ve since had a bunch of texts and WhatsApp messages purportedly from the apartment asking for further personal information within 24 hours or my booking will be cancelled type thing. If id not noticed the original message I probably would have responded to them. It’s put me off a bit I’ll admit.

I wouldn't use it

I use them a lot, but always do lots of research on other sites or reviews elsewhere about the property before booking.

I do have a colleague who was scammed - he booked an overnight for a work trip, basically a single room cabin type thing. Day before, got message to “say not available we have rebooked you for next week automatically” which is utterly absurd. He phoned to confirm but the number rang some totally unknown person. Contacted booking.com chat bot and eventually got through to a person who also tried to contact the property, failed, and agreed it was a scam but said “can’t help, you’ll have to ask your credit card company to do a chargeback for the fraud, we can’t refund you as it wasn’t cancelled.”

Customer service is atrocious.

I will never ever use them again.

A few months ago I had a four hotels reserved for an upcoming trip. Two airport hotels and two accommodation for the holiday. Without warning they deleted my account. They didn’t communicate this to me, they didn’t warn me. It was only when I logged in to pay that I found out they had done this.

I then had to reach out to each hotel to find out that they had cancelled every booking with them. I tried to reach out to booking.com to explain how dangerous this was as I was solo female traveller, but they weren’t interested.

Booking.com is known for being susceptible to scams and poor property management, especially for property listings. The reason they wanted you to cancel was because they would have to pay a fee to booking.com, whereas they avoided that by you cancelling.

I would never book a property on booking.com, only hotels.

I had an issue with them when I booked a stopover in a hotel in France. They took payment 3 times. When I called and eventually managed to get through to the French branch of customer service, they advised that this was just something they do and the refund should be back in 5 working days.

Considering we were on our way to in a very expensive country, that was a significant chunk of our spending money that they just decided to take on a whim.

I have not used them since and will not be doing so again.

i recently booked tickets for the Colosseum in Rome and it was fine.

but i got a post on instagram from a mexican girl that turned up at her apartment booking in Rome and it didn’t exist. someone from a shop next to it told them that they were the 4th people it happened to.

it had been booked through Booking.

i’ve been hearing more stories about Booking and don’t think i’ll risk it again.

Yes that’s another issue with them - they are regularly hacked.

Have a look at the page on Reddit for countless stories of bad experiences.

We rent out our granny flat on booking. Hosts can’t cancel bookings, the guest has to cancel it. That’s why they asked you to cancel.

As someone else suggested, I‘d use booking to look for a place you like. If the accommodation has their own website, book direct. Then you know it is legit, and it should be cheaper too- because the host doesn’t have to pay commission to booking.

I book all my holiday stays with them, I get a Genius discount - always cheaper than booking with hotels direct. Booking mainly hotels, but also booked a couple of flats over the time. Never had any problems.

One thing I do though is always double check reviews on Google and Trip advisor and never stay anywhere that has no reviews.

As an aside, if you don’t like Airbnb because of all the properties they have removed from the rental market, how does booking a home through booking.com make that any better? It’s just a different broker.
Personally I use booking.com for hotels and Airbnb for rental properties and fingers crossed so far that has worked for me.

I went to hotel in Brussels in Feb booked through booking.com. In the run up to the stay I had six WhatsApp messages from ‘the hotel’ telling me to click on a link. They were very obvious looking and two of them used the same photo. I checked my stay directly with the hotel, all was fine and we went to Brussels. And I reported to booking.

During our stay, a couple from Spain tried to check in and found the room was gone but they’d paid and were on the phone to booking.com. I don’t know what happened, but scans are a plenty.

They're awful. Just book directly with the accommodation provider, you don't need to go through third parties.

I had a reservation at a large hotel last weekend. On the Fri I had a message asking for our check in time (today). My booking was for Sat and Sun. I messaged saying we’d arrive at 7pm on Sat. We checked in, all smooth. On the Mon I had a message telling me they expected my arrival in the early hours of Sat and that I’d need to reserve an extra day. We had checked out and were home by then. Oddly now I can’t see any record of these interactions.

They've very quickly gone from "sometimes useful" to "pointless". At best, you'll end up paying more than booking direct. At worst - due to their lack of oversight, customer service, security etc - you'll be robbed.

I’ve experienced many problems with vrbo and Airbnb, everything from. It being able to get into the property to double booking. I’m all about proper hotels now, but less often

Used booking.com for accommodation in many countries across the world for well over 10 years. Three bad experiences - Brazil, Zanzibar and Sussex, UK.
Customer service has deteriorated into pretty much non-existence. They were happy to leave us in the middle of the night with no suitable accommodation because they couldn't get hold of the owner. They only sorted it out because I properly lost my shit.
Therefore I cannot trust them and only book with them if a hotel rate is significantly cheaper and won't be matched directly by the hotel.

It’s been fine for hotels but after a disaster with a serviced apartment, I wouldn’t use them again. They agreed to cancel and refund after an inaccurate listing, then didn’t pay out and washed their hands of it. Awful, dishonest customer service. We only got our money back with a genuine threat to sue.

There was an article from Which about them https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/what-went-wrong-with-booking.com-aYOyv4Q7Ua2D?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwY2xjawSKRMBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA80MDk5NjI2MjMwODU2MDkAAR5tVnMvEbiu3fRnm_nb_cpYzJG0GFUZQLYaYoQsNYpOIIUYxgXR3lsGe1p9sw_aem_ArMWmlCND84zl7LGY1Ne3g#Echobox=1779897246

I’ve used them many times with no issue. One issue this year with an awful hotel we left before staying, they refused to deal with refund and said booking.com had to process it. It was impossible to speak to a real person at booking.com in the end I got £35 back, that’s it

I’ve used them hundreds of times over nearly a decade for hotels only and the genuis discount have been useful but will never use them again after the last time. I booked a hotel I have been to many times before with them through them as usual but when I emailed the hotel about parking then did not have my booking. I sent them the confirmation and they said I had booked a “partner offer” and sure enough the payment had gone to some company in china but there was no booking, no one could seems to help. Both booking.com and the hotel said it would have been sold as a “partner offer” (implying I had done it to save money somehow even though it wasn’t noticeably a different price). Then a couple of days before my stay whoever this mysterious “partner”
was did book a room in my name and the hotel said I could stay but it all felt so weird. When I went back to the site to see if the “partner offer” was flagged there was no mention of it anywhere or on my booking, especially nothing that would make you think they were sending my payment to a random third party who they couldn’t say who they were! Bank suddenly said I needed a new debit card due to suspicious activity which could have been unrelated but I doubt it. Absolutely never again.

Gah, that sounds like a nightmare but I, too, had problems on the site. Similar to your experience the host wanted me to cancel or I‘ve been told the dates I had booked weren’t available - only for them to show on the site when cancelling.

What took the absolute biscuit was a room I had booked in Windsor. I booked it as soon as the Windsor triathlon for last year was confirmed and got a decent price for a room (£90 odd). About 6 months after booking the place I received a message from the host saying they would require me to cancel my booking as the Apartment was undergoing electricity maintenance (building work) and they couldn’t guarantee it would be done by July..this was early 2025. I cancelled the booking only to find that a few weeks later when I was trying to find a replacement they were offering the same room at £150+. 😩

I read the Times travel column and there are so many issues with booking.com, people turning up with no room, there’s a well known scam to pay extra direct by email etc. I have friends who swear by the great deals they get because it shows a percentage discount growing the more you book yet I’ve always found it cheaper going direct

I’ve found it surprisingly pleasant booking direct, I find especially if you speak to someone to book, you’re much more likely to be upgraded for free - have been upgraded to amazing rooms twice since taking this approach, well worth the few extra minutes it takes to book NOT through booking.com!

I refuse to use them anymore. Their security is lax. The line for me is receiving messages through the app that are scams. When scammers know my email address and the fact that I’ve booked accommodation at a particular hotel and can somehow direct message me through the app then that is enough evidence for me. My daughter lost €300. And booking.com didn’t want to know.