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.

Bikes a boutique hotel with them last year. Was assured by hotel that booking would automatically take the payment on departure day. They didn’t. I ended up looking like a common thief. The hotel had to contact me when I was halfway down the motorway going home to say bookings had failed to pay. Luckily I sorted it immediately over the phone but I felt awful about the whole thing.

I avoid them

I think what she means is that air bnb caused all this in the first place. Aka it’s “the air BnB effect”. Which I think is a principled stance, although as you say a bit pointless now everyone is doing it.

What I will say for air bnb is that they gave me a full refund in the pandemic when we couldn’t travel, although I did have to get a bit cross with them.

Yikes. I have three private rentals booked through them for a trip to Norway this summer. Worrying now! Never had a problem with them before; switched from AirBnB due to places letting us down and thought Booking.com was better. It has been so far, I hope our luck holds out for this summer as the area we’re going to has very limited accommodation.

I’ve used booking.com for all kinds of accommodation; hotels, apartments, hostels, guesthouses, across the UK, (mainly London), Ireland, Spain, Malta,Germany, Italy , Austria,Jordan, Egypt and Morocco without any issues. In fact I have had excellent experiences when have had to cancel even non refundable accommodation and when I explained the situation I got a full refund on more than one occasion. Maybe I’ve been lucky, maybe you have been unlucky.. as people have said; it’s a huge platform so I guess inevitably someone will have a bad experience. I do a lot of multi centre trips and it would be a nightmare doing all the accommodation independently

I think they may have been targeted recently, I just got a very authentic looking message from my host for a trip this weekend, with a link to Booking, asking to reconfirm credit card details. I very nearly fell for it; it was a scam.

I don’t use them. I use trivago and then check the hotel online. One I looked at had a booking.com price. When I looked up the hotel it was the same price but had a 20% discount for booking direct and I would then be the hotels guest hit a third party and would have better protection if something went wrong.

Sorry that sounds absolutely crap

i used booking.com for a house stay last week (first time I’ve used for a non-hotel) and all was fine fortunately.

but I do think booking whole properties rather than hotels, regardless of where, is far less reliable than booking a hotel. A house owner can change their mind at any time. A hotel is unlikely to do that.

That sounds awful..

I managed to stay at the five star rated accommodation I had booked, but it was awful. No hot water, no staff on site, broken door lock. I felt really unsafe and Booking were useless.

I don’t use it that much, but when I do, I book 4/5 star hotels with no problem. I prefer to book directly when the price compares as I find the hotel is more likely to give you an upgrade, but when the site offers a better deal, then I use them. I do look at the hotel’s own site and reviews first. Staying somewhere next week, prompt welcoming communication from the hotel as soon as I booked with details of their restaurant for dinner. Also, a warning about how to avoid scammers relating to the booking.

I have used them multiple times for uk trips only and iv'e never had a problem .
I am cautious though after hearing about problems.

I use it because it's largely good, although me, my DH and my friend have all separately had instances of booking somewhere, turning up, and the place has shut down.

DH and I once also booked a bnb the same morning we were staying. Payment taken etc. Turned up and the bloke had no idea we were coming and thought he'd taken the listing down for that week.

So I don't think they should take payment until the owner confirms or something.

I use booking.com to find hotels in an area and get idea of price and availability, but then book directly with hotel or b&b - usually much cheaper that way.

I had an issue a few years ago - so dont book through booking.com anymore. Customer service was AWFUL!!

The security is compromised.

i got a WhatsApp that knew all the details of my booking and asked for extra money.

I’m flying out to my booking next week so we will see but I won’t use the platform again

I use them all the time but only for hotels and I never book anything with less than 100 reviews. I also cross check on trip advisor. Never had a problem until this week when I am getting scam WhatsApp messages purporting to be from a couple of places I’ve currently got booked, asking me to urgently click links to confirm the booking. My data was confirmed to have been lost in the last data breach they had so this is what is causing it. It’s bloody annoying and I can see how people would easily fall for it.

We used them once as it was the best way to organise a multi-centre UK trip.
Never again. A long story, but 1 hotel lied about the accommodation, refused a refund & we had no option but to go elsewhere.
Booking.com were not interested.

Have used Booking loads of times over at least 15 years, prob book about 4 places per year, occasionally use Vrbo or AirBnB.

Never had a real issue other than AirBnB taking the booking but then get a "property not available" a day later.

However, i'm now worried i've cursed my holiday starting next week!!

Tbh, we'd been booking apartments taken from the rental market on booking.com and hotels.com long before airbnb came along and pretended that it was something they'd come up with.

They’re awful. I was scammed out of £1,000 - got a message from the property agent when we had landed at the airport to say that our booking had been cancelled. They never gave us a refund. Booking.com were absolutely useless, they did nothing to help.

Luckily we’d paid by credit card and got the money back from the credit card company eventually (Tesco Finance - you are awesome).

I would never use Booking.com again. Avoid avoid avoid.

Ive used them a lot and never had a problem but maybe I've just been lucky. However, I do generally use them to book hotels that I know exist etc. and where they just have a better price than the website. I did feel really anxious using them to book a ski chalet in case we turned up and it was a scam - it was fine (lovely in fact) but not sure the advance stress made it worth it

We had huge problems with them when our apartment in a major European city was cancelled with 4 days notice last summer. The host had the cheek to ask me to cancel. I refused so that they had to - as hopefully booking.com would at least look unfavourably on this. Booking.com gave me a good spiel about how I mustn't worry and I was protected, but ultimately they offered me something like an extra £150 to cover the whole booking. This wouldn't have even got us budget hotel rooms (which would have completely changed the nature of the holiday as a large family group). I'm much more careful now and still use them for hotels but I wouldn't want to book an apartment through them. This was with a provider who had lots of reviews incidentally.

I've given up on them since an incident last year. We booked a small hotel, they the money, but when I went to check a couple of weeks later I realised I hadn't had any confirmation. I had an infuriatingly circular conversation with their customer service people who eventually said it meant that the booking hadn't gone through and I would receive a refund within a week. Needless to say, it hasn't arrived, despite chasing. I'm going to try recovering it via my credit card provider though I've heard that's not easy as they're registered outside the UK.

The last two times I booked accommodation through booking.com I was scammed by new owners of properties using old photographs and reviews from previous owners

1st booking wasn't too bad so I stayed, 2nd booking was horrific

1st booking was still advertising itself as a 4 star hotel with it's own restaurant but when I got there, the restaurant had been converted into a shop and separate café and the room was odd, needed dusting, but OK. Definitely NOT 4 star, though

2nd booking I put up on Mumsnet on 30 days only

Advertising itself as an ensuite room only, it was beyond horrific

Using pictures from when it was a well reviewed B&B, it was smelly and dirty, with dangerous electrics and I ended up spending nearly £1k on another hotel

The scammers refused to cooperate with booking.com for the dispute and refund, I had to raise a dispute through Visa and I eventually got my money back after nearly two months

I will never use booking.com again

They are too open to scammers, their security issues are now well known, they don't seem to vet any of their advertisers and are toothless in disputes

Agree, plus you as a customer aren't reviewed by booking. com hosts so not sure how you have great records with both companies.

Same issue here! Except they somehow messaged me via the app!