To warn you about booking.com

[AnotherDayAnotherIdea]

I have used airbnb quite a bit in the past, and once went into a property (in london) that was so bad that I had to call airbnb. They issued an immediate refund and helped me find an alternative.

I have also stayed in hotels plenty of times, often via booking.com. And if I had a problem, it was sorted out directly by the hotel.

But now booking.com are offering airbnb style properties owned by individuals.

We booked one about a week ago, and were sent the address and details of a key box promptly.

However once inside, it was clear that the cleaner hadn't been. A simple oversight. The bed hadn't been changed, the kitchenette and shower were dirty, and the towels very dirty indeed. It was 7pm, and we briefly considered just making do, but the towels were covered in something ... marital, so we decided we didn't want to have our children (or us!) stay there.

This is where it all started to unravel, because despite appealing to the owner directly, who promised she had approved a refund, and contacting booking.com, and PayPal, we are still in dispute over this. Booking.com is saying they can do nothing because the owner is unreachable. How is that my problem though?! She says she has approved the request. PayPal has not responded at all.

Basically, if you want an airbnb appartment, use airbnb. Your money is not protected in case of dispute if you book via booking.com.

You're 100% right. I booked a Christmas weekend away with my daughter one December as a treat.

It was a room in a country inn, which looked nice from the photos.

In reality it was a fairly ropey pub, which had a room out the scruffy back yard, accessed via dangerous, slippy stone steps. Once inside, it was a poorly converted annexe, with a tiny narrow corridor leading to about three cramped rooms.

The room was cheaply furnished, with very worrying looking electrics, plus circuit breakers on all the appliances which kept cutting out. There was a tray perched uneasily on a bedside table with a small kettle and sachets of powdered coffee.

It was also freezing as no heating had been on.

Essentially it was minging. I relooked at the listing and realised the photos were very small and a little fuzzy.

Anyway, we arrived late as driving down from London after work so we just settled. Never again.

What did the reviews say for that place?

The reviews were good, it was a nice place, but it hadn't, been cleaned. I thought therefore, as we weren't talking a difference in opinion on quality, justu a simple "the cleaner hasn't been ", that it would be an open and shut thing. Nope.

@Viking11 started at thread on Booking.com but this has more posts and is relevant to what I want to say, so I'll post it here.

Some argue that Booking.com deletes bad reviews - this does seem to be the case.

My sister booked a room through the site at this hotel, East Walls in Chichester. The experience was awful - though it didn't last long!

East Walls Hotel, Chichester (updated prices 2025)

Now, East Walls hotel has positive reviews across the board at first sight - you have to make the effort to investigate the bad reviews only to get a different impression. Now, I was going to use this to highlight how many recent reviews are negative but hidden, but now I post this I see that there is just one bad review in last month, while the next bad review is a long time ago - and I don't recall that being the case when I checked it out a fortnight ago; so some negative reviews do seem to get deleted.

Indeed, even when you look up the same residence on TripAdvisor, again, it still seems like a safe bet - you have to specifically check out the bad reviews to get a fairer impression, and these are drowned out by 'good' reviews, even if the bad ones don't get deleted.

We hardly got over the threshold before we were booted out - we were subjected to a tirade of admonishment in the first minute, it seemed quite extraordinary, our hostess saying angrily and somewhat hysterically 'If you find you don't like it, just say so, you can leave, I have no problem!' Eh?

Now, some hotels do overbook in the same way airlines do, but many have links to other hotels which can step in should there be no 'no-shows' that night. I suspect what happened here was they had overbooked, had no hotel to take the overspill not being a chain, so the best way forward was to find a pretext to turn away the unsuspecting customer. Other reviewers on Tripadvisor experienced a similar turn of events, one advising not to book via booking.com because the hotel resented them for delayed payments, and they took it out on the customer.

It is easier to find the bad reviews on Tripadvisor but again, the hotel still has a high rating across the board.
EAST WALLS HOTEL - Updated 2025 Prices & Specialty Hotel Reviews (Chichester, England)

The question then is, do you get a refund via booking.com because a good many have found they don't get their money back. You might then instead choose to get your refund on your credit card instead? Problem is, the hotel then has your credit card details and can simply withdraw the same amount from your card the following day without your permission. I'm not saying this is what happened, here, suffice to say the matter is with First Direct's fraud department.

Don't expect the police to get involved; apparently the matter is a 'dispute' and not a police matter!

Many praise booking.com saying they've never had any problem; one suspects it's a numbers game, as with Ryanair; so if something goes wrong, your're screwed but most customers can say it went well, so there you are.

That was our first and last time of going via booking.com!

It might help your case above if you explained why you were thrown out of your hotel within a minute of arrival?

Just a word of warning, don't book flights through them. If a problem arises or you need to make changes they cannot provide a resolution at all.
Twice they've been unable to add a passenger for me and the final time (aka the final straw) came when they took the money for a flight and then told me they couldn't fulfil it and I'd have to wait for a refund. I needed the flight the next day so it put me in a difficult financial position having to pay out twice before the refund.

I always use them for hotels and taxis to and from the airport. I've never had a problem.

I think I have explained the most likely reason - they'd double booked the room.

Not that they said that. The hosts went on about how they had CCTV cameras there, as it to imply we were crooks. Now, I'll out myself as a bloke - my sister booked and paid for the room as it was short notice and she was on the website. She booked a hotel elsewhere... when I dropped my stuff off there and sat with her in the room briefly, the hostess ushered my sister out, saying 'No monkey business!' and seemed to insinuate she was a prostitute or something.

This was after two minutes there so the offer to refund us and boot us out seemed less of a threat than an opportunity to be seized.

But it was evening and I couldn't find another hotel to stay at, so had to sleep on the floor of my sister's hotel room. Not what either she or I had in mind, still it was just one night.

Other Tripadivsor reviews - which we hadn't read unfortunately - talked of the same experience - being rudely shown the door.

Anyway, this was via Booking.com You don't get the impression that Booking.com are all over this but in fairness do the police do anything these days either?

Still have no idea what you are on about. You checked into a hotel and went into your room. But somebody from the hotel went into your bedroom, told you that they had CCTV, implied your sister was a prostitute and threw you onto the street? Because they had double booked the room? That doesn't make any sense. Why let you into the room in the first place? Why tell you they were illegally recording you?

You tell me, I had no idea what they were going on about either. But I had a clearer insight after reading the other reviews - it seems if a room is double booked, they have to find a reason to kick the other person out, not having another hotel to send them on to.

We can go on about this all day. My point was about Booking.com, whom my sister had booked through.

1. It seems they don't vet the hotels they put on their site, or hold them to account in any way.
2. It appears they delete bad reviews of the hotels.
3. Hotels get an inflated rating because of this.
4. They have a bad reputation with some hotels, who complain about delayed payments from Booking.com, so you are not their favoured guest, as can also happen with voucher type deals and so on.
5. You may not get a refund from them if it all goes pear-shaped.
6. If you're invited to get the refund on your credit card, that means the hotel will have your credit card details and can withdraw money from it unless you put a block on it immediately after the refund, and you'll have to keep the block there until you get a new card - hardly ideal!

We were scammed via Booking.vom. They blamed the hotel. We know it wasn't the hotel. We eventually got a refund from Booking.com. It wasn't easy getting the money out of them. They are a Dutch company and you do not have the same legal protection when using them that you would have with a UK business.

I wish I'd seen this thread before booking a short break next weekend through Booking.com. When I went to double check the details I couldn't find a confirmation email from them, though I could see that the payment had gone through on the day I booked. The website offers to re-send the confirmation email, so I tried that but nothing appeared. I then phoned their laughably misnamed Customer Service line - what a waste of time. The person I spoke to kept saying that the booking hadn't gone through despite the fact that they had my money and had provided written a booking index no. through Paypal; then he kept saying the money would be refunded to me because the booking hadn't gone through. When I asked him why, if that was the case, it hadn't been refunded already, he just repeated that I would get the payment within two weeks. Despite the fact that I'm a registered customer, it seemed to be completely out of their power to feed my details into their computer to find out what an earth had happened.

Fortunately I should be able to get my money back via the credit card company, but obviously if I hadn't called today to double check we would have ended up being turned away from the hotel, no doubt having to spend a fortune to find somewhere else at short notice.

Lesson learned, no more booking through Booking.com.