booking.com chaotic booking system

They once sent me a confirmation for a booking, but when I arrived at the hotel they claimed they had heard nothing from Booking.com, I had the confirmation in the app, but they only had a room for the first night.

I contacted Booking.com and they booked me a replacement and pretty much the exact same thing happened. The hotel for the new booking only had one or two nights free not the full stay (but they had accepted the booking from booking.com or hadn't updated their list of free rooms in their app, so 'confirmation' clearly isn't actually any kind of actual confirmation). I happened to call into the hotel to check in person this time and cancelled right away when I heard they didn't have a room for the full stay. They phoned another 'local' hotel for me (30 minute drive away), which I thought was nice of them at the time. But then I later found out that they charged me for the partial stay they had a room for anyway, claiming the cancellation was too late as the booking was for the next day.

I pointed out that booking.com made the reservation last minute on the day I called in and they shouldn't have accepted a booking for several nights when they only had one free. I got refunded in the end after a lot of hassle. The booking.com help line was US based, they kept telling me in an obnoxious tone that I didn't understand how booking.com was supposed to work, claiming it wasn't their fault etc. I finally had some marginal expenses covered by booking.com after escalating it.

I've had to use them once since as they had a bit of a monopoly in the area I was going to at the time, but in general avoid if at all possible. If you have to use them it's definitely advisable to call the hotel to confirm the booking, but I'd be even less likely to use them on hearing about the messaging system scamming issues.

The golden rule in building hotel reservations systems, and maybe in 3rd party booking systems too, is that there is always availability. That is from the perspective of the sales and marketing teams; front-of-house staff might argue.

From hearing of the horror stories with b.com I simply avoid them. I do use triv ago .com to check what the general best price is but I always do this in incognito mode so that I don't get spammed by remarketing adverts for months on end.

Once I have an idea of the price, I go to the hotel website itself and if the price is similar, I book directly.

Incognito mode on google is great for any similar searches where in normal mode they try and bombard you with remarketing advertising.

b.com are very aggressive on advertising - many airlines including aerlingus automatically send you to a b.com age when you book. A VERY annoying part of the aerlingus booking system

We use booking.com most of the time and have never had any problems..so far.
There is an e mail , supposedly, from them to confirm details of our booking within the next 24 hours to or lose the booking.
I also received a text from ' booking' that they need more information to 'guarantee your booking ' .

Update on last message...Mrs joer just rang the hotel about the e mail ' message' and it was a legit message. So that is the best way of making sure that everything is above board , ring the hotel..

joer said:

There is an e mail , supposedly, from them to confirm details of our booking within the next 24 hours to or lose the booking.

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It sounds like if the hotel gets a booking through booking.com they don't trust it and require further proof it's legitimate.

I use Booking.com for photos, their maps/location of hotels. I read their reviews. They show the type of room that a person stayed in, unlike Tripadvisor who don't.
I notice that they do not show all of the hotels available on their site. However if you Google the name of the hotel they will offer you a price on it. They seldom show the larger chain hotels unless you specifically request a quote.
You can also ask the hotel a question through their website.....such as......do you have a walk-in shower or is it shower over bath.
I have not booked through them in a long time. I nearly always get a better price when I contact the hotel direct. Sometimes it can be a few Euro but other times it can be substantial.
It can be very difficult to find who owns an apartment for rent but I have through a bit of digging found where the owner can have their own website and dealt with them directly.
Unfortunately Booking.com own numerous booking sites under different names.

After reading this thread i'd be tempted to go back to bricks-n-mortar Irish Travel Agents (or click-n-go, if it wasnt for their mad airport-to-hotel transport charges!)

That sounds very disappointing,I have always found booking.com excellent myself,I remember in croatia in 2023 ,we booked a car at Dubrovnik airport and it was pretty clear very quickly that it was a shakedown operation with rubbish cars , booking.com allowed us out of the deal ,the person I rang up listened to the cowboy who was busy being an ass and said he realized what was going down, we paid a small forfeit fee of €50 but saved a few hundred

Booking.com are huge and sometimes they platform outfits who are not fully reputable but a review system exists

They are miles better than Airbnb who take down negative reviews and just want to wash their hands of complaints

I have never had any problems with either Booking.com or Air B&B and have used both a lot .....

I'm probably stating the obvious, and I see an earlier post making this point, but the Booking.com platform is indeed being exploited in this scam, but it is also operating according to it's design. There's no need for sophisticated black hat IT skills. Most hotels will have a simple to guess password for this system, probably no MFA (if its even an option), and people sharing credentials to the platform with temps, new hires who chuck the job after a day, and even writing the password down and sellotaping it to the reception computer.

booking.com can and must up their access credentials game, just like the banks have been pressured to do. If they want hotels to take security seriously and adhere to enhanced security (and not be human and figure out how to continue making access easy for all) they will need to put financial indemnity for fraud onto them.

kickstart said:

Most hotels will have a simple to guess password for this system, probably no MFA (if its even an option)

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According to this 2FA is supposed to be mandatory for accommodation providers.

Setting up two-factor authentication​

During the registration process on our platform, you must set up two-factor authentication (2FA) to give your account an extra layer of protection. With 2FA activated, you'll log in with your username and password. In addition, we'll send a PIN to your authorized device.

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ClubMan said:

According to this 2FA is supposed to be mandatory for accommodation providers.

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I'm happy to see that. In terms of the breaches that have been reported in this thread, I wonder how long they've mandated it, but that's in the past now.

It seems they have SMS as an MFA method. We know there are (at least) two ways around that -
- Easy: Some hotels will have a reception mobile especially for this, so they can share it around the reservations team.
- Hard: Use specialist IT skills to clone the phone number and re-direct the SMS token to the attacker .

I believe that booking.com also warns hotels that they will be financially liable for fraud that's down to carelessness. On the practical side, if you've used booking.com and handed over money to a scammer, it's going to be a complicated and difficult conversation to get practical redress. Booking.com will blank you, and the hotel will run for cover. Both will hope that the consumer will do a CC chargeback and go away.

Airbnb take down negative reviews at the behest of hosts and probably guest's,we are hosts ourselves and we have thankfully never yet encountered guest's who were in anyway a problem,however as guest's in Italy a few years ago we were once targeted for a shakedown for fabricated allegations about apartment damage, the allegations were beyond spurious and the amount requested was so small, you wouldn't get a tradesman to come out and look at the apartment, nevermind carry out repairs , they were accusing guest's of causing damage as a way of paying for wear and tear repairs and probably wagered that most guest's would pay the circa €250 to avoid conflict, we refused to pay but Airbnb were wishy washy about it and just wanted rid of both sides as quick as possible, they ended up satisfying neither side with their fence sitting , the hosts left us a bad review( I left a very brief note warning future guest's of the hosts game playing) but having read all their reviews afterwards on the site , it was their MO to employ this tactic and other guests referred to allegations of damage