We spent £7,300 on a Booking.com trip... but booking didn’t exist!
Ms A.S. writes: We booked villas in Turkey through Booking.com for our group of 19 people, but when we arrived, the owner told us to leave as we did not have a reservation.
He then called the police. We had paid €8,400 (about £7,300), but had to spend two days in emergency accommodation costing €2,000 (about £1,740) and a further €6,000 (about £5,200) on new villas. This was a very expensive nightmare holiday. We have been asking Booking.com for a refund and hope you can help us.
YOUR party of 19 people included four small children, and you paid in advance for three villas.
Just a few days before your holiday, you were given confirmation of the arrangements to transfer you from the airport to the villas at Kalkan. But when you landed, there was no transport waiting for you, and when you called the owner of the villas, he denied that you had a reservation and told you not to go to the villas. You went anyway, and found the owner waiting there. He called the police to have you removed and you spent seven hours at the local police station.
The police were actually sympathetic and helpful. They found you hotel rooms for the next two nights and even gave you an online link through which you successfully found new villas, though this meant paying all over again.
Meanwhile, there was confusion and contradiction over why all this had happened. The owner of the original villas said he knew nothing about your booking, and suggested that a previous owner had scammed you. But he gave a slightly different explanation to Booking.com, saying you had been double-booked.
You contacted Booking.com and were assured that you would have a refund within a fortnight. But no refund arrived, and you have told me that Booking.com explained that you did not have ‘documents in the correct currency’, whatever that means. At this point, having spent a month trying to get your money back, you contacted me.
I asked Booking.com to comment, and was quickly told: ‘We would like to apologise to the customer for their experience and the obvious inconvenience they faced. We will, of course, be refunding them for the original booking and relocation fees, while we investigate further to understand what happened.’
But in a message to you, Booking. com said: ‘Booking.com does not own any rooms, apartments or other accommodation units, and we are not responsible for this situation.’
The company did refund all the money you paid originally, and it said it would pay you a further £819 ‘as a gesture of goodwill’.
The £819 was the cost of the two days you all spent in emergency hotel accommodation. There was nothing to make up for the thousands of pounds you spent from your savings and holiday money in order to pay on the spot for the replacement villas. And nothing to make up for a ruined holiday when you had paid for a restful one.
And, of course, none of this explains what went wrong in the first place. Booking.com does not believe this was a scam, and it confirmed that the Turkish property company employed by the owner of the villas had accepted your booking. Booking.com has removed the villas from its website.
The final outcome is that although you have now received just over £8,000, you are still about £1,000 out of pocket. And your trip was hardly the holiday you expected.
Booking.com emphasised: ‘To the extent permitted by mandatory consumer law, we will only be liable for costs you incur as a direct result of a failure on our behalf.’
It added that the £819 it paid on top of the refund ‘is not an admission of responsibility’.
This is not reassuring.