Booking.com: Price Increase After Booking Accepted

pjh104

Hi

We wonder if anyone here has any advice on how to handle the following. 

1. Booked a property with Booking.com on 1st of the month @ GBP 200 per night
2. Received booking confirmation
3. 7 days later Booking.com send a message saying “Price should have been £300 per night, please log in to accept new price or cancel”

This is a prepay but cancellable booking, and I suspect it was when they tried to take the money that the error was discovered. Nothing has been charged to us thus far. Do we have any redress here, or are they entitled to do this under e&oe? 

Thanks in advance for any advice.

heatherw_01

Not really no. You can accept or cancel which are the correct choices in this situation seeing as an error was made.

leylandsunaddict

It's not booking.com that have changed the price, it's the property.  They've either loaded it incorrectly or they've realised there's a major event on in the vicinity and that they can charge more.  

You can either accept the change or cancel.

YIB213

Yep - as above. It is the property instigating the changes. Bcom are just facilitating it and giving you a choice of two.

pjh104

So in essence Booking.com are facilitating a business where the property owner can at any time say “whoops, an error, pay more or get lost”? Not a good look. 

heatherw_01

Any shop online can make mistakes with price and also cancel your order if the price was a mistake.
With hotels it happens too like in this instance. They can ask you to pay the difference or offer you free cancellation which is what offered here.

pjh104

Fair enough, but what how do you establish a true error and taking the mickey? For example looking at the rate at which bookings are being snapped up for like apartments and then saying, some way down the line, “we made a mistake and are not charging what the market will now bear?”. Surely there has to be a point at which the contract is struck and should be honoured ? 

Aylesbury_Duck

pjh104 said:

Fair enough, but what how do you establish a true error and taking the mickey? For example looking at the rate at which bookings are being snapped up for like apartments and then saying, some way down the line, “we made a mistake and are not charging what the market will now bear?”. Surely there has to be a point at which the contract is struck and should be honoured ? 

That would normally be once payment has been made, but even then, an error can be corrected.  It could be difficult to prove a genuine error wasn't made and you'd have to weigh up whether you felt strongly enough to go down the loss of bargain route to force a price on the seller.  Then there's the obvious question: Would you want to stay somewhere that you'd legally forced to honour a lower price?