Booking.com price hike after booking

raaaaa

Hello,
Grateful for any advice if possible please.
Booked a hotel room in new York last week during a brief stay, and booked a room listed as being £207 as a "mobile only" deal using their app (the same room was coming up as £236 on the laptop). When checking out of the hotel, the Booking.com charge for the room has come up as £290!
I queried this with Booking.com, and they were completely unsympathetic and said that unless i can provide a screenshot of the cheaper price then they don't accept it and reject my complaint. Of course as i booked it using the app, i don't have any screenshot and the prices for that date no longer appear.
Anyone else had experience of this, and is there anything i can do to challenge Booking.com further?
Thanks

Sandtree

What does your booking confirmation email say the price was?

I have experienced there be something to pay at the hotel on top of the amount in the confirmation email (not booking.com) but those were city taxes/resort fees etc which the small print did say was on top of the hotel price and payable to the hotel. I do always double check the confirmation email and have queried a couple where there has been a buy 2 get 1 free type offer and the email gave a per night average fee that didn't make sense.

Westin

Sandtree said:

What does your booking confirmation email say the price was?

I have experienced there be something to pay at the hotel on top of the amount in the confirmation email (not booking.com) but those were city taxes/resort fees etc which the small print did say was on top of the hotel price and payable to the hotel. I do always double check the confirmation email and have queried a couple where there has been a buy 2 get 1 free type offer and the email gave a per night average fee that didn't make sense.

My question as well. 

TELLIT01

Check the hotel's own website for 'resort fees' and other local charges.  Many hotels throughout the USA have caught on to this 'con' which started in Las Vegas.  When we were looking at the possibility of returning to Hawaii we discovered resort fees of up to $50 per night.  They are not optional, even if you don't want to use the facilities they are supposedly to cover.

daveyjp

Without evidence not much you can do and whilst a price may be given, if the room they quote for isn't available it maybe subject to'bait and switch' where a different more expensive room is offered at checkout.

It why I generally use booking.com, hotels.com etc as research tools, but then book direct with the hotel.

Sandtree

daveyjp said:
if the room they quote for isn't available it maybe subject to'bait and switch' where a different more expensive room is offered at checkout.

Bit harsh to only swap your room type at checkout, if they did it at check in at least you get to enjoy the presidential suite

Ozzig

I found them to be absolutely useless with a system designed to take as much money as fast as possible with the promise you'll never see any of it again. 
Customer service dire.

Upsidedownandaround

I don’t really understand the sequence of events here.

The hotel sets the prices not booking.com. If you booked for £207 then you should have received confirmation of that by email and in the app.

How did the booking.com price end up as £290 at checkout? Surely that would be the hotel charging you this and you would have asked them why they were charging you more? What did they say?

Upsidedownandaround

Ozzig said:

I found them to be absolutely useless with a system designed to take as much money as fast as possible with the promise you'll never see any of it again. 
Customer service dire.

Certainly contradicts my experiences with them.

A lot of issues from my experience seem to stem from misunderstanding how the platform works and that it is a direct distribution platform where the hotels upload the inventory and prices themselves rather than booking.com being a company who sell the rooms itself and set the prices and has inspectors who go around visiting all the properties making sure they are of a suitable standard.

Unfortunately this misunderstanding also allows hotels to avoid responsibility by simply blaming booking.com when they have oversold the rooms or try to charge more by being able to tell customers it's booking.coms fault.

A lot of people also use it without checking whether they can get it for cheaper or the same price direct.

Customer service is always a problem for these type of online companies models. People want low prices and the ability to book a room within seconds anywhere in the world and the only way to make this possible is to rely largely on the whole prcoess being automated with minimal human input and as a result when things go wrong usually there is not anough humans available to deal with them.

Ozzig

I understood how it worked when I booked a two-night stay for us and two young children.

It was the accommodation provider refusing to take responsibility because I booked via booking .com and booking .com refusing to take responsibility because the accommodation provider has a no-refunds policy.

Raised the issues on checking in (via phone as no reception service - checking in was a door code number texted to me at 16:30 on the day of check-in)

The accommodation provider said nothing could be done until the next morning.
The next morning the accommodation provider said nothing could be done that day and they had no other rooms to move us to and suggested escalating to booking .com, booking .comsaid "no refunds" but they could look for other accommodation for us but as it was such short notice we'd be paying top dollar for anything they come up with. I didn't have the money to pay for another accommodation and we had two small children at the seaside who would have been heartbroken if we'd just left to come home.

We basically spent two days cleaning and fixing the bits of the accommodation we used as we needed.

Complained to booking .com when we got home about how the system fell down and they said we can have a £20 voucher off our next booking.
I wanted an apology and some understanding that they need to fix the problem not £20 towards a booking I was never going to make.

I asked to escalate to a manager and was told to hang up and call back and ask again as the agent couldn't because they work from home and the next guy might but probably would be able to either.

I told him to close my account and confirm when my details had been removed from their systems and he said to hang up and call back again. 

Never used them again.

Upsidedownandaround

Ozzig said:

I understood how it worked when I booked a two-night stay for us and two young children.

It was the accommodation provider refusing to take responsibility because I booked via booking .com and booking .com refusing to take responsibility because the accommodation provider has a no-refunds policy.

Raised the issues on checking in (via phone as no reception service - checking in was a door code number texted to me at 16:30 on the day of check-in)

The accommodation provider said nothing could be done until the next morning.
The next morning the accommodation provider said nothing could be done that day and they had no other rooms to move us to and suggested escalating to booking .com, booking .comsaid "no refunds" but they could look for other accommodation for us but as it was such short notice we'd be paying top dollar for anything they come up with. I didn't have the money to pay for another accommodation and we had two small children at the seaside who would have been heartbroken if we'd just left to come home.

We basically spent two days cleaning and fixing the bits of the accommodation we used as we needed.

Complained to booking .com when we got home about how the system fell down and they said we can have a £20 voucher off our next booking.
I wanted an apology and some understanding that they need to fix the problem not £20 towards a booking I was never going to make.

I asked to escalate to a manager and was told to hang up and call back and ask again as the agent couldn't because they work from home and the next guy might but probably would be able to either.

I told him to close my account and confirm when my details had been removed from their systems and he said to hang up and call back again. 

Never used them again.

That’s not surprising then.

The fact you booked a poor standard of accommodation is nothing to do with booking.com. I’m not sure what you were expecting them to have done in those circumstances.

If your expectation was that they would provide you with alternative accommodation because you felt the accommodation was poor or you expected them to give you a refund for the accommodation providers failings then with respect I don’t think you do understand how they work.

Unfortunately that is one of the risks of using them though that you give unscrupulous accommodation providers the leverage of blaming booking.com to avoid taking responsibility.