Booking.com - incompetent rip-off. Start of holiday spoilt.

Bob__M

Short-story. 
Booked hotel and car rental through them for 1 week in Tenerife. What a disaster unfolded!  Can't see any value in booking through them.  Will go direct to hotel/supplier in future after doing research on Booking.com site.  Strongly recommend that you don't book through them; just use them for research and "holding bookings" that can be cancelled.

Longer story
Got to TFS (Saturday about 18.30), went to Topcar rental desk to find huge queue.  Asked people in queue and told they'd been there 2 and 2.5 hours and were still some way from the front.  Rather than waiting 3 hours for car (after travelling 7 hours) decided to abandon queue and get taxi/bus to hotel. Wrote email to Booking.com the next morning and they were useless.  So gave up and rented directly with another local company to salvage holiday plans.  Requested refund when back in UK to be told that I should have called Booking.com from the airport to be eligible for the refund (remember this was a Sat evening then about 19.00). After sending email complaints multiple times they eventually gave me a "goodwill" refund but still held onto £55 of my money having delivered nothing of value and plenty of stress and disappointment.

After the taxi delivered us to the hotel we went to check in.  We had paid, we had received confirmation of payment, we had gone through online check-in...and yet the hotel had no record or knowledge of our reservation.  And on top of that it was fully occupied!
So we had to then get another taxi to another, more expensive hotel to find alternative local accommodation.  We actually called Booking.com from the hotel (now about 21.00 on a Sat night) and they said that they would pay for half of the alternative accommodation.  Now we are back in UK, have written to Booking.com and of course they are not now responding to email.

Don't know if we'll ever get any refund for our excess expenses due to their screw-ups.  Based on the car rental rip-off I doubt it, but will update here if any significant development.

DullGreyGuy

Bob__M said:

went to Topcar rental desk to find huge queue.  Asked people in queue and told they'd been there 2 and 2.5 hours and were still some way from the front.  Rather than waiting 3 hours for car (after travelling 7 hours) decided to abandon queue and get taxi/bus to hotel. Wrote email to Booking.com the next morning and they were useless.  So gave up and rented directly with another local company to salvage holiday plans.  Requested refund when back in UK to be told that I should have called Booking.com from the airport to be eligible for the refund (remember this was a Sat evening then about 19.00). After sending email complaints multiple times they eventually gave me a "goodwill" refund but still held onto £55 of my money having delivered nothing of value and plenty of stress and disappointment.

£55 gesture of goodwill is a good outcome for you deciding you didnt like the length of the queue and abandoning your booking. Booking.com no doubt didnt make any promises on the length of the queue and its clearly outside of their control. Clearly others understood their need to queue. 

Bob__M said:
We had paid, we had received confirmation of payment, we had gone through online check-in...and yet the hotel had no record or knowledge of our reservation.  And on top of that it was fully occupied!

So we had to then get another taxi to another, more expensive hotel to find alternative local accommodation.  We actually called Booking.com from the hotel (now about 21.00 on a Sat night) and they said that they would pay for half of the alternative accommodation.  Now we are back in UK, have written to Booking.com and of course they are not now responding to email. 

This is a more material issue and one that shouldn't have happened. When you spoke to them, presumably still in the reception of the first hotel, did you not ask them to arrange an alternative booking for you given clearly wasnt your fault (if its theirs or their suppliers is broadly irrelevant as your contract is with them)?

jbrassy

Who the heck are Topcar? I would always recommend renting a car through a reputable and established company like Hertz/Thrifty, Sixt, Avis/Budget, Enterprise/Alamo, Europcar/Keddy. This forum is filled with people complaining about these smaller and cheaper csr hire companies. The prices are often too good to be true.

As for the hotel, did you check the reviews before reserving? I've booked hundreds of hotels through Booking.com and never had an issue.

jimjames

I've booked many times through Booking.com and never had any issues. Sounds like some sort of issue with the hotel rather than Booking.com. I recently booked a hire car through booking.com and on arrival the booked vehicle wasn't available (well a vehicle was available but EV not petrol). I didn't really see it as a Booking.com issue as they had arranged the booking and there was a car available, just not suitable for my needs.

jimi_man

Whenever I read about car hire as soon as the firm is mentioned and it’s not one of the Avis, Hertz type firms but ‘Topcar’ (who?) or Goldcar or other similar low budget firms, then my heart sinks as I know what’s going to happen. 

To be fair you abandoned the booking so one can hardly blame booking.com for that. 

saajan_12

The hotel is the real issue - it was Booking.com's responsibility to book accommodation so if they failed to meaning you now had to re-book at higher, last minute prices, then the entire new place should be on them (assuming you already paid for the original hotel). 

The car is not their fault, queues can be long and some providers have an express tier for this very reason. Getting all minus £55 is a good result. 

zagfles

There's nothing wrong in principle with small local car hire companies, I use them all the time. The problem usually comes from using brokers/agents/comparison sites who will try to get the price as low as possible, which usually means the hard sell on add-ons like excess cover etc. As car hire companies compete to be the cheapest on price, to the extent that they probably make no money or even a loss on the car hire price, and instead make money on extras like excess cover. 

The queues are probably caused by this, when the desk agent says to each customer "do you want our super excess waiver for just EUR 300", and the customer says "no, I already have that through the broker/bought before I came" and the agent says "we don't recognise that" and the customer says "you don't need to, it covers me not you" and the desk agent says "well we'll need to put a 10000 EUR block on your credit card" or "your card isn't embossed" or the attempt to do the block mysteriously fails, or they come up with some other feeble excuse to try to force sale of their excess waiver because they're targetted/bonused on sales, and eventually the customer gives up and is practically forced to buy the excess waiver because they're not going to get the car without it. 

Typical tourist destinations like Tenerife have loads of small car hire places in every tourist resort, and IME they always take cash, no CC required, and they don't give you the hard sell on add-ons. The advantage of using cash is you know you won't get a nasty surprise on your CC when you get home, and it's far less likely they'll pull a fast one like charge you 500 EUR for a small scratch which was already there.  

The other advantages of hiring the car in the resort rather than the airport are you don't need to transport luggage, so don't need as big a car, and you may not need the car for the whole holiday eg if you spend some days at the local beach, or go somewhere it's easier to get public transport to. Those savings would normally more than pay for transport to/from the airport.