Booking.com confusion

MrChips

Hi!

My wife is travelling to Dubai tomorrow for work and booked an apartment a few days ago for four nights through booking.com.  At the point of reservation, it offered the choice of paying at the property or through booking.com.  We chose the latter as we wanted to know the booking was secured and also not be at risk of adverse currency movements (payment was in AED) in the meantime.

However no charge has been applied to our card then or since, and the property is now chasing my wife to make a payment through their own link (inclusive of an additional 4% 'online payment fee'!).

We can see numerous articles online warning of scams from paying directly through such links, and the booking.com chat window it came via even says "avoid suspicious activity - don't click or respond to unusual links or messages".

I spent an hour on the phone with booking.com customer service this morning but went round in circles with the agent (who spoke reasonable but slightly patchy English) constantly putting me on hold and not seeming to know what the issue was. Ultimately she wasn't sure why booking.com hadn't taken any payment and wondered if it was an issue with our card (it isn't) or maybe a technical issue with their site.  She said she would contact the property and send us an email confirming that booking.com would be taking payment (that email has not arrived some 3 hours later).

We still want booking.com to take the payment as we don't feel we should pay more than the agreed price.  However, we are slightly worried my wife will arrive and find the accommodation won't give her access if booking.com haven't passed the money on. To complicate matters her sister is going to stay with her but is arriving on an earlier flight from another country and so she will get to the accommodation first so will be the one potentially having to negotiate.

Can anyone offer any insight or advice?

MrChips

Update: booking.com called us and clarified that the property shouldn't be charging more than the agreed price.  Following this the property called and agreed we could reduce the amount we paid by 4% so that when the 4% was added it cancelled out.

All in all a satisfactory outcome but a lot of stress and confusion over the last few hours.

They also charge a 1000 AED security deposit, which they also wanted a 4% addition for (which they confirmed over the phone wouldn't have been refunded even in the event all the deposit was returned!).

Bigphil1474

I've had a couple of bad experiences with booking.com in the last few years. I've stopped using them for overseas flights or accommodation tbh. The last time we had 2 outbound and 2 inbound flights booked with them 6 months in advance and 2 weeks before we were due to leave, they cancelled all 4 because the 2nd inbound flight had been rescheduled 2 hours earlier so set off before we got there. I ended up spending nearly 3 days suggesting alternatives to them until they finally agreed to put us on the same second flight the day after. We had to pay for a night in a hotel. It wasn't so much the cancellation, but that they couldn't be bothered trying to sort it out for us.

heatherw_01

Glad you got it sorted.

I have used booking.com for decades now, and only had that once where one hotel messaged me to use a link.

You would think the hotel would be penalised by booking.com such as a "warning" or something like that for trying to get a customer to pay via a third party link as it happens so much now.