Which? research published today about dodgy listings on Booking.com didn’t surprise me at all – I have been trying to get the accommodation platform to take action on a fraudulent listing since January.
But it has just ghosted me.
In January, I went on holiday to Phuket, Thailand. For the first five days of my trip, I stayed in a hotel I’d booked on Booking.com. The four-star hotel sounded great, with a bar, pool bar, restaurant, spa, fitness centre, water park and many other enticing facilities. It was also advertised as ‘beachfront’.
Yet, when I arrived bleary-eyed after 15 hours of travel, the reality was very different. When I asked where the bar and restaurant was, I was directly out of the hotel to the main road where there were bars and restaurants – but these weren’t part of the hotel.
Nor was there a spa, a pool bar or a waterpark. The ‘fitness centre’ was a couple of machines and a few dumbbells, rather inconveniently located next to the breakfast buffet. This meant any early-morning workout would take place among people eating their breakfast.
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Not that I ate breakfast at the hotel more than once – the ‘international’ cuisine promised comprised some lukewarm unidentifiable Chinese food and some slices of white bread.
Still, the beach was just moments away – apparently. This was a lie too. The hotel was a few minutes from an inaccessible section of sea, but 20 minutes’ walk to the nearest beach.
The room was OK, but the listing advertised a safe/security box in the room – something I always look for – and there wasn’t one. When I asked the receptionist about this, I was given a lightweight lockable ‘safe’, which I carried to my room myself. As the box was not secured to anything in my room, it would have been easy for any thief to just carry it away.
I tried to raise my grievances with the hotel, but despite being described as ‘international’, some of the staff didn’t speak English. As I was only staying a few days before moving elsewhere (an awesome yoga/wellness retreat that I would definitely recommend), I decided to make the best of the situation and sort it out with Booking.com when I got back.
Surely the biggest travel website in the world would have a process to remove/amend fraudulent or misleading listings? Well, apparently not.
Lack of response
I contacted both Booking.com customer service and the hotel directly on my return. The hotel ignored me. Booking.com asked for more information – my account details, the dates of my stay, etc – then it ghosted me.
So I asked the press office what was going on. Perhaps naively, I assumed Booking.com was going to do something about this misleading hotel listing and my emails being ignored was just an oversight.
I also asked for half my money back, threatening to initiate a credit card chargeback for the full amount if I didn’t receive a partial refund. Admittedly, and I suspect due to the threat of both bad press and a possible chargeback of the full amount, I soon received a refund for 50% of the price paid. Quite rightly so – as I had not got what I paid for.
Booking.com also issued the following statement: “It is our accommodation partner’s responsibility to ensure the details of their listing on our platform is accurate. Issues with accommodation listings occur very rarely, and if we are made aware of any concerns, we will always investigate. If found to be fraudulent, we can take the property off of our platform.”
Despite receiving this statement at the end of January, no investigation has taken place and the original listing for the hotel – claiming to have numerous facilities it simply doesn’t have – is still on Booking.com.
I have sent numerous emails to Booking.com customer service and CEO Glenn Fogel asking for an update on the promised ‘investigation’ – but have not received any response at all.
I have also asked the media relations team why Booking.com claims to investigate and act on fraudulent listings when it actually does nothing – but these emails have been ignored too.
Booking.com told Which? it “take[s] the process of verifying accommodation listings seriously”. But judging by my experience – and Which?’s extensive research – this is unfortunately not the case at all.
