Comment by fizzbitch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fizzbitch | Hacker News Reader

I booked a room on booking.com a few weeks ago. There was an accident and I booked a smoking room---technically my fault. But since booking.com is just yet another internet middleman, their response is "you should have looked closer" and the hotel, which didn't have any non-smoking rooms that night, let me know there's no refunds for same-day online booking and told me to get bent (after hours on the phone trying to talk to people). I did not stay in the room, but they already had my money and I'll never see it again...

I really dislike how companies like booking.com (and others) plus physical merchants enable "gotcha capitalism" like this, where each party points at the other and they both keep my money.

booking.com: 'talk to the hotel for a refund'

hotel: 'talk to booking.com for a refund'

``` booking.com: 'talk to the hotel for a refund' hotel: 'talk to booking.com for a refund' ```

Yea I experienced this last March. Charegbacks are not easy for regular consumers. Their customer service are trained to never give refunds (based on first-hand experience).

You'd have to be a valued client of your bank to have a successful dispute. And it is the only way I believe.

Both parties (booking.com and hotel) simply won't budge.

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Europeans can charge back just fine.

Not always. If a firm wants to avoid that, it's not too hard to do so - it's got to make sure that the transfer was customer initiated, because those aren't necessarily reversible. There are other exceptions too, some of which are probably regional, non-EU-wide. SEPA isn't implemented identically across the EU, incidentally, so not just are the rules locally interpreted, the tech is too; so none of this is quite as simple as it seems it should be.

And then of course there's the fact that reversing charges doesn't change legal liabilities, so this isn't a protection you can rely on if the receiver feels they're in the right and are willing to take (sometimes fairly simple) legal steps.

It's definitely still a nice protection to have, since at least it places some burden of proof on the recipient.

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