I'm actually sick of all of these intermediaries taking money but when something goes wrong they're like: oh we're just the middle man.
I've got a contract with you, not with the hotel. I upheld my end of the bargain, now you uphold yours...
I've got a contract with you, not with the hotel. I upheld my end of the bargain, now you uphold yours...
Once I had booked a hotel in Hong Kong for a week, pretty expensive, and I finally couldn't go. But this was in an especially hectic moment (personally and professionally) so I missed the full refund deadline for cancellation. It was obviously my fault, as the deadline had been clear from the beginning, so I just cancelled without refund (or maybe with partial refund, I don't remember) and moved on.
The next day, and without having asked, I got an email from Booking saying that they would negotiate with the hotel to see if they could give me a full refund anyway. A day after that, I got the refund. It was a substantial amount of money so I'm quite grateful to whomever did that at Booking.
On the other hand, I hate their pricing practices, e.g. presumably because I am a relatively frequent customer, the website often offers me worse prices than my wife who almost never used it. Also different prices on mobile and PC, etc.
I went out and sat in the car, and eventually got to chat with a Booking.com agent, who said they could do nothing at first. After 15 minutes of chatting with them, they said, "We don't have any relationship to that hotel. What is the local number you have for them?" And about 15 seconds later, "I am issuing a full refund."
Frustrating, but I did get my money back, and did find another room elsewhere in the city (unbelievably, with the one hotel chain where I use their rewards program!)
Turns out someone had simply set up a fake hotel profile for this prominent hotel in the city and was collecting booking fees from people like me! Like I said, at least I did get my money back...
I don't know what service it was but they were very proactive about it.
I haven't had much issue with Booking.com but I haven't had any times where I needed to refund either.
The further we get from the factory/industrialized IS9000(1) standards of the 1960s where quality control was king, the further we get into wildly inconsistent and personally variable experiences, with spectrums of experience that fluctuate wildly from yours, and the person in the article. And that's a big problem.
Consistency is really hard, but when companies are built on software which can more or less withstand moderate failures, errors like this are more prone.
I hate to be "we need to go back" - but we really do need a return to consistency of experience and product.