I am a regular user of Booking.com and I find the service very convenient. However, as soon as you have an issue that you need to discuss with them, their customer system falls down completely, or worse it simply doesn’t exist.
I noticed a charge of $1027 on my credit card with the description “Hotel Booking.com Sydney.” However, I have no booking linked to that charge. So, the next thing I did was go to their website to see how I can discuss this with them. Now, a month later, that still has proven to be impossible.
If you go to their ‘Customer Service Help,’ you end up on a useless page that lists your previous bookings. They try to send you to one of their hotels where you have stayed. Obviously, my problem is that it is not linked to one of my bookings. Underneath, they list their’ Frequently Asked Questions’ (FAQ), however, none of them allows you to communicate directly with them. So, in my case, I selected ‘Payments,’ but if you click on that, it loops back to the FAQ. Even if you click on “I need help with something else,” it simply loops back to the FAQ page.
Next, I tried going to ‘About Us’ and from there to ‘Contact Us.’ The only relevant option here is ‘Do you have a question?’ Also here is an option ‘Help Centre,’ but this one is different. Here it states, ‘send us a message’ and ‘call us.’ However, both are without links to such options. A bit further down, it states: ‘Contact us anytime – Send us a message or pick up the phone, our agents are always available.’ Again, no links.
It directs you to the ‘Help Centre,’ and by now you will guess it loops back from where we started the article above.
OK, on to Google search: “Telephone number for Booking.com“. All of the top options simply go back to the useless ‘Help Centres’. On the Google list is a company called Elliott Report, and they list a toll-free number ‘888 850 3958. However, that number doesn’t work; the other two numbers are both in the UK (Main: +44-20-8612-8000, Customer service: +44 20 3320 2600). However, you can only contact them if it is in relation to an existing booking; you need to enter a reference and pin number, otherwise, you can’t talk to them. So, that doesn’t work either.
So, let’s now go to their site on Facebook; yes, you can message them and that is what I did. I got a message back to send them my mobile number and yes, I got a WhatsApp call (from 44 7440 178 790). They said: ‘no problem, we will manually refund you. Please download the All Remitly’, which I did. It asked for my name and address, which I entered. However, next they started to ask for credit card details, obviously that made me suspicious, which I made clear. He said no worries, my manager will call you back, which of course never happened.
How on earth is it possible that if you go to the official Booking.com Facebook site, the company allows criminals to hack and spam their customers? There is no information, no warning from the company on the misuse of their service, what soever. Looking at the Facebook posting on the Booking.com site, I quickly noticed that I was not the only one.
It is incomprehensible that a large company such as Booking.com (28 million listings) is getting away with this and that there are no regulators anywhere in the world that are acting against this company. It is definitely by far the worst digital media company if it comes to customer service. There simply is no customer service whatsoever. They do everything to avoid providing a customer service only diverting any questions to their accommodation providers.
Paul Budde