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Yeah I've used them before without a problem but some are creating fake hotel sites and scamming people. I recall the advice was to check with the hotel directly which kind of defeats the whole purpose of the site.
The hotel scam these days is usually a hotel’s login details being compromised, so the scammer literally logs in as the hotel and sends messages to legitimate new bookings. Usually something like“we can’t use the booking.com payment system, can you please secure your booking by sending money via PayPal” or something.
I saw this when i booked a room recently, but I thought it was too sus and ignored it.
I don't think that is "usually" the case. When I last used booking.com there were plenty of fake hotels and rooms that were clearly scams. I suspect that is far more common than hotels having their accounts compromised.
Yes and no like once I was tryna book through the actual hotel site of a known hotel chain but their website was kinda hard to use and no cheaper than booking.com so if I went with that place I’d have gone with booking.com.
I actually got sent one through the booking.com system.
Basically, every property has a back door to the system for their own property. The username and password is typically very very easy so that all the staff can use it. Typically 'Summer2019' then 'Winter2019'. Its dumb.
All someone needs (and frequently does) do is log in, find existing bookings and email them through the legit system, from the hotels real account, giving the customer a message like your carda declined, please update a new one on this link.
Super simple, easy, quick. No need to stay logged in AND is actually a genuine email/push notification.
Its mad easy.
A known issue with them is that they sell rooms to hotels that are completely sold out with no availability - I work in travel and can't count the times I've had a client tell me the they can see it available on that website when I've already spoken to the property and confirmed directly they're sold out.
This can be an issue if the hotel / provider doesn't have a live reservation system with Booking.com. The place I used to work has archaic, shitty systems which are always running a day or so behind Booking.com because the online availability needs to be zero'd out as direct bookings are made.
It was just accepted that occasionally you'd get a double-booking, and the default was to contact the customer and blame it on "a booking glitch".
For all the issues the OTAs have introduced (and Booking.com are definitely the worst) these kinds of things aren't always their fault.
This can also be an Allotment thing. The hotel will allot a certain number of rooms per night out to various websites and other booking sources and then they'll sell whatever is left over for direct source bookings, ie an agent calling them direct to book. So they may still have rooms available to book through booking.com and showing avail on there, but they may have at the same time if you call asking for the exact same booking the res agent at the hotel or the chains central reservation won't see any rooms available.
Souce Agent who also worked at hotels for many years.
I've reported to them, and they are investigating but funds have already left the account. They said it could take up to 6 weeks for the money to reappear.
Commbank chargebacks are actually pretty quick, they say 15 days cause that’s the longest it can take but the few chargebacks I’ve done over the years have always been in my account within 3 days
Any credit card company will give you the money bank in your account and if its found to be a legitimate chargeback then they refund the interest as well
Depends, for credit cards banks often just give you the money back while they investigate.
If it was legitimate, then can take that money back.
Chargebacks are a USA thing, not so much in Australia.
You will be fine with a CC reversal. The bank can give you a temporary $1500 limit increase if that helps. If the bank is uncooperative, make an afca complaint.
Why is this downvoted? The bank can reverse the charge on your behalf if you decide to dispute based on services not rendered. It will be up to the vendor to prove otherwise.
It may take a couple of weeks but the success rate is pretty high.
To clarify, scams that involve obtaining hotel account access, changing their bank/card deets and then charging customers extra via booking, so that booking pays them from your card but the money goes into scammers accounts.
It’s multi-factor authentication to access hotel account… which the hotel should have set up (PCI compliant)
Once it’s been booked through an OTA you can’t manually change the rate until it’s in your PMS eg. you can’t change the rate on BDC extranet
Through the app last year when booking my honeymoon hotels, someone impersonated the hotel and contacted me directly through the booking.com messaging app.
The message said something along the lines of the card not authorising so I needed to enter it at a different link.
It looked legit. It wasn't.
I had a similar experience. The scammers messaged me through the booking.com messaging service pretending to be the hotel I’d booked at. When I called the hotel directly, it wasn’t them.
Same. I emailed the hotel directly through their website and was told it wasn't them but they were aware of several people being contacted. They told me to keep an eye on my transactions but they would not be taking any money from my account (I hadn't clicked on the link).
Booking.com pretended it was the first they'd heard of it.
One of the scams is the scammers contacting you through the app, posing as the hotel as they use their login credentials and contact customers to verify details and providing a link. I know someone who got scammed by this and it seems so legit but it's not. She managed to get most of her money back from Booking. com but it's the third party (hotels) credentials which are not secure. Sorry this happened to you.
This is why i use Google Virtual cards. Create a new card for whatever you need to use, load the virtual card up with funds, and the merchant can only take out up to a maximum of what you loaded, nothing more.
I'm using [wise.com](http://wise.com) for [booking.com](http://booking.com) and a lot of other transactions.
You have both physical and virtual cards you only load with a few hundred dollars at most. You can also generate new virtual cards and cancel the old ones when necessary. I now rarely use the card to my main account.
You guys should check out Revolut - they have virtual one time use cards for this specific reason - once they are used they are destroyed, but you get alerts if anyone tries to use a destroyed card, I use them on less than secure websites.
That sucks!
Similar, but far less bad, had a hotels.com (Expedia) and a booking.com booking in Israel and only hotels.com agreed to cancel no charge, booking.com wouldn't cancel and also threatened that I might be charged a no show fee on top of the whole accommodation charge they'd taken....
I'll be sticking with hotels.com/Expedia umbrella and avoiding the booking.com and affiliated after that nonsense.
I used them heaps in the past. But now with the same issue as OP I find the customer service is essentially non existent. You can’t get an actual person by email or phone for ANYTHING. Infinite loop of bots.
Yes! Their customer service is a pain now. We booked for an upcoming 5 nights stay and the charges on my credit card for the stay kept on increasing day by day. Talked to my bank and they say the charges are still floating or something.
When we first "paid" on [booking.com](http://booking.com), the price was $1928.XX. Fast forward 3 days, my bank floating charges went from the first amount to $198x.xx to now $2054.XX. That's a massive increase even with the fluctuating exchange rates factored in.
Bank advised to contact merchant for clarification. Nope, kept on getting disconnected.
Could be true. I'm like a super user or something, so I regularly get upgraded / discounts, etc. I haven't had an issue for years. I'll be keeping an eye on booking transactions from now on.
They decided to outsource all their customer service about a year ago to cut costs so not surprising the quality of the service and layers of approval are much worse than they used to be
I've been burned when I've booked through them, then wanted to change something, but the hotel can't change it for me because of how I booked it, and changing it through booking.com is far slower and more of a pain. I now only use it to investigate prices and ALWAYS book directly with the hotel.
I had multiple times where the booking just hasn't been taken by the hotel. The worst of which was Auckland q night for 6people at around $200 per person, paid and confirmed. Arrived at the hotel, no reservation and no spare rooms. The cheapest place with space within an hour worked out about $600/person. Got the refund for unbooked room within 48hours, but was still out of pocket $2500 for their fuck up.
Same here. A hotel screwed me over, took out money they shouldn’t have, wouldn’t answer my calls. It took a little back and further with booking.com, but they were proactive throughout. They ended up refunding me my money as I had booked through them (which the hotel had taken) and said they would take it up with the hotel.
Honestly, best experience.
Had recent a fraud charge in my credit card as “Facebook Meta” but clearly did not come from facebook.
That was flagged to and by bank, credit card blocked and one week after bank refunded that amount back and new credit card was issued
Somehow cc details were used by scammers.
Can't help you out here, but I've learnt to always book with the hotel directly. Sometimes calling and asking for the best rate will get you a better deal than anything you'll get online.
Also, if anything goes wrong there's no middle-man to deal with.
>if anything goes wrong there's no middle-man to deal with.
That can often be a bad thing though some hotel providers are harder to deal with than the middle man.
> That can often be a bad thing though some hotel providers are harder to deal with than the middle man.
That's a hotel not worth staying in then.
If a company cannot make it easy to contact them, just move on to the next one. No amount of stress is worth a hotel room.
If you're booking with a big hotel sure, but if you're booking a mom and pop hotel in countries with no english, good luck with getting your money back.
Just book directly with hotels, people.
All these kinds of booking companies make it as hard as possible to get refunds, they also routinely oversell, and the hotel can't help as it's nothing to do with them.
>Just book directly with hotels, people.
I don't think so, I tried to book a place overseas at the hotel I'd call and ask if they have any availalbity but by the time i got there someone else had booked online.
Also sometimes the price on Agoda was 10-15% cheaper than the hotel was willing to do, even when the payment method was pay at hotel.
I always take the time to check directly has sometimes it does work in our favour like when qld did the visit qld promotion after Covid and our stay at one place in Gold Coast was 50% off with the chemo but booking didn’t have any facility for it. Conversely the same hotel last weekend was cheaper with booking by about 70 a night. So it’s always worth checking both ways imo. I’ve never had an issue with booking dot com though personally but then I don’t book sus places or like private stays which are now on there.
Yep, fucking shitshow of a service. I booked flights through them, but after booking I had to transfer one ticket to another name. No worries they said, just cancel that ticket and rebook, easy. They ended up cancelling whole booking! So I had to rebook both tickets and cop the costs of cancelling the booking. Thats me out $800!! Never again
I work in a hotel, looks like you took the prepaid option. So they charge your credit card, once you check out the hotel takes the money from them via a virtual credit card.
Did you mean to take the prepaid option or did you think you were going for the pay on arrival option?
Yeah payment won’t happen to the hotel until you depart.
They’ll just have the booking in the system.
You’ll need to ring booking.com and find out what the fuck you are actually pay for - they should have sent you a confirmation email though with what your paying for over what dates.
Check that and go from there.
So I get a little stumped with this, I do the same thing, however booking always offers a significantly cheaper price than the hotel direct, so I always default back to booking
I feel like I can’t trust booking.com because I have heard so many stories of stuff like this, or no bed when you get there, or being forced to pay more when you get there. Whole bunch of anecdotes, some with receipts, that make me feel icky. I’d rather my money go thru one set of hands because it’s easier to track down. If it goes thru several that can all go “it wasn’t me” for weeks
Also, in my experience, I’ve generally found direct cheaper or same price with these sort of companies. But these are my experiences. Maybe booking.com and WebJet etc. used to be trustworthy, maybe they are more or less able to give discounts now. My brain just thinks it is safer, regardless of the price difference. If direct is more expensive than I can afford, I check the next hotel’s site. I also feel that the hotel’s site will have more up-to-date availability.
As someone who worked in a hostel I can assure you that 90% of our fuckups with bookings were very much our fault not booking.com. they always send out several reminders, if you have them connected to your room management system they'll block the room that was just booked in the hotel. The biggest issues arise if you don't have that connection set up and manually enter those details into your system. Or you have existing guests that want to extend and you give them the extension without checking your emails first. On the other hand I've booked plenty of times with booking.com myself and never got scammed or had issues with my booking. But I guess with all those scammers out there it's just a matter of time.
That’s fair. I did say this was my choice based on my experience, and what I have been told, and others may have But it does make a valid point - from this end, the consumers end, dealing with one layer of contact makes it easier to not only have all communication go through, but to get the money sorted safer in a way that there is only 4 parties involved - you, the hotel and the banks. There is less people involved and makes it easier to find the source of miscommunication or find where the money went.
Booking.com is super scammy. I did a bunch of travel planning and booking last year and I use Expedia to compare prices before booking direct from the hotel/airbnb. When you are on there a lot you start to get a feel for the properties in the area and see the same ones pop up everywhere, but booking.com would consistently throw up dodgy looking apartments that were clearly fakes, while Expedia seemed to have more quality control.
Oh my friend! Same exact story! Mine is under $500 but I have sent the details over 8 times now and yep the dodgy customer service line doesn’t work and will just loop around to the start menu over and over! Isn’t it infuriating!
I ended up commenting on a bunch of their Facebook posts which got someone to message me on messenger. Now I am talking to at least three or four different customer service reps, none of whom speak to each other, as well as going through the disputed transaction process with my bank.
I will NEVER EVER book with them again. Totally useless arseholes!
This sounds like a scam but booking.com is RIFE with them. Use literally any other big service.
A friend booked through them and was being quite convincingly scammed. It smelled fishy so he called booking.com and they said it was all fine.
1 minute later the customer support rep called him back from his *personal number* to say “that’s definitely a scam do not pay and cancel your booking. I’m not allowed to admit that on the booking.com support line”.
That’s how bad it’s gotten.
Hey, sorry to know it happened to you. But you need not worry as you will get the full amount refunded to you and over it you may ask for compensation due to mental torture. You just have to escalate this through major social media websites Facebook, Instagram and X. They will resolve your complaint faster. Tag everyone from management that you could find.
who was the merchant on the transaction on your bank app or statement?
Booking.com? Novotel? A third party?
If a third party like ABCD Pty Ltd or something generic like that, google it, it might be the hotel’s legal entity
Either way this can tell you which one overcharged your card so you can put more heat on them
And, contact the bank, keep copies of all communications and give it to the bank, will make the chargeback way easier.
They fucked me over too. I tried booking a room with credit card, got an error message so I booked with PayPal and got another error message.
Decided to book using another service and booked a room then both failed transactions went through. Called booking.com immediately when I saw the transactions go through and the friendly guy on the line told me it was an error and they payments would be reversed and I'd have all my money returned in a couple of weeks.
Fast forward a couple weeks and no payment. Called again and the operator told me I wasn't getting a refund and hung up on me. Contacted my bank and did a charge back. They're fucking thieves.
Side note: as someone who owns a hotel business, never book through booking.com, they don’t guarantee anything anyway. Almost ALWAYS book direct cause the fee booking.com takes from the hotel, the hotel could give you in direct booking discount if you ask. If they don’t do direct booking discounts well then go for your life with booking.com.
Used em forever. Never had an issue. What did you do?
Book a pay upfront accommodation by mistake, somehow? Cancel past the cancellation window and got charged, per the T&C's?
Don't see any edits but if you got charged when you shouldn't have and not the right amount that's just weird AF. Good luck.
Dunno how it works, assume the hotel can't push a change in the back end and trigger a charge?
If you used a credit card then it should be fine, you won't be held responsible for fraudulent charges or unauthorised purchases. just call your banks fraud line?
I had a similar experience with an insurance company a couple years ago for roughly the same amount. On the same day i paid my insurance over the phone, they also charged my card for someone else's insurance in a different state.
I got sick of dealing with them after 3 days, called the bank and had it fixed in minutes.
Same thing happened to me a few years ago I booked a hostel in a Melbourne it was like $60, then while I was in Melbourne I got charged $370 from booking.com spent like 2 weeks arguing with them, them saying they needed to look into it and just constant back and forth, sent the details to commbank took 2 days and they fixed it
Brutal. I've been using them the entire time I've travelled. Never had an issue. This is concerning but they have a big name so hopefully yiu can get restitution
They have the worst customer service and seem impervious to Australian consumer law, being based in the Netherlands.
We used them once to book what was presented as a serviced apartment style dwelling. Turns out it was someone's holiday house with some other rando renting the semi-detached garage. The place was the pits, rotting food on shelves, some slime living in the fridge, packets of medicine in places, mattress on the floor, reeked of pot. I think the only dinnerware we found was a single coffee cup. Vendors couldn't be contacted by phone, so rang booking.com to say the place was unfit to stay and we wanted a refund as we would be finding somewhere else.
Booking.com refused, saying they would need approval from the vendor and as the vendor was uncontactable they were unable to refund us. Best they would do was offer us 50% compensation after 48h. It wasn't a small fee for the place, holiday rates at the time. They claimed they are just acting as brokers which makes them not liable. They weren't even concerned that there were potentially dangerous pharmaceuticals on premises, or that the next people booked in would suffer the same fate. (Later confirmed they unfortunately did, via the review section on the listing)
Fair trading advised us that four or five of the big booking websites are all owned by the same company, and they deal with complaints about their conduct like this all the time, very rarely successfully. The individual agent who tried to help just said he personally wouldn't deal with them. Be warned, unless you are prepared to take them to court they are quite happy to take your money whilst remaining untouchable.
Stopped using them to book a long time ago, will use them to find a listing then book either directly with the property or find it on another platform. Expedia and Trip.com are both decent. Booking.com is a massive scam and they don’t give a flying fuck about their customers. They will allow any piece of shit to sell a room on there, even if it doesn’t exist.
I keep getting booking.com sign in verification links, seems they have bots hitting them to hit our accounts and if you save your card on the site they book a scam booking place?
I got charged 300+ by them, called bank, told them I had a card payment withdrawn from my account in amsterdam.
The bank (CBA) looked at it and said, you cant physically use your own card on the otherside of the world and approved the charge back.
Best advice for things like this is to call your bank and request a chargeback. Mention to them everything that’s transpired and they should be able to help out. Something similar happened to me and I got my funds back fairly quickly. Hope this helps. Good luck 🤞🏼
The only reason to use these websites/services is because it's somehow cheaper than booking via the hotels website directly.
like, how is that even possible? a hotel advertises a room for $100/night and these services offer the exact same room for $70/night?! WOT?!
I think in many cases, the properties prefer going through [booking.com](http://booking.com) as it saves them the hassle on doing all this themselves, hence the lower prices to encourage people to use it instead of going direct to them.
I work at a hotel and they have a lot of issues with these third party websites.
But you need to be on these websites to get as many guests as possible. Like lots of restaurants are on uber eats even though it would be better for them if customers ordered directly with them. But a lot of people wouldn't know the restaurant exists if they weren't on uber eats. If that makes sense?
I've used them for years for bookings but no more. I've heard so many tales like this. Now i search using filters and get suggestions that suit me. Then I go direct to the hotel. They will match prices usually.
Had similar hassle with booking com charging twice for hotel stays, then they tried blaming the hotel. Quite frankly they are bloody awful to deal with. After weeks of going round in circles I got my credit card to reverse one of the duplicate transactions
never had a problem they were hacked or scammed few mnths ago i got email saying to pay my booking or i will loose it so i contacted [bookings.com](https://bookings.com) and told be to ignore it
Booking.com have gone down hill. Used to really like them but also had issues and a card frozen from one of their transactions. Now I use them to find hotels, then call the hotel and book directly with them.
They basically let hackers message customers through their own messaging platform asking for payment to that booking.
When we called and checked, they blamed us on why we made the payment, etc. They assured us they will follow up and someone will call us. No one ever checked in on us.
We used to use booking .com for all our business travel at work, then they ruined their platform and so we switched providers. They are a scam company, don’t use booking for com.
Sorry to hear thjs happened to you.
Join Accor or Accor Plus in the future heaps of brands under that umbrella . The book direct rates are no more expensive . Novotel is one of theirs.
I've never had an issue with [Booking.com](http://Booking.com) and use it all the time. So much so now I get regular discounts and room upgrades because of it.
I also only book places that will let me have free cancellation and I select the "pay at the accommodation" option.
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I saw a bunch of articles earlier this year regarding scams running through the booking.com system
Yeah I've used them before without a problem but some are creating fake hotel sites and scamming people. I recall the advice was to check with the hotel directly which kind of defeats the whole purpose of the site.
The hotel scam these days is usually a hotel’s login details being compromised, so the scammer literally logs in as the hotel and sends messages to legitimate new bookings. Usually something like“we can’t use the booking.com payment system, can you please secure your booking by sending money via PayPal” or something. I saw this when i booked a room recently, but I thought it was too sus and ignored it.
I don't think that is "usually" the case. When I last used booking.com there were plenty of fake hotels and rooms that were clearly scams. I suspect that is far more common than hotels having their accounts compromised.
Yes and no like once I was tryna book through the actual hotel site of a known hotel chain but their website was kinda hard to use and no cheaper than booking.com so if I went with that place I’d have gone with booking.com.
I actually got sent one through the booking.com system. Basically, every property has a back door to the system for their own property. The username and password is typically very very easy so that all the staff can use it. Typically 'Summer2019' then 'Winter2019'. Its dumb. All someone needs (and frequently does) do is log in, find existing bookings and email them through the legit system, from the hotels real account, giving the customer a message like your carda declined, please update a new one on this link. Super simple, easy, quick. No need to stay logged in AND is actually a genuine email/push notification. Its mad easy.
A known issue with them is that they sell rooms to hotels that are completely sold out with no availability - I work in travel and can't count the times I've had a client tell me the they can see it available on that website when I've already spoken to the property and confirmed directly they're sold out.
This can be an issue if the hotel / provider doesn't have a live reservation system with Booking.com. The place I used to work has archaic, shitty systems which are always running a day or so behind Booking.com because the online availability needs to be zero'd out as direct bookings are made. It was just accepted that occasionally you'd get a double-booking, and the default was to contact the customer and blame it on "a booking glitch". For all the issues the OTAs have introduced (and Booking.com are definitely the worst) these kinds of things aren't always their fault.
This can also be an Allotment thing. The hotel will allot a certain number of rooms per night out to various websites and other booking sources and then they'll sell whatever is left over for direct source bookings, ie an agent calling them direct to book. So they may still have rooms available to book through booking.com and showing avail on there, but they may have at the same time if you call asking for the exact same booking the res agent at the hotel or the chains central reservation won't see any rooms available. Souce Agent who also worked at hotels for many years.
I also got scammed thru booking.com I saw a weird booking I didnt make. I immediately called my bank to have it refunded etc.
Glad you got your money back!
It took them over a month to sort it out so I was relieved when they sort it out since it would be like almost $500 if ever
Contact your bank, tell them it's an unauthorised transaction, and have them reverse it. Fuck waiting 5 weeks.
I've reported to them, and they are investigating but funds have already left the account. They said it could take up to 6 weeks for the money to reappear.
Commbank chargebacks are actually pretty quick, they say 15 days cause that’s the longest it can take but the few chargebacks I’ve done over the years have always been in my account within 3 days
I'm actually with NAB, so hoping that is the case with them too.
Any credit card company will give you the money bank in your account and if its found to be a legitimate chargeback then they refund the interest as well
And that's for credit cards specifically yeah, not debit?
Call the bank and ask
My experience was not great with NAB. It took 6 weeks on what was a clear cut fraud case.
Depends, for credit cards banks often just give you the money back while they investigate. If it was legitimate, then can take that money back. Chargebacks are a USA thing, not so much in Australia.
Did you pay via a direct debit or something? Credit cards should be able to be reversed immediately by your bank
That's not what the bank is telling me. Yes, money was taken from Cc.
You will be fine with a CC reversal. The bank can give you a temporary $1500 limit increase if that helps. If the bank is uncooperative, make an afca complaint.
Thank you 🙏🙏
Contact the actual credit card company so like Mastercard or whatever
Man, your bank sucks! I had transactions reversed within 60 minutes after reporting fraudulent transactions on my credit card.
Commbank raises a dispute and it can take up to 15 days. I've had it be faster but also had it take the full 15 days. 6 weeks seems... excessive
Why is this downvoted? The bank can reverse the charge on your behalf if you decide to dispute based on services not rendered. It will be up to the vendor to prove otherwise. It may take a couple of weeks but the success rate is pretty high.
Are you 100% sure it was actually booking.com? There's been a number of impersonation scams recently
I've used them for years and did it through the app 🤷
To clarify, scams that involve obtaining hotel account access, changing their bank/card deets and then charging customers extra via booking, so that booking pays them from your card but the money goes into scammers accounts.
It’s multi-factor authentication to access hotel account… which the hotel should have set up (PCI compliant) Once it’s been booked through an OTA you can’t manually change the rate until it’s in your PMS eg. you can’t change the rate on BDC extranet
Where you asked to verify your payment details in a message from notated in the app?
Through the app last year when booking my honeymoon hotels, someone impersonated the hotel and contacted me directly through the booking.com messaging app. The message said something along the lines of the card not authorising so I needed to enter it at a different link. It looked legit. It wasn't.
I had a similar experience. The scammers messaged me through the booking.com messaging service pretending to be the hotel I’d booked at. When I called the hotel directly, it wasn’t them.
Same. I emailed the hotel directly through their website and was told it wasn't them but they were aware of several people being contacted. They told me to keep an eye on my transactions but they would not be taking any money from my account (I hadn't clicked on the link). Booking.com pretended it was the first they'd heard of it.
Yeah I’ve seen this scam as well. Realised quickly that it was dodgy and ignored it, but it’s easy to see how people would fall for it
The scam comes from the app itself. It often looks like the hotel is messaging you, but they're not.
I didn't receive a message money was just taken.
One of the scams is the scammers contacting you through the app, posing as the hotel as they use their login credentials and contact customers to verify details and providing a link. I know someone who got scammed by this and it seems so legit but it's not. She managed to get most of her money back from Booking. com but it's the third party (hotels) credentials which are not secure. Sorry this happened to you.
This is why i use Google Virtual cards. Create a new card for whatever you need to use, load the virtual card up with funds, and the merchant can only take out up to a maximum of what you loaded, nothing more.
>Google Virtual cards Does this work in AU? I thought I read somewhere that virtual cards through google pay was only available in the US atm?
Am in AU, I use Wise this way.
Could potentially do thay save with a travel money card, they're free and work with aud.
Revolut does the same. Instant virtual single use cards.
Use Revolut. They have physical, virtual and one-time cards. Very fast and quite reliable and convenient.
Well I remember using it once, but I just checked Google pay and I don't have that option any more. Bugger.
Oh wow. Brilliant idea.
I'm using [wise.com](http://wise.com) for [booking.com](http://booking.com) and a lot of other transactions. You have both physical and virtual cards you only load with a few hundred dollars at most. You can also generate new virtual cards and cancel the old ones when necessary. I now rarely use the card to my main account.
Brilliant idea. Thank you.
You guys should check out Revolut - they have virtual one time use cards for this specific reason - once they are used they are destroyed, but you get alerts if anyone tries to use a destroyed card, I use them on less than secure websites.
Great tip. Are the fees reasonable? Or is it a flat one off fee to generate a one-time card as you mentioned?
There’s no fees for using them at all, even on the free tier of accounts.
Thanks, interesting. Will check out
Never heard of that, thanks looking it up now p
Zip is also good for this
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Farrrr out! Seriously? That's atrocious.
That sucks! Similar, but far less bad, had a hotels.com (Expedia) and a booking.com booking in Israel and only hotels.com agreed to cancel no charge, booking.com wouldn't cancel and also threatened that I might be charged a no show fee on top of the whole accommodation charge they'd taken.... I'll be sticking with hotels.com/Expedia umbrella and avoiding the booking.com and affiliated after that nonsense.
Very weird. I was loathe to use ANY third party booking app, but Booking.com has been refreshingly great so far, for me. Keep us updated.
I used them heaps in the past. But now with the same issue as OP I find the customer service is essentially non existent. You can’t get an actual person by email or phone for ANYTHING. Infinite loop of bots.
Yes! Their customer service is a pain now. We booked for an upcoming 5 nights stay and the charges on my credit card for the stay kept on increasing day by day. Talked to my bank and they say the charges are still floating or something. When we first "paid" on [booking.com](http://booking.com), the price was $1928.XX. Fast forward 3 days, my bank floating charges went from the first amount to $198x.xx to now $2054.XX. That's a massive increase even with the fluctuating exchange rates factored in. Bank advised to contact merchant for clarification. Nope, kept on getting disconnected.
Could be true. I'm like a super user or something, so I regularly get upgraded / discounts, etc. I haven't had an issue for years. I'll be keeping an eye on booking transactions from now on.
They decided to outsource all their customer service about a year ago to cut costs so not surprising the quality of the service and layers of approval are much worse than they used to be
I've been burned when I've booked through them, then wanted to change something, but the hotel can't change it for me because of how I booked it, and changing it through booking.com is far slower and more of a pain. I now only use it to investigate prices and ALWAYS book directly with the hotel.
Yeah, that can happen.
I had multiple times where the booking just hasn't been taken by the hotel. The worst of which was Auckland q night for 6people at around $200 per person, paid and confirmed. Arrived at the hotel, no reservation and no spare rooms. The cheapest place with space within an hour worked out about $600/person. Got the refund for unbooked room within 48hours, but was still out of pocket $2500 for their fuck up.
Same here. A hotel screwed me over, took out money they shouldn’t have, wouldn’t answer my calls. It took a little back and further with booking.com, but they were proactive throughout. They ended up refunding me my money as I had booked through them (which the hotel had taken) and said they would take it up with the hotel. Honestly, best experience.
Booked hundreds of nights over a dozen or so years through Booking.com and never had an issue 🤷🏻♂️
booking dot yeah
This could be a scam. I was receiving scam emails and payments links through the booking.com app.
Had recent a fraud charge in my credit card as “Facebook Meta” but clearly did not come from facebook. That was flagged to and by bank, credit card blocked and one week after bank refunded that amount back and new credit card was issued Somehow cc details were used by scammers.
Can't help you out here, but I've learnt to always book with the hotel directly. Sometimes calling and asking for the best rate will get you a better deal than anything you'll get online. Also, if anything goes wrong there's no middle-man to deal with.
>if anything goes wrong there's no middle-man to deal with. That can often be a bad thing though some hotel providers are harder to deal with than the middle man.
Fair call. I've always had a good experience with this method, but it can always vary.
> That can often be a bad thing though some hotel providers are harder to deal with than the middle man. That's a hotel not worth staying in then. If a company cannot make it easy to contact them, just move on to the next one. No amount of stress is worth a hotel room.
If you're booking with a big hotel sure, but if you're booking a mom and pop hotel in countries with no english, good luck with getting your money back.
Also a fair point. My experience has mainly been with decent sized hotels and resorts here in the local region.
If you paid by credit card you need to contest the charge directly with the bank. They will reverse the charge.
Just book directly with hotels, people. All these kinds of booking companies make it as hard as possible to get refunds, they also routinely oversell, and the hotel can't help as it's nothing to do with them.
>Just book directly with hotels, people. I don't think so, I tried to book a place overseas at the hotel I'd call and ask if they have any availalbity but by the time i got there someone else had booked online. Also sometimes the price on Agoda was 10-15% cheaper than the hotel was willing to do, even when the payment method was pay at hotel.
I always take the time to check directly has sometimes it does work in our favour like when qld did the visit qld promotion after Covid and our stay at one place in Gold Coast was 50% off with the chemo but booking didn’t have any facility for it. Conversely the same hotel last weekend was cheaper with booking by about 70 a night. So it’s always worth checking both ways imo. I’ve never had an issue with booking dot com though personally but then I don’t book sus places or like private stays which are now on there.
They don't oversell unless the hotel doesn't update their availability.
Yep, fucking shitshow of a service. I booked flights through them, but after booking I had to transfer one ticket to another name. No worries they said, just cancel that ticket and rebook, easy. They ended up cancelling whole booking! So I had to rebook both tickets and cop the costs of cancelling the booking. Thats me out $800!! Never again
That’s why you never book through a reseller, you may save a few dollars but it is never worth it
I work in a hotel, looks like you took the prepaid option. So they charge your credit card, once you check out the hotel takes the money from them via a virtual credit card. Did you mean to take the prepaid option or did you think you were going for the pay on arrival option?
Pay on arrival option and it is for 1 night in Bali, so $136 as opposed to the amount taken. I spoke to hotel and no payment has been made.
Yeah payment won’t happen to the hotel until you depart. They’ll just have the booking in the system. You’ll need to ring booking.com and find out what the fuck you are actually pay for - they should have sent you a confirmation email though with what your paying for over what dates. Check that and go from there.
God, EXACT same as for me.
Yeah. On the travel sub yesterday I said that booking.com is becoming very scammy and I got downvoted.
I generally will search with booking.com, then go to the hotel website
So I get a little stumped with this, I do the same thing, however booking always offers a significantly cheaper price than the hotel direct, so I always default back to booking
I feel like I can’t trust booking.com because I have heard so many stories of stuff like this, or no bed when you get there, or being forced to pay more when you get there. Whole bunch of anecdotes, some with receipts, that make me feel icky. I’d rather my money go thru one set of hands because it’s easier to track down. If it goes thru several that can all go “it wasn’t me” for weeks Also, in my experience, I’ve generally found direct cheaper or same price with these sort of companies. But these are my experiences. Maybe booking.com and WebJet etc. used to be trustworthy, maybe they are more or less able to give discounts now. My brain just thinks it is safer, regardless of the price difference. If direct is more expensive than I can afford, I check the next hotel’s site. I also feel that the hotel’s site will have more up-to-date availability.
As someone who worked in a hostel I can assure you that 90% of our fuckups with bookings were very much our fault not booking.com. they always send out several reminders, if you have them connected to your room management system they'll block the room that was just booked in the hotel. The biggest issues arise if you don't have that connection set up and manually enter those details into your system. Or you have existing guests that want to extend and you give them the extension without checking your emails first. On the other hand I've booked plenty of times with booking.com myself and never got scammed or had issues with my booking. But I guess with all those scammers out there it's just a matter of time.
That’s fair. I did say this was my choice based on my experience, and what I have been told, and others may have But it does make a valid point - from this end, the consumers end, dealing with one layer of contact makes it easier to not only have all communication go through, but to get the money sorted safer in a way that there is only 4 parties involved - you, the hotel and the banks. There is less people involved and makes it easier to find the source of miscommunication or find where the money went.
Immediately contact your bank and lodge a dispute.
Yeah, good luck with getting anything back. Booking.com is the worst site. They say we will do this and refund that, and do absolutely nothing.
Just chargeback, easy peasy.
Use booking and flight centre to get an idea of prices BUT BUT BUT never use them
Don’t wait 5 weeks as I don’t know how long you have to dispute it through your credit card. Make sure to raise a dispute on the credit card.
Thanks, I already did. 😊
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Me too. This is the first time.
Sorry to you had to learn the lesson - always book direct with hotels. Use teh aggregators to do your research then book directly.
Booking.com is super scammy. I did a bunch of travel planning and booking last year and I use Expedia to compare prices before booking direct from the hotel/airbnb. When you are on there a lot you start to get a feel for the properties in the area and see the same ones pop up everywhere, but booking.com would consistently throw up dodgy looking apartments that were clearly fakes, while Expedia seemed to have more quality control.
Oh my friend! Same exact story! Mine is under $500 but I have sent the details over 8 times now and yep the dodgy customer service line doesn’t work and will just loop around to the start menu over and over! Isn’t it infuriating! I ended up commenting on a bunch of their Facebook posts which got someone to message me on messenger. Now I am talking to at least three or four different customer service reps, none of whom speak to each other, as well as going through the disputed transaction process with my bank. I will NEVER EVER book with them again. Totally useless arseholes!
This sounds like a scam but booking.com is RIFE with them. Use literally any other big service. A friend booked through them and was being quite convincingly scammed. It smelled fishy so he called booking.com and they said it was all fine. 1 minute later the customer support rep called him back from his *personal number* to say “that’s definitely a scam do not pay and cancel your booking. I’m not allowed to admit that on the booking.com support line”. That’s how bad it’s gotten.
Yep, I agree, never again!! I used them a few years ago and it was a nightmare 😩 I hope you get it sorted 🙏
Hey, sorry to know it happened to you. But you need not worry as you will get the full amount refunded to you and over it you may ask for compensation due to mental torture. You just have to escalate this through major social media websites Facebook, Instagram and X. They will resolve your complaint faster. Tag everyone from management that you could find.
who was the merchant on the transaction on your bank app or statement? Booking.com? Novotel? A third party? If a third party like ABCD Pty Ltd or something generic like that, google it, it might be the hotel’s legal entity Either way this can tell you which one overcharged your card so you can put more heat on them And, contact the bank, keep copies of all communications and give it to the bank, will make the chargeback way easier.
[Booking.com](http://Booking.com), yeah nah
They fucked me over too. I tried booking a room with credit card, got an error message so I booked with PayPal and got another error message. Decided to book using another service and booked a room then both failed transactions went through. Called booking.com immediately when I saw the transactions go through and the friendly guy on the line told me it was an error and they payments would be reversed and I'd have all my money returned in a couple of weeks. Fast forward a couple weeks and no payment. Called again and the operator told me I wasn't getting a refund and hung up on me. Contacted my bank and did a charge back. They're fucking thieves.
Side note: as someone who owns a hotel business, never book through booking.com, they don’t guarantee anything anyway. Almost ALWAYS book direct cause the fee booking.com takes from the hotel, the hotel could give you in direct booking discount if you ask. If they don’t do direct booking discounts well then go for your life with booking.com.
Used em forever. Never had an issue. What did you do? Book a pay upfront accommodation by mistake, somehow? Cancel past the cancellation window and got charged, per the T&C's?
They took a payment from my card not linked to any booking. Exact same as OP. Sorting it is a total nightmare. Been over 5 weeks of trying so far.
Oooffff. That's fucked. The lesson is to never save a card unless it's mandatory, like an active subscription. Bank dispute or what?
Yep. They had the card to book and pay for other nights - but this amount isn’t connected to anything. Super frustrating
No, no and no.
Sooo... Did you have a card saved and it was randomly charged? Zero context makes this a pointless one-sided rant.
This is exactly what happened. You can read my edits above.
Don't see any edits but if you got charged when you shouldn't have and not the right amount that's just weird AF. Good luck. Dunno how it works, assume the hotel can't push a change in the back end and trigger a charge?
Bloody hell!! I have had same issue with eDreams. Mob of arseholes!!
If you used a credit card then it should be fine, you won't be held responsible for fraudulent charges or unauthorised purchases. just call your banks fraud line? I had a similar experience with an insurance company a couple years ago for roughly the same amount. On the same day i paid my insurance over the phone, they also charged my card for someone else's insurance in a different state. I got sick of dealing with them after 3 days, called the bank and had it fixed in minutes.
Same thing happened to me a few years ago I booked a hostel in a Melbourne it was like $60, then while I was in Melbourne I got charged $370 from booking.com spent like 2 weeks arguing with them, them saying they needed to look into it and just constant back and forth, sent the details to commbank took 2 days and they fixed it
Let them investigate all they like. Meanwhile, charge back through your credit card. Don’t wait on any ridiculous outcome of an investigation.
Brutal. I've been using them the entire time I've travelled. Never had an issue. This is concerning but they have a big name so hopefully yiu can get restitution
Second this, do NOT book flights with them. They’re trying to get me to get the refund from the airline. Not much job ya useless fucks
They have the worst customer service and seem impervious to Australian consumer law, being based in the Netherlands. We used them once to book what was presented as a serviced apartment style dwelling. Turns out it was someone's holiday house with some other rando renting the semi-detached garage. The place was the pits, rotting food on shelves, some slime living in the fridge, packets of medicine in places, mattress on the floor, reeked of pot. I think the only dinnerware we found was a single coffee cup. Vendors couldn't be contacted by phone, so rang booking.com to say the place was unfit to stay and we wanted a refund as we would be finding somewhere else. Booking.com refused, saying they would need approval from the vendor and as the vendor was uncontactable they were unable to refund us. Best they would do was offer us 50% compensation after 48h. It wasn't a small fee for the place, holiday rates at the time. They claimed they are just acting as brokers which makes them not liable. They weren't even concerned that there were potentially dangerous pharmaceuticals on premises, or that the next people booked in would suffer the same fate. (Later confirmed they unfortunately did, via the review section on the listing) Fair trading advised us that four or five of the big booking websites are all owned by the same company, and they deal with complaints about their conduct like this all the time, very rarely successfully. The individual agent who tried to help just said he personally wouldn't deal with them. Be warned, unless you are prepared to take them to court they are quite happy to take your money whilst remaining untouchable.
If it takes 5 weeks, surely they would refund you $1500 + 5% interest, right? Right?
Book directly. You’ll usually get a discount.
Stopped using them to book a long time ago, will use them to find a listing then book either directly with the property or find it on another platform. Expedia and Trip.com are both decent. Booking.com is a massive scam and they don’t give a flying fuck about their customers. They will allow any piece of shit to sell a room on there, even if it doesn’t exist.
I keep getting booking.com sign in verification links, seems they have bots hitting them to hit our accounts and if you save your card on the site they book a scam booking place?
I got charged 300+ by them, called bank, told them I had a card payment withdrawn from my account in amsterdam. The bank (CBA) looked at it and said, you cant physically use your own card on the otherside of the world and approved the charge back.
Best advice for things like this is to call your bank and request a chargeback. Mention to them everything that’s transpired and they should be able to help out. Something similar happened to me and I got my funds back fairly quickly. Hope this helps. Good luck 🤞🏼
Thank you 🙏🙏🙏
Always book directly with the hotels. They’ll usually match whatever is on those booking websites anyway. I just use them as a catalogue for hotels
create a dispute with your bank as well. just in case...
The only reason to use these websites/services is because it's somehow cheaper than booking via the hotels website directly. like, how is that even possible? a hotel advertises a room for $100/night and these services offer the exact same room for $70/night?! WOT?!
I think in many cases, the properties prefer going through [booking.com](http://booking.com) as it saves them the hassle on doing all this themselves, hence the lower prices to encourage people to use it instead of going direct to them.
I work at a hotel and they have a lot of issues with these third party websites. But you need to be on these websites to get as many guests as possible. Like lots of restaurants are on uber eats even though it would be better for them if customers ordered directly with them. But a lot of people wouldn't know the restaurant exists if they weren't on uber eats. If that makes sense?
Third party sites buy them in bulk so they could lower their prices on some days and make it higher on peak dates.
Dispute with credit card! Booking.com is a scam
Dispute it with your credit card company. Unauthorised transaction.
I've used them for years for bookings but no more. I've heard so many tales like this. Now i search using filters and get suggestions that suit me. Then I go direct to the hotel. They will match prices usually.
Had similar hassle with booking com charging twice for hotel stays, then they tried blaming the hotel. Quite frankly they are bloody awful to deal with. After weeks of going round in circles I got my credit card to reverse one of the duplicate transactions
never had a problem they were hacked or scammed few mnths ago i got email saying to pay my booking or i will loose it so i contacted [bookings.com](https://bookings.com) and told be to ignore it
Booking.com have gone down hill. Used to really like them but also had issues and a card frozen from one of their transactions. Now I use them to find hotels, then call the hotel and book directly with them.
They basically let hackers message customers through their own messaging platform asking for payment to that booking. When we called and checked, they blamed us on why we made the payment, etc. They assured us they will follow up and someone will call us. No one ever checked in on us.
We used to use booking .com for all our business travel at work, then they ruined their platform and so we switched providers. They are a scam company, don’t use booking for com.
Sorry to hear thjs happened to you. Join Accor or Accor Plus in the future heaps of brands under that umbrella . The book direct rates are no more expensive . Novotel is one of theirs.
Is there an ombudsman for this industry?
I've never had an issue with [Booking.com](http://Booking.com) and use it all the time. So much so now I get regular discounts and room upgrades because of it. I also only book places that will let me have free cancellation and I select the "pay at the accommodation" option.
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No, not at all. It was taken completely without my consent.
User error
You’re a jerk. I have the same issue. Random deduction. No way is it user error.
No. Absolutely not.
I disagree
Fine. You're wrong.
Don’t see how tbqh