17 ms·

Bad UX: How Booking.com deceives clients

• dchichkov 9y ago
  I think that I've faced a similar issue with a non-cancelable room. The date was changed into a random one. Not a big loss, but I've stopped using their services since.
  • CareerUnlocks 9y ago
    I’ve noticed they switch between DD/MM/YYYY and MM/DD/YYYY in the date boxes and so it’ll look right but be there wrong date due to the alternative format
• slipstream- 9y ago
  What do you expect, from an entity that advertises via spreading malware/PUPs? https://blog.malwarebytes.com/detections/pup-optional-booking/ https://blog.malwarebytes.com/detections/pup-optional-bookin...
  • exikyut 9y ago
    "Potentially Unwanted Program"? That's a polite way of putting it. > PUP.Optional.Booking > This is the detection for a family of potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) that show advertisements hailing from the booking.com domain. This PUP predominantly uses scheduled tasks to trigger the advertisements. Wouldn't mind seeing that looks like. Regardless, "scheduled tasks" definitely sounds like unsolicited EXE execution, which is firmly on the "no thanks" side of shady.
    • slipstream- 9y ago
      as InfoSec Taylor Swift once said, "potentially unwanted programs" are just malware with a legal team.
  • mythbustah_13 9y ago
    I believe these don't come from the actual company itself, rather from other people abusing their affiliate program (same thing happens with Amazon, for instance, so I guess you can't trust them either).
• mtmail 9y ago
  Try searching for a hotel room 6+ months ahead. Oslo end of February 2018. "14 people are looking right now. In high demand! Booked 124 times in the last 24 hours. Latest Booking: 3 minutes ago" "In high demand – only 3 rooms left on our site!" "Someone just booked this In high demand!" "Limited supply in Oslo: 3-star hotels. 4 hotels like Best Western Karl Johan Hotel are already unavailable on our site!" "3 other people looking now" While all true it has no connection to how much the hotel might be booked next February.
  • kushalbohra 9y ago
    That was a good one :D , system didn't even realize its trying to fake too much.
  • FireBeyond 9y ago
    Basically exactly this. I looked at Oshkosh WI for the middle of October next year. Middle of the week, in fact, a Wed night, 1 night, 1 person stay: "Only 1 room left!" "Booked 14 times in the last 24 hours!" - Oh yeah? This hotel in Appleton WI, with 80 rooms, had FOURTEEN rooms booked for a random Wednesday in September 2018 through booking.com ALONE in the last 24 hours. Screw dark patterns, that's outright deception, if not fraud. (edited, I originally said October 2018, when in fact my example was for Wed September 19, 2018).
    • soneil 9y ago
      This is a perfect example of a dark pattern. The site said “14 bookings in the last 24hours”. You read it as “14 bookings for the date you searched for, in the last 24 hours”. I don’t believe this is an accident.
    • breitling 9y ago
      To be fair, it said the room has been booked 14 times in 24 hours...not that it had been booked for that specific date 14 times in 24 hours.
      • mikeash 9y ago
• jakub_g 9y ago
  Booking is the website with the highest density of dark patterns per pixel I've ever seen. Red texts hurrying you to make a reservation in virtually every <div> on the page ("only 2 rooms left", "someone just made a booking", "12 people looking", "Booked N times today", "You're lucky to see this room, normally it's booked!", "You're lucky to see it for $50, normally it's more expensive" etc.). All of those texts are flashing/animating so there's a lot of moving things on the page. When you're idle for a while and switch the tab in the browser, after coming back you get a popup urging you to make a reservation. Basically you're sweaty after the process. I reserved my hotel lately with Booking and I will actively try to avoid in the future if possible.
  • dannyr 9y ago
    I've seen this dark pattern at Agoda.com first. They have been doing it for a long time.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • bamboozled 9y ago
      Agoda and Booking are owned by Priceline Group, so this makes sense.
  • mewciv 9y ago
    Is there any other company not using these dark patterns? I tried to use many others (big enough to have choices) and it's all the same. Sometimes you're even wondering if it's not just the same website with another branding.
    • tyingq 9y ago
      Booking.com is the white label hotel provider for many websites. Kayak, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, etc.
      • 9y ago
• pingec 9y ago
  Even as a host using booking.com I dislike many shady things they put you through but at the end of the day these dark patterns must work in practice as there is no other platform that delivers even closely as many guests as booking.com.
  • mandarg 9y ago
    What are some alternative sites that send you guests? I have used hotels.com sometimes (has dark patterns too, but fewer of them). I would definitely prefer using something that was more...sensible. I would naïvely think that booking directly with hotels would be cheapest, but I have definitely seen deals on these aggregators that were unavailable on the same hotel's own site – which is the only reason I even think about using them.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • amag 9y ago
      Oh, don't get me started on hotels.com. It's seems to be quite common for hotels.com to sell you the room with breakfast (in countries where breakfast typically is included) but when you get the confirmation, there's no mention of any breakfast and the booking code is for a room without breakfast. So when you arrive at the hotel and they say: "Nope, breakfast is not included" you have nothing to prove that you booked with breakfast, in fact, to the hotel your reservation is the very definition of a no-breakfast reservation. This happened to me and we had to run through a lot of hoops to eventually get hotels.com to reimburse us. It helped that we had called them for parts of our reservation because all calls are recorded and the operator clearly stated that breakfast was included. The same thing happened to my father who was a bit more alert and noted the missing breakfast from the confirmation. He then had to call them something like five times for a confirmation that actually said breakfast was included. Each time they sent him a new reservation but it wasn't until the last call it did say breakfast was included.
    • desas 9y ago
      The aggregators I looked into working with (5+ years ago) required that you offer rate parity. You had to guarantee that for a given room+date+conditions you would give the lowest price to them as you would anywhere else. The way around it was to offer more flexibility for direct bookings or throw in breakfast.
• aluhut 9y ago
  I gave up online vacation reservations this year. This is the second time I wasted hours on several portals before I've found one that worked in a decent way and had a useful choice. When I've finally found a destination, I tried to book the trips I've found and they all have been "sold out". When I tried the same criteria again, I got the same results but more expensive. Again sold out when I clicked any of them. Did it one more time, same results. Went to a travel agency in a mall nearby. Got a better price and even some useful hints as where to go to when I'm there. I'll be back when you have that AI travel agent...
  • JCharante 9y ago
    Hopefully it won't be "powered by Watson". God I can already imagine the commercials.
  • amag 9y ago
    Given the state of affairs with online reservations, going to your local travel agency is is undeniably the future. Oh the irony.
    • preinheimer 9y ago
      I tried to book my honeymoon with a travel agent. We figured we could use some good advice, and (at least in canada) when you book with them you get some bonus insurance. They basically told me it wasn't worth their time unless we were booking a cruise.
      • aluhut 9y ago
        > They basically told me it wasn't worth their time unless we were booking a cruise. How is this even possible? Did you take away their time? Were there people waiting who would book a cruise? My experience above is from Germany.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
• snksnk 9y ago
  Is 'dark UX patterns' the new meme for something that has already been around for >15 years? <insert bold red marquee here>
• Kiro 9y ago
  Can someone actually comment on the issue in the article instead of dropping random anecdotes? Sounds like a bug rather than a dark pattern? EDIT: The submission title said something about Booking.com using dark patterns but it has been changed now.
• clamprecht 9y ago
  It's a FOMO machine. I use it to find places, filtering by "wifi available", and then contact them directly.
  • JetSpiegel 9y ago
    Basically this. I use booking as the yellow pages, you search for the hotels you want and give them a call directly. Cheaper prices and no cuts for parasite middleman.
    • samastur 9y ago
      So parasite middleman is for you a company that enables you to find those hotels in the first place? Do you find all middleman parasitic or is there something else booking should do to stop being in this group?
      • clamprecht 9y ago
        I've had some bad experiences with third parties (middlemen) when booking hotels online. Anytime there is a problem, the other two parties point the fingers at each other, and you, the customer, is left to deal with it. I don't find all middlemen parasitic, but in this case, it's less risk for me to deal directly. Sometimes only booking.com has rooms and the hotel site itself doesn't, and in that case, I will still use booking.com.
    • Scea91 9y ago
      If you do this, you are more of a parasite than the middleman which provided value to you.
• dbatten 9y ago
  This happened to me with Expedia. They advertised a lower rate on a different room at the hotel I was looking at... Didn't catch until after I checked out that the advertisement was for a different day than my search results. (Because obviously I'm just as happy to stay at a random hotel just off the interstate in rural Ohio a week after my trip as during it?) Thankfully, Expedia has good customer service and fixed things for me, even though it was not a cancelable reservation.
  • bdcravens 9y ago
    Same issue. Went up to Dallas for a few days to avoid Harvey floods, and the $99 site rate increased to $147 on the weekends.
• k__ 9y ago
  I tried to book a holiday last year and had the feeling basically all booking sites are broken. No where did anyone show me the real price of what I was buying.
• moondev 9y ago
  The only time I used booking.com, the hotel wouldn't honor my reservation, even though I showed them the booking confirmation number. They were sold out and simply said "not my problem, third party and we never got it". Who knows who's fault it was but with something as crucial as a hotel in a specific location/date I tend to just book through the actual hotel site from now on.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • soneil 9y ago
    I’m surprised this isn’t more common. I went through a period where I was frequenting the same hotel ~10 times a year. They knew me by name, and I knew most of them. There was no such thing as “full” - they would move heaven and earth to accommodate repeat custom. When they perceive your ‘loyalty’ as being to a portal, and me as years of repeat custom .. well what would you do? (Unrelated tip: If a hotel is booked out, visit them directly. Most don’t list all their rooms on portals, for similar reasons)
  • lucaspiller 9y ago
    If you are booking with a chain you usually get better perks by booking through their site, especially if you are a loyalty member (even the most basic level often gives perks so it's worth signing up). Some are even cheaper by booking directly (e.g. Accor group). The place where booking.com really shines is for individual hotels and smaller properties like bed and breakfasts - often they only use one provider and it's usually booking.com/Priceline (at least here in Europe). You could just call them directly once you've found it though...
    • petre 9y ago
      They're cheaper directly because booking.com takes 15 or 18% comission.
      • Simon_says 9y ago
        You would think so, but I travel a lot and it's been extremely rare that the price in cash at the hotel is less than Booking.com's price.
• basicplus2 9y ago
  Never use booking.com not only dark patterns but when you finally get it "right" (I was nearly caught out) their price is way higher than everyone else anyway. Scumbags
  • mythbustah_13 9y ago
    This isn't true, I've used it since 2011 and for more than 30 reservations and even compare using meta-aggregators like HotelsCombined and whenever Booking has the room and it's same price or cheaper than others. It may happen that they don't have a room while other websites do.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• fizzbitch 9y ago
  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'
  • dyu- 9y ago
    ``` 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.
    • wikibob 9y ago
      -
      • user5994461 9y ago
        Europeans can charge back just fine.
        • emn13 9y ago
          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.
• chewz 9y ago
  booking.com is a deliberate scam. Their business model is to lock customer into reservation that he would have to cancel and booking.com will keep the money. Booking.com puts a lot of pressure (through dark UI patterns) to make a reservation ASAP promising that you can cancel at any time. In many cases cancellation simply isn't possible - too late etc.. They are just keeping the money and this is exactly what their business model is after.
  • rixed 9y ago
    No this is ridiculously far from the truth. They make an awfull lot of money selling actual room nights (think Google-scale a lot, per employee, although the money culture in both firms are opposite to each other), and actually do cancel bookings and even sometime refund non cancelable ones. They are definitively harsh on the business side, especially when negotiating commissions with hotels, especially since it's always easy to justify ("that's for our users"). But this is not a scam. You might have had a bad experience. No amount of money spent on customer care will ever balance out a big firm being 100% money driven as opposed to reputation driven, and fundamentally not caring for an individual user. So yes when you are that one user who felt through the cracks it feels bad indeed.
    • dyu- 9y ago
      ```No this is ridiculously far from the truth.``` Easy to say for someone who haven't experienced their deception first hand. GP is correct. That is part of their scheme to extract more revenue.
      • raverbashing 9y ago
        I had zero issues cancelling bookings that were free to cancel (within a time limit - usually 24h before the arrival date). But some aren't and are explicitly marked as such
      • rixed 9y ago
        I had actually. Once, because of their website insisting on showing dates for which there are availabilities, I ended up booking for the wrong days, something that I could not cancel. At the time I though I made the mistake so didn't complain. Only later did I realize that's how the website works (they force a date in the web session because it converts better). Had I given them a call at the time, chances are that they would have refund me, but this also I learnt only later. I've also been "stolen" a car booking on rentalcars once, another company belonging to Priceline. I'm not as familiar with rentalcars as I am with booking so can't be as confident but even in that case I doubt the business plan is based on such erroneous bookings. For sure, the incentive to fight fraud they are victim of is bigger than the incentive to fix the UX dark patterns that are causing the erroneous bookings and eventually bring them some extra profit. Also, let's not forget that companies abusing dark patterns or being slow to fix "bugs" when they convert well, are not merely soulless organisations driven by profit. They are made of teams driven by OKRs, which are made of individuals driven by their desire to fit in the culture (or their perception of it).
• true_tuna 9y ago
  How about calling it malicious UX? Bad is not a strong enough word. Or maybe hateful, or exploitive.
• jimjimjim 9y ago
  in my previous trips i have never seen a room rate at one of these booking type websites that i wasn't able to get by going directly to the hotel website or by phoning them. they are parasites.
• joeframbach 9y ago
  Could someone explain to me any reason why it would be better to book through any third party instead of directly through the hotel?
  • brewdad 9y ago
    Mainly the convenience of seeing many options in one place. Sure, if you know you want a specific Hilton in Seattle, then go directly to their site. When we looked for places to stay in Norway and Denmark last summer, booking.com was a great resource to learn about many options and the going rates. Once we narrowed things down to a couple options, we could look at the direct site or book through Booking since many smaller places bounced us back there anyway.
  • aianus 9y ago
    It's frequently cheaper through the aggregator. The aggregators force the hotels to sign a contract stating that they won't sell cheaper on their own site and since you seem specifically interested in their hotel (maybe you're a business traveler with a points card) they have less reason to compete on price.
    • mythbustah_13 9y ago
      This is no longer true anymore as EU regulations recently forbid that.
  • viraptor 9y ago
    If you book enough stays through them, you get a genius status and get a discount on some of the hotels. Something like 10% in some cases if I remember correctly. It's pretty well hidden though. I've never seen it advertised on the homepage: http://loyaltylobby.com/2013/07/22/booking-com-genius-award/ http://loyaltylobby.com/2013/07/22/booking-com-genius-award/
  • piceas 9y ago
    Convenience. If the service provides value for research and an easy booking process for roughly the same price/advantages then there's little benefit to booking directly. I like booking.com because the description of the hotel, photos, and conditions are presented in a consistent format which makes comparing options and locations very efficient. The details have largely also matched my experience which is nice. I started using the site because I found that their cancelation conditions were better than booking with the hotels directly. More recently, this is less of the case as the differential in price for a refundable booking has increased greatly in some cities, at least for my needs. Their solicitation for reviews process is pretty good. People’s expectations of service an amenity tend to be pretty unreliable but there are enough substantive reviews to filter out the extremes. It is slightly convenient to have a diverse range of accommodation types booked in one system but not enough to balance the dark patterns. I no longer recommend the site to those who aren’t at least a little savvy with travel and pattern spotting.
• Fjolsvith 9y ago
  My wife and I use Windham Group, and use their app. Very nice booking experience. And if we're driving late we can push a button on the app and a reservation specialist finds us the nearest available room and calls us with the booking. The app also gives a maps link.
• rixed 9y ago
  "looks like some kind of ab testing bug or round-robin servers." Definitively AB testing. The website runs hundreds of experiments simultaneously, on a few pages. Although in theory all the experiments are independent in practice it is often not the case and some bugs show only in some combination of 2 or more experiments. Especially, in such crowded web pages, even technically distinct experiments influence each others UX wise, which can cause bugs of their own (like, two distinct experiments displaying two seemingly contradictory messages). Eventually, the mix of experiments a given user is subjected to can look a lot like an outright lie or bug or scam or deceptive practice (especially when it's a combination of small dark patterns of course), and I think that's what's happening here.
• minimaximus 9y ago
  I've been burned by booking.com's 'Free Cancellation' UI shenanigans a couple of times. In both instances I swear that I saw the free cancellation banner next to the room I'm reserving. Instantly after reservation, I receive an email saying 'non-refundable', or $400 fee for cancellation. The first time I thought I made a mistake, but when my wife saw the same thing... well, something fishy is going on.
  • dyu- 9y ago
    It is deception at it's finest. My siblings experienced this first hand and I told them, no more booking.com, ever. Also, the cancellation was 1 month away from actual booking but they do not care. They just want to decieve (scam?) you and get your money. Luckily, the bank sided with us. The dispute is a sure process as long as they value you as a customer.
    • Udik 9y ago
      Hm hm. Chrome extension that takes a screenshot of every page you visit on certain sites (and adds the hashes to a blockchain for further proof).
  • csomar 9y ago
    Free cancellation means they don't need your CC. If they get your CC they got you by the balls.
• usr1106 9y ago
  Using the online travel gangsters has been the worst part of travelling for years. Extorting business practices against small hotels, high fees, and when you check the small print/certificate you understand that profits go to a tax evasion paradise. If something goes wrong for whatever reason their so-called customer service is of no help whatsoever. Only one room left is not even technically lying. It just means that small hotels give rooms only one by one to the extorters, hoping to sell as many of them via a cheaper channel. Unfortunately it is not easy to find a small hotel directly on the web, search results a completely polluted by booking sites. In that context dark patterns on their sites are just a minor detail, I don't expect any better from companies with such ethics.
• tudorconstantin 9y ago
  These dark patterns are the result of successful A/B tests. They don't do it because they enjoy it. They do it because the data says the platform performs better. And I know this because I met dozens of Perl developers at conferences and I asked them explicitly about the FOMO spreading. The question is: how can one measure the long term impact these dark patterns have on future sales? I do my best to avoid using booking.com precisely because of these dark patterns. I love Perl, there are just a few big companies that are still using Perl as their main backend technology and whenever I can I try to give them money. Especially when they're getting involved in the community and are trying to grow the ecosystem like booking does. But when their web site tries to apply the cheapest manipulation tricks on me, I avoid them.
  • brianwawok 9y ago
    You let the backend stack of a site determine if you visit it or not?
    • yebyen 9y ago
      Why not? I'd be more inclined to give my money to a company too, if I knew they were playing nicely in the community, and contributing positively to the ecosystem of one of my own personal pet projects. It's not a standard that most people will use to decide, but most people don't love software... but if you do love your software and it's not leading-edge anymore (or even if it is, I don't know much about modern Perl development and I assume that is because it's unfashionable...) you want companies that also love that software to do well, and keep putting their improvements back into the upstreams.
• oskarth 9y ago
  I was booking a place in Budapest this summer on Booking.com, and there was a specific area I wanted to be in. I searched for that area and found a place that was marked as having a certain location that was perfect for me. Upon arriving, it turns out this was just where their "main office" was, and the specific apartment I was renting was situated in a different area, several tram rides away. I tried to get my money back for this clear deception but to no avail. Their excuse? The real address was available to me in my confirmation email, i.e. after I had already paid. If you can't trust their map, it serves no purpose whatsoever. A few weeks later I was trying to find the listing but it appears to have been removed. I'd switch in an instant if someone built a useful alternative to Booking. Agoda is the same deal as far as I can tell, and it is owned by the same parent company. EDIT: Airbnb is great - I use it a lot, more than Booking - but sometimes you just want a more professionally run hotel, hostel or apartment. In fact, after cancelling that place I ended up booking a studio with Airbnb at the last minute.
  • smegel 9y ago
    Airbnb?
  • BillinghamJ 9y ago
    Did you initiate a chargeback?
    • oskarth 9y ago
      No. Booked with debit card, not credit card, which as far as I know makes the requirements for chargebacks higher.
      • brianwawok 9y ago
        This is why us Americans always use credit. So much protection.
  • howlgram 9y ago
    I don't think booking is at fault here, they just list the hotels they don't make sure that they are hotels are honest or whatever, it's like renting on airbnb on a room with no reviews
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• feelin_googley 9y ago
  The annoyances described by the author sounded like they relied on Javascript and graphics. This made me wonder if the site relies on Javascript or graphics. As an experiment, I just wrote a small POC command line script for 1. searching for hotels by keyword 2. obtaining the hotel ids 3. searching availability using the hotel id 4. printing prices, etc. If anyone wants this I will share it. Easily adaptable to bulk searching, producing CSV, etc. Again, this site does not require Javascript or graphics for getting price lists. Easy to avoid the "dark patterns" and just retrieve the desired data. I use a text-only browser.
• Freak_NL 9y ago
  What are the realistic alternatives to Booking.com though? When I'm planning a journey the reviews and search by area features of Booking.com make it possible for me to gain some understanding of going rates and hotel quality, but the process leaves a lot to be desired for both me, the customer, and the hotel. I can search with Booking.com yet book directly with the hotel, but that means I can't review the property and help others.
• sschueller 9y ago
  I have heard from some people that booking.com takes such a high percentage that you can call some hotels and get a better price going directly.
• praulv 9y ago
  Sadly I fell for the various tricks described here and hastily booked a room on holiday recently. Having said that, my family of 4 adults with different credit cards made excellent use of their generous £15 referral reward kicking back both ways to save a significant amount on the total booking cost.
• cateye 9y ago
  Besides dark patterns, there is something else that annoys me even more: the cluttered and inconsistency of the UI itself. It is not possible or really not intuitive to do something like entering a couple of places you would potentially want to go to, select 2 adults and 3 children, filter them on criteria like free parking, free wifi and sort the results on price. While this sounds like a pretty common pattern, the experience is really bad. Sorting is messed up by sponsored hotels, not consistent on the price of a room or the room I configured or the price is the cheapest room without wifi... On top of it, they run all kind of experiments. This causes more confusion for me, because I just learned to do something in a specific way. I still use it, not because of the great usability or great service but because there are no real better alternatives.
• matthewmacleod 9y ago
  Obviously I'm an odd one out – I quite like booking.com. Sure, it'd probably be a bit nicer if it didn't have all the flashing red shit everywhere, but broadly speaking I've found it's pretty useful for locating hotels and getting the details in a consistent manner. I've never had a booking made through it cancelled or anything like that, and the prices haven't been obviously inflated versus those offered booking directly with the hotel. Obviously it sounds like other have had a worse experience…
• dennisjauntify 9y ago
  Ha. As someone on the other side of this, we used to spoon feed availability to OTAs that do this. Set up a competitive price, and it worked wonders. Now they just took it to another level, which would make that technique work even better, Booking sites never know the exact availability of any property. It could look like only a couple left, but there could be blocks, cancellations, who knows why the hotel decided not to give all the rooms. That is part of the inspiration behind priceling getting hotelnija and expedia releasing its own. Even hostelworld had their own PMS for years. So dont believe when there is only a few left.
• Freestyler_3 9y ago
  I just did a booking through them and noticed that the price changed per the selected language, the difference was 124 vs 169 (eng). Booking in english gives you quite the disadvantage.
• assafmo 9y ago
  One time we canceled a hotel with free cancelation but the hotel chared us 1100$ anyway. (why the hell did the hotel had our credit card details?!) We contacted booking.com and asked to get a refund, and they said we are right but it takes time... So we contacted Mastercard and said that booking.com won't refund us. Mastercard checked with the hotel and when they didn't get a good enough answer from them they refunded us 1100$. Then booking.com followed up on our earlier request for refund and also didn't get a good enough answer from the hotel so they refunded us 1100$ from their money... Sometime after that we got charged 1100$ by Mastercard... I think that booking.com got a complaint from the hotel that Mastercard reverted the charge and then opened a dispute with Mastercard to get their 1100$ that they refunded us... At least now I know to just go and tell Mastercard every time I get a little resistance from some business who won't rightfully refund me.