Charlene T.

Our company has been a faithful user of booking.com for a good few months now for our corporate bookings.

During one attempt to cancel the booking for London Marriott within the free cancellation window, it was immediately reflected as [CANCELED] on the site and we safely assumed it was cancelled. We did NOT receive any cancellation emails (as we would have, considering the previous bookings/cancellations we have done). We safely then booked another hotel in view of this cancellation around the same vicinity.

HOWEVER, a week into the stay-period, we are shocked to have been billed a hefty NO-SHOW fee for London Marriott (which is cancelled then on site) and when we logged back in to check (it amazingly shows NO-SHOW, instead of CANCELLED!).

I do not know if it was on booking.com's rep's part that they failed to cancel promptly this Marriott booking and thus caused this big penalty fee but it is atrocious to blame the customer for (double-booking, according to the Customer Support) for your site's technical error and failure to confirm via email to us. We have always received confirmation/cancellation emails previously, but there was NONE for this.

The customer service (female, obviously I didn't bother to ask for her name as it would just be an alias) was pretty rude when she attended to my questions with sarcastic comebacks and all she could say was she'd forward a refund request (but according to her system, there were no cancellation requests ever done) to the hotel in respective and "get back to me" with the hotel's refund response.

Acting on behalf of a corporate entity, we would strongly advise the readers to book directly with the hotels themselves instead of booking.com agent. It's extremely saddening to know how actually middlemen agents like booking.com works to earn their keep.

Extremely disappointed.