I’ve made over 50 successful reservations with Booking.com. Until recently failures were rare and always due to mistakes by the host: For example a hotel in Beijing didn’t say in their listing that they cannot accept foreigners. A hotel in Bulgaria didn’t properly block out their listing for a weekend when they hosted a wedding. A hotel in Cambodia didn’t have space for me. In all these cases the hotel refunded any money already paid.
But this week Booking itself made a mistake: The app showed the price as 307 South African Rand on some screens and R511 on other. The last price I was shown before finalizing transaction was R307, but R511 was billed to my bank card.
Customer support didn’t answer my query. It seems like they don’t even care about profiting from their own mistakes, which is fraud.
