One Booking.com customer is calling out the site after she says they accidentally sold her a stay at a house that someone else had purchased. How did she find out? The new owners tried to move in during her stay.
The TikToker, G (@johnsnowfanpage), is demanding her money back from the popular travel accommodation website. “Booking.com give us a REFUND RIGHT NOW !!!” she writes in a viral clip that’s accrued over 885,000 views on the popular social media application. In the video, she records movers coming into the unit with furniture and their clients’ belongings.
She adds in a text overlay: “Y’all think your fort lauderdale spring break is bad, we have two days left of our vacation and someone just pulled up with three moving trucks to MOVE INTO OUR AIRBNB , f*ck you booking.com.”
While G refers to the unit as an Airbnb rental, the unit was booked through Booking.com, which is a different platform.
This isn’t the first time a Booking.com customer has vented their frustrations with the site while setting up travel accommodations. The Guardian reported in October that “travellers are getting seemingly convincing messages asking them to provide bank card details and threatening their reservation will be cancelled.”
This resulted in some folks getting double-charged for their stays, like one woman in the article who said she felt like she was going “hysterical” because a Booking.com agent told her the double charge was “simply impossible.” One would assume that the consumer was in error—they clicked on a spam email link and willingly gave their information away to scammers.
However, there was one problem: the scam email was issued by Booking.com’s own email address, The Guardian reported. The same customer said shortly after reporting her issue to the website, she received an email indicating their system was breached. In the same article, they reported that Booking.com “was accused of leaving many hotel operators and other partners across the globe thousands of pounds out of pocket for months on end, blaming the lack of payments on a ‘technical issue’.”
Other folks, like this Redditor who posted to the social media application’s r/travel sub, have also warned other travelers to exert extra caution when using Booking.com.
In a ten-minute follow-up clip, G responded to a commenter asking if she ended up having a sleepover with the folks moving into their new place.
She explains that she was on a trip with nine other people, who all chipped in for the accommodations and that someone else used Booking.com to book the unit. She adds that while everything seemed to be great with the unit before the trip, which they booked months in advance, a review from a previous guest indicated a slew of issues with the property management and the unit itself.
After digging further into the property’s address and trying in vain to get a hold of the manager of the rental, they saw that the house was listed on Zillow. They spoke to a real estate agent and told them they had the unit booked until March 16.
However, the real estate agent said was impossible because the new folks were going to move into the place on March 15. After some back and forth, G says she was told there was some type of miscommunication error and that they would be totally fine to stay there until their original date.
She and her friends drove 20 hours from Indiana to Fort Lauderdale and everything seemed “peachy keen” at first.
But a few days into their vacation, a stranger, who had the code to the home, tapped one of G’s friends who was fast asleep, and told them that he was “supposed to be moving into today.”
@johnsnowfanpagee Booking.com give us a REFUND RIGHT NOW !!! @Booking.com #fyp #fortlauderdalebeach #springbreak ♬ Oh no, oh no, oh no, no no – Hip Hop
After complaining to Booking.com and going back and forth with the “rude” property manager, the TikToker was ultimately given the option of staying at another property by the owners, along with a $700 refund, which she rejected because it would have to be divided among 10 different people who had to pack up all of their things in 30 minutes and have their vacation “disrupted.”
TikTokers who responded to her clip urged the young woman’s group to go after Booking.com for their money: “Girl get your bagggggg,” one penned.
Someone else replied that it’s experiences like this that influence their decision to never book through rental homes. “Yep. This is why I stay in hotels,” while numerous other folks heavily criticized Booking.com.
The Daily Dot has reached out to Booking.com via email and to G via TikTok comment for further information.
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