Booking.com Impresses

I have always found booking.com to be a reliable and user-friendly portal for booking accommodation for my travels, and thus have been using it regularly despite the fact that it has no loyalty rewards system. Therefore it was to my dismay that I was pre-charged 101.5% of the amount (by the accommodation) for a recent booking I made, when it was stated clearly on booking.com that only a 5% deposit would be pre-charged. As the saying goes, it takes years to build up trust, and only seconds to destroy it.

So I wrote an email to booking.com to state my displeasure, and booking.com staff followed up by contacting the accommodation manager to support my complaint. Eventually a full refund was processed, so that I would just need to make full payment on arrival at the accommodation.

Unfortunately, due to credit card fees and foreign currency exchange rates, I ended up short of S$2.90 despite an equivalent debit and credit in the foreign currency. Though the amount lost was really small, it was nevertheless an irritant, and the whole experience left a bad taste in my mouth.

So I wrote another email to booking.com to state my displeasure again, even though the whole fiasco wasn’t really any fault of booking.com, apart from the fact that I made the booking with it. To my pleasant surprise, booking.com staff managed to get the accommodation manager to top up the shortfall amount!

Nice one, booking.com! Impressive customer service, indeed.