Booking.com Reviews 196

Booking.com is a guest booking platform as long as they get their commission, the host is unimportant.
Some bookers book for the maximum number allowed and then sneak in almost double the numbers, messes the property, damage and then leave a bad review. The guest reviews are posted immidiately but the host response takes up to 72 hours to be checked and posted. How is this fair? Booking.com earns because of Hosts and without Hosts, will they have the same revenue?
Airbnb on the other hand is a very Host oriented platform, with measure in place to help and protect the Hosts.

We had a guest from booking.com cause significant damage to one of our rooms, we lodged a guest misconduct complaint with booking.com - they told us to get the cost of replacement out of the guest and gave us a 'sorry this happened' and that was it. About 6 weeks later we received a 1 out 10 from this same guest, they didn't leave a comment so we couldn't even respond to the review - we immediately asked booking.com to take the review down, they said "We believe in transparency and fairness" so wouldn't take the review down - transparency and fairness would be not allowing the guest to review us in the first place and if they were allowed to review, we should have had the right of reply and could have added photos of the BLOOD that was covering our room from drunk and disorerdly behaviour, police had to attend twice to remove these thugs but booking.com just respond with generic messages without even reading what we submit.

They are unfortunately a necessary evil in the hotel business but they are widely disliked by the property owners, I have never heard a good thing said about them from any other property I know and we are actively working towards removing them as soon as possible.

Airbnb charge the same commission but are a far superior platform in terms of fairness and customer service.

Platform is clunky and difficult to use, only a matter of time surely before some tech company sees their major weaknesses and takes over this space.

I can only confirm what many other reviews have already said: the customer service is nonexistent. Any problem a host raises is met with a canned, irrelevant reply. The only reasonable conclusion is that they’ve outsourced support to a third-world call center, where agents are given no training and are paid a few cents per response rather than rewarded for solving issues.
There is no feedback mechanism either—likely because the company already knows the quality of support is consistently poor and the whole service is just a façade.
On top of that, they’ve underpaid me by about £30 due to a commission accounting error. Having lost all confidence, I’ve disabled both the “Payments by Booking” service and direct debit for commissions.
If I receive an incorrect invoice, I will only pay the correct part without reporting the problem to anyone.

I have tried to get my property listed with them for the last 3 months. Everything has been submitted and all they need to do is review the video confirming my address. I have phoned them so many times, spending hundreds of rands on airtime, following up. Every time, they make a promise. A promise to call back; a promise to have it listed the next day etc. Nothing is happening! Im suffering a huge loss of income because of their inadequacy!

If you are suffering from masochism, or really wanna hurt your mind, try this garbage of a software.

Such an incredibly bad customer experience. You are forced to communicate through an inadequate platform. One that continually opens new tabs forces you to re-log in for each tab, sometimes multiple verifications, that sends you in loops, offers contradictory information and ultimately, rarely offers a solution. Anything to avoid connecting you with a real person.

And this is when you don't have a serious problem. You can't communicate with Booking.com for day to day stuff. I don't want to have to rely on them when I inevitably have a real problem, they will just let me down.

Booking.com always let you down.

The worst customer service I’ve ever experienced.
As a host, I found Booking.com’s platform to be incredibly frustrating to use. The site is confusing, full of technical issues, and the app is just as bad.

Customer service is a nightmare — the reps are nearly impossible to understand, don’t resolve the problems, and repeatedly promise callbacks that never happen. I wasted hours trying to get basic issues fixed and got absolutely nowhere.

After hosting just one guest and dealing with endless hassle, I removed my listing and will never use Booking.com again — not as a host or a customer.

Absolute worst hosting website. No help. Interface is horrendous. Extranet log in is terrible. Avoid at all cost.

I was a host for 2 months in 2024 but terminated my property. Booking.com made a mistake to put my property live on 6/8/25 and guest in UK called me a few times to ask key collection information. I had to stop working calling booking.com to cancel it. Another Irish guy called me a few times from Dublin at 8pm on 6/8/25 said his card in booking.com was used to book two properties in UK today. He did not book them at all. My property was one of the two properties. I had to explain and call booking.com immediately. I have called booking.com four times regarding I need compensation for the stress they put me. They sound nice and said different things each time. They promised me accounting team will call me within two hours. But nobody called me. I will send a formal complaint regarding this bad experience. I removed my credit card from booking.com. I made a complaint as their customer service is useless. Not much hope of formal complaint. It was a message format on partner websites.

Really terrible customer service back up nearly impossible to get a sensible human, they try to make you use BOTs that generally don’t help. The pulse app compared to Airbnb is clunky, full of bugs and very hard to navigate. Their IT dept should be sacked!

they all give 0 care about anything, not one can communicate.

Here's the latest on the absolute con-artists popularly known as Booking.com. So after my initial zero star review here from 16 Apr 2024, I went ahead and removed my listing and deleted my account.. or so I thought/tried.

Turns out it's impossible to even delete your own account - you have to ask them do to it, which after screaming and shouting for 11 months, they still haven't.

But here's where it gets fun, after I deleted my listing - Booking.com calls and says "Someone wants to book your property, but it's not listed anymore", to which I say "Yea, cuz your platform is crap. You can ask them to cancel their request OR if they want they can contact me directly OFF THE PLATFORM", which they did - and now Booking.com is trying to charge me a fee for it, for a booking that happened OFF their platform, AFTER I had deleted my listing!

To make matters worse (and comical at the same time) they've assiged a "Debt collection agency" onto me.

PLEASE EVERYONE AVOID THESE CHARLATANS LIKE THE PLAGUE!

As a host their customer service team is really awful and I am really considering removing all of my properties from their platform

They don't you pay out when a guest damages your property they hardly answer the phone and when they do they are useless or the calls "by chance" gets cut off

I would like to comment on the very high commission charged by booking.com

An example:
A guest books at the end of December 2024. Does not use discounts and I do not have them enabled. The customer financially pays €464.20 for 3 nights and as a host I pay €106 in commission and €6.96 extra for 'transaction costs'. And also about 22%VAT of €25!, while I am only allowed to charge 10% VAT myself! So that's already a difference of 12%.

But that's not all, the commission and costs are approximately 24% of the guest's booking amount!! So much commission for what??? Just to be online on the platform?

The guests already pay relatively much, only because booking reduces so much of the amount that the host will get. Otherwise it would be completely uninteresting for a host to rent out the accommodation, given the other costs and taxes, except for booking, the host also has to pay.

I think I'm not the only host who thinks this way and wonders whether it's still profitable to use booking.com as a platform.

The only thing that booking.com does is collect even more margin from the host for all the extras that the customer receives as a 'gift'. But in the end the host is paying for it.

To keep the stay affordable for guests, it is important the price and quality are maintained. Now we have to cut in our own margins, because I don't want the customer to suffer from the high costs booking.com charges.

It is important to me that the price and quality ratio is more then ok. I still stand for hospitality and enjoy receiving our guests. I hope booking.com realizes that they cannot continue charging this kind of high commissions to the host.

There is a complete disconnect between the people who understand how the system works and the customer service team answering the phones. There’s no escalation path, no access to technical support when the system fails—customer service only handles guest-related issues. If you’re dealing with a system error, you're essentially on your own.

Case in point: tonight I received an email saying a guest requested to cancel, and I have two days to respond. The email includes a link labeled “Review and Respond.” I clicked it. It opens the app (which I'm always logged into), and shows an error: “This account is not authorised to see this.” I tried on my laptop—same issue.

There is no message in the app. No message in the online portal. Just a dead-end email and a countdown clock.

It’s currently 11 PM, and I’m forced to call customer service just to explain that the guest in question has been staying in the apartment for the past three days and cannot cancel. This is one of many examples—frankly, the process is broken and it leaves hosts unsupported.

Worst, Terrible, Crazy, Very Rude, illiterate, Customer Service has ever encountered.
Most of the reviews I have been reading here are similar to ours. And it is so sad these people don't care about the host.
Firstly, there was a drunker, etc, that did check in, he was staying for 6 nights, the second day, I noticed he vomited in the toilet, peed everywhere because he was on dru..., etc. I told the guest this was not acceptable, and he threatened me. I called booking.com immediately to please change the date, so that He can leave, but they said, is not possible. The date of his check out, i went to the room around 2 pm, he was still on the bed, bedsheet remove, more than 30 bottle of vodka, lots of cans of coke, dru..., etc sock water and pee smell on the floor, we called ambulance, even police, before he manage to leave the flat. I could not recognise my apartment again because of the terrible state. I contacted booking.com with evidence of damages. to my surprise, the damage request was declined; their reason was that I sent many different pictures, and I was shocked. So, I end up paying for all the damages.

Recently, on the booking availabilities page, I put only one person allowed, and if one person booked, the system was supposed to block the date. instead, the booking system allows 3 extra people to book the same date, same room that is supposed to have been closed. Immediately, I contacted them to inform them that their system made a mistake, but to my surprise, they blamed me, saying that it was our fault, not theirs. So, I said no problem, I knew this was from booking.com's fault, but we will accommodate them in our expensive place. The day one of the guest suppose to check in, we have contacted the guest about the check in, suddenly i saw a message from booking.com, saying i have 30minute to reply that the guest said I cant host them, i was shock, I even wrote the guest, the guest send message to booking.com he never send message to booking.com. They later apologized, saying it was because I had informed them, there was double booking some weeks ago.
These platform is one of the worst shit platform, they are not like this before, but since they started employing people from asia, india, that cant even speak English, and have no knowledge about what they are saying, it has been hell. I dislike this platform, I wish there were a popular platform I could be using, I will have delete my account. As it is, I don't put my hope on this platform anymore; it's a useless platform.

I’m absolutely sick to death of this platform and never being paid on time!! Another month of no payment why?? Fully booked month in and out and now saying no payment until July! Sort your system out we pay all this money to use your services and they don’t work!! You’re leaving people out of pocket which means you are a company who doesn’t care!

I’m a host and their plattform sucks. It’s littarly high school student who programmed it… well it’s the feeling of it. Just so bad!

This platform is absolutely the worst, stay away as it is overly complicated, very bloated with unnecessary worthless features. AirBbnb is far superior in its simplicity as well as fees and problem resolution. BookingCom charges outrageous fees and uses extortion on property owners with higher fees for more visibility as well as stealing funds$$$ from Bookings with clever bullshit excuses...Scammer clients can come in and extort the owners with bad reviews, and even with proof of shitty clients BookingCom will do nothing

I am literally out of my mind with frustration at this platform. It's impossible to talk to a person and their website just takes you through this never-ending maze that keeps repeating itself. Not answering your question.
I will cancel my contract and stay with the original platform that have been amazing for 10 years, always someone at the other end of the phone to help with whatever query I have.