Booking.com Broke Our Property
Ok, now I have your attention, I should say that booking.com is probably the finest portal for booking holiday lets. Their website has just about everything you could wish for and more and is very innovative, this story is about booking.com deleting our property from their portal and leaving us in the lurch. For the sake of clarity no damage was done to our property!
Before I wrote this page, I did some research to see if anyone else had experienced the sam,e issue and I wasn’t able to find anything
In May 2021 we started using booking.com to advertise our holiday let on the Isle Of Wight. Because we weren’t used to how their system worked we inadvertently created two properties for the same address.
This was fine until we asked for the “snoozed” listing to be deleted and leave just the live property intact.
At 2am on the morning of Thursday 1st September 2022, waking us from deep sleeps, we received a call from booking.com to discuss the property, yes you read that right, 2am! The lady on the phone was very apologetic and said she would send me an email, which she duly did.
Having received this call, imagine our shock when we found the wrong properties had been deleted, leaving us with a property that we can’t use!
In the screenshot below, the one highlighted in red is a random property from an account I set up some time ago as a visitor – Deleted
The one highlighted in blue is the dormant property we don’t use – Remains
The one highlighted in black is our live property with all our reviews, photos, description, messages and bookings – Deleted
In sheer panic we contacted booking.com. We were told that duplicates were not allowed and “someone had found out”, so they deleted them. Clearly this is a breakdown in communication. (We had asked in June this year for the dormant property to be deleted and got a standard response that didn’t answer our question, we then followed this up whilst clarifying it wouldn’t affect the live property. But they went ahead and deleted the live property)
So having gone round in circles, we were told booking.com “local team” would be asked to deal with this and we still have no communication, we have rung and messaged and got no-where.
So, my question to booking.com is how do we revive the listing that had all our reviews and information? As you can see, Sandy Feet Cottage on the Isle of Wight has excellent reviews and when Sandy Feet Cottage was live on booking.com, we were at the top of the list when people searched for a self catering cottage in Sandown on the Isle Of Wight, but now we are stuck in limbo with no property listed as we can’t make the snoozed property live (we’ve tried!!), and we can’t add another listing as it will be a duplicate and probably deleted again, and I’ll be back here again writing about another catastrophe!
One note about our reviews you can see below, we download the reviews to our website so they are saved so they are all genuine reviews, at the time of writing we are unable to gather any further reviews from booking.com, neither do they appear on booking.com, because they deleted them!!
If you are a property owner and want to use booking.com, do it, they are exceptional in their field and provide excellent tools to market your property. One thing I don’t like about them is, when someone makes a booking we are not able to accept or decline the booking, instead the booking is confirmed and you are unable to cancel it. If you do, you are responsible for finding the same or better standard of alternative accommodation for the guest. So if you advertise elsewhere, make sure you have your channels setup and are talking to each other!
To conclude, booking.com gets a big thumbs up from us, I just hope they can sort this out for us soon!
UPDATE 2ND SEPTEMBER 2022
We have again spoken to booking.com and they told me that the “relevant department” have a note to contact me on, wait for it…The 6th September (not sure what year!). I’ve asked that they contact me by the end of business today (5pm UK time), we’ll see what happens, I’ll keep you posted!