Last May, 12 of us used Booking.com to rent a Greek villa for a fortnight in August. We paid the €4,435 cost in full and booked flights and hire cars. Recently Booking.com informed us that there had been a pricing error and the actual cost was €9,407. We were told that we must pay the difference or it would cancel the reservation. It is already re-advertising the villa for the dates we have booked. We feel that it is trying to take advantage of increasing demand for holidays at our expense.
PJ, Stockport
Booking.com holds customers to strict terms and conditions when it comes to cancellations, but scuppers holidays itself without penalty. Last year, I reported on a family who arrived for their spa holiday in Cornwall to find the company had transferred their booking to the London suburb of Uxbridge. Your experience is similarly breathtaking in its audacity. The curt email from Booking.com arrived 11 months after your booking and gave you 24 hours to pay the extra. It stated that the villa owner wished to find “middle ground” and would reduce the new €9,400 price by €200. It added, graciously, that if you did not want to accept the offer it would cancel your booking “for free”. The company’s terms and conditions state that obvious errors, such as a €1 hotel suite, are not binding. If the €4,435 price was an “obvious error”, you’d expect the owner to have noticed last year. If it were not, you should have been able to rely on another clause in the terms and conditions which state that your payment constitutes “final settlement of the due and payable service”.
