Flavia Zsofia Hannus, 23, booked a three-bedroom flat near Ibiza's famous Ushuaïa club for a three-night hen trip with six friends, paying £1,800 ($2,380) through Booking.com.
Days before the group were due to arrive on the party island, the host stopped replying, and the listing vanished from the site.
The seven women were left searching for somewhere to sleep at the peak of the summer season, when last-minute rooms on the island are scarce and expensive. They shared what happened in a first-person account published by the travel site Creatorzine.
A £1,800 Booking That Vanished
The available account does not record any response from Booking.com, or whether the £1,800 was returned. The six friends who travelled with Hannus were not named.
The sum sits almost exactly on the national average. Action Fraud figures show holidaymakers who reported travel fraud in 2024 lost £1,844 ($2,430) each on average, with total reported losses of more than £11.2M ($14.8M) for the year
Why Booking.com Is Under Pressure
Booking.com handled more than 1B bookings in 2023 and is the most visited travel site in the world. It has also become a target for fraud. The company's internet safety chief, Marnie Wilking, has pointed to 'a 500 to a 900 per cent increase' in phishing attacks over 18 months, driven by criminals using AI to write convincing fakes.
Booking.com has said AI-driven scams stole more than £200,000 ($265,000) from travellers in 2023, and that nearly one in four of those caught lost at least £760 ($1,000).
With group trips, one booking often covers several travellers, and organisers tend to pay a large sum up front, sometimes months ahead.
Other warnings have followed. Microsoft flagged a phishing campaign impersonating Booking.com that began in December 2024 and was still running months later, using fake Booking.com messages to plant credential-stealing malware aimed at hotels and their guests.
NordVPN said around 40 fake Booking.com sites were being detected each day during the February booking peak, with Booking.com the most impersonated travel brand by far.
A Pattern Ibiza Has Seen Before
Ibiza has seen this kind of fraud before. In 2019, a British couple paid £9,610 (around $12,700) for a 'VIP penthouse' at Ibiza's Las Boas complex that didn't exist, with photos lifted from other flats in the building. They pulled the listing only after their story surfaced.
@xxxflavia #fyp #ibiza #booking #hotel #scam
♬ original sound - Tyra
The problem is also seasonal. Action Fraud says July draws the most holiday-fraud complaints, as demand peaks and rooms grow scarce.
How to Protect Your Money
Consumer bodies and the platform itself give the same core advice. Keep every payment and every message inside the official site, and never switch to a bank transfer or a WhatsApp chat to 'secure' a deal.
Booking.com tells travellers to 'never wire money directly to an individual', and to treat a price that looks too good to be true as a warning sign.
The payment method matters most when things go wrong. In the UK, anything bought on a credit card between £100 and £30,000 (about $130 to $39,600) is covered by Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974.
The rule makes the card provider jointly liable when a paid-for service is not delivered. Debit-card users can ask their bank for a chargeback instead. A £1,800 booking falls inside both.
Travellers have raised similar concerns online. On Reddit, one traveller asked a Rome community whether a cut-price 'suites' listing was a scam. Its reviews, they noted, were all recent, all from Italians using first names only, and none with photos. The property's registration code, they added, matched a different city entirely.
Booking.com says its systems detect and remove fraudulent listings once they are spotted.
