How not to spoil your vacation when booking a hotel in advance

Situations when tourists encounter trouble when arriving at a hotel already booked through Booking or other search and booking systems are not so rare. Everything can happen, starting from the discrepancy between the room photos and the description on the site, and ending with the absence of a hotel at the specified address.

In fact, there is nothing surprising in this, because, for example, so beloved and popular all over the world booking (Booking), like other World Search and booking systems for hotels, are just intermediaries between you and the owners of hotels, hostels, apartments, etc., and completely exclude the bad faith of hoteliers or apartment owners can not. Therefore, there are such cases when tourists arrive at the hotel and find themselves in front of closed doors; suddenly find out that the price for the room has jumped sharply; that there are no available rooms; or they can not find the hotel at all.

However, despite the presence on the Internet of angry reviews about such cases, proven booking systems do not abandon their users and do not remove responsibility from themselves. Any such problem can be solved in your favor, you just need to know how to act correctly.

What problems can arise and when you can count on help in solving

You need to understand that if you arrived at a hotel that subjectively will not meet your expectations, or if you violated the rules of arrival, stay, did not make payment on time, then customer support may well refuse to solve your problem. However, this does not mean that you need to give up. For example, if the description and photo of the hotel is beautiful and clean, and you came to the "pigsty", take a photo, send it to support and try to achieve at least a free cancellation of the reservation.

In the following cases, you can safely contact the booking system for help:

• You did not find the hotel at the address.
• The hotel indicated the wrong address or did not indicate it (this happens with private apartments), and does not get in touch.
• The hotel is closed and there is no possibility to check in.
• You have been denied check-in for any reason (no room available, room unsuitable, etc.).
• When checking in, you are asked for a price higher than was indicated at the time of booking, or require a surcharge if you have already paid online.
• The description of services and photos on the site do not objectively correspond to the object of placement.
• You are offered to settle in a room of a lower category or even move to another hotel.

How to proceed if there is a problem

First of all, when traveling independently, you should always be prepared for the possible occurrence of a problem, so that it is easier to solve it. To contact the support service, you must have a booking number, PIN code (only for contacting Booking), and ideally a printout or electronic view of the reservation in your smartphone. Also carefully check and make sure that the address and contacts of the hotel are correctly recorded.

Do not forget to record customer service numbers in advance. It is advisable to have numbers for the country where you are located in order to reduce communication costs, but you will have to communicate at least in English. If you do not speak a foreign language, write down Russian-language phones:

• Booking customer support contacts

  • Phone numbers in Russian: +7 499 271-87-36
  • Phone for international calls (in Russian): +44 20 3320 2612
  • Form on the website for feedback: https://secure.booking.com/content/cs.ru.html
  • E-mail: customer.service@booking.com (Accept letters in Russian and English)

  Attention, for registered clients of Genius level and above, other phone numbers are available, where it is easier to get through. You can find them out in your merchant profile on the page https://secure.booking.com/content/cs.ru.htm

• Agoda customer support contacts

  • Phone numbers in Russian: +7 495 705 9247
  • Phone for international calls (in English): +44 (0)20 3027 7900
  • Form on the website for feedback: https://www.agoda.com/info/contact.html (Please note that the feedback form does not work correctly when Russian is enabled, it is better to switch to English)
  • E-mail: ruservice@agoda.com (Accept letters in Russian and English)

To contact customer support, you will need communication, and this is where the problem most often arises. Being abroad, it is not always possible to communicate inexpensively by phone, so as a result, you can spend even more on telephone conversations than the cost of the hotel itself. The main thing is to be patient and be able to get through, because waiting in the queue of calls can last for several tens of minutes. This is especially true for Booking, where support has become less accessible in recent years. Therefore, it is worth hedging and having either a local SIM card, or connecting a special option from your mobile operator, or at least having instructions on how to connect it if necessary.

You can also contact via the internet if available (you can find Wi-Fi in a cafe or at the reception of hotels) and send a message through the form on the website or by e-mail, but then you should not expect a quick solution to the problem: you will receive an answer in a day or two, or even more. By phone, they start solving your problem right away.

When you get through, be ready to provide all the data (full name, reservation number, PIN code), and describe the problem. Depending on the country and the situation, you may be offered a replacement hotel (in emergency cases, when they do not check in and there is nowhere to go); solve the problem with checking in at the same price at which you booked (in case of overpricing on arrival); may offer to find another hotel yourself and compensate for the difference in price. There may be other solutions, these are only the most basic. You may also be compensated for inconvenience and additional costs if you justify them. For example, in our experience (the authors of the site), for refusing accommodation in one of the guest houses in Abkhazia, in addition to compensation for another hotel, an additional 25 euros was also paid, which more than covered the cost of roaming phone calls with the support service.

If you can not contact support and need an urgent solution to the problem

But what to do if you can not contact customer support? In this case, you will have to solve the problem on the spot yourself, namely, you need to find another accommodation option in the same city of about the same price category. Which is good, it might be a hotel even more expensive than the one you booked, but within reason. But it is important that when you pay for it, you are provided with receipts. You can pay by card online, but then you will have to get a bank statement about the expenditure operation. After that, contact support as soon as possible, describe the problem and send scans of checks to get compensation for the cost. If you do not be impudent and book a five-star hotel for $ 200 instead of a three-star hotel for $ 20, then you will be fully compensated for the difference in cost. If there are additional objective expenses that you can document, you can count on their compensation, but within reasonable limits. The refund is made to a bank card.

And one more important point. Even if for some reason you decide not to use the compensation, still inform the booking system that there were problems and you did not check into the hotel. This must be done, because dishonest owners of hotels and apartments can send information to booking that you have not checked in or are staying with them, for which the system can write off money for accommodation in your card (or not return it if you paid in advance).

So, summing up briefly, you need to do the following:

• Have with you all booking data, customer support contacts, and provide an opportunity to contact.
• If a problem occurs, immediately contact the support service of the booking system, provide all the data and wait for the proposed solution.
• If you can not contact, independently find another accommodation option of approximately the same price category, when paying, request a receipt. If you encounter any other objective additional costs in connection with this, also collect all receipts.
• As soon as possible, contact the support service via the feedback form on the website or by e-mail, describe the problem, and send scans/photos of receipts for compensation.
• Even if you decide not to receive compensation, still report a no-show at the earliest opportunity, otherwise you may be charged a fine for the first or more days.

Where is it better to book so that there are fewer problems

We (the authors of the site) have long decided for ourselves where it is best to book, and who has the best customer support system.

• Agoda. Especially convenient and profitable for traveling to Southeast Asian countries, such as Thailand, Vietnam, India, Malaysia, Indonesia. As our practice has shown, problems with settling through Agoda happen extremely rarely (in our practice, only once out of several hundred bookings). And if something happens, it is decided very quickly, because in Southeast Asian countries hoteliers are very respected and afraid of this system.

• Booking System. The whole world is much more widely represented on booking, so if you are planning a trip not to Asian countries, it is better to use booking. The support system also works reliably, but not as fast as we would like. In addition, it is very difficult to get through. It is easier to reach users of the Genius level and higher by phone numbers available only from the personal account. In any case, if you act as we wrote above, any problems will be solved.

  Book hotels on Booking.com

As for large hotel aggregators like Tripadvisor, Trivago, Roomguru, etc., then it should be understood that they themselves are just additional intermediaries between you and the actual search and booking systems, which in turn are also intermediaries. Most often, these sites do not provide real customer support, but simply redirect you to the same Agoda or Booking, or take on the function of an intermediary in resolving the problem, which is why it will only be solved longer.