On 22 November 2025 we booked an apartment in Alcala, Tenerife for a trip in March 2026. I was a little concerned that it might be a challenge to arrive at the apartment within the prescribed check-in times due to the timing of our flight, so asked Booking.com at the time I made the reservation whether there was any scope to arrive a little later than 8pm. I was told to contact the property owner directly.

I received no answer from either emails or attempted phone calls to the contact details Booking.com provided. Somewhat concerned by this lack of response, the day before our departure to Tenerife I called customer service – having spent some considerable time and effort to track down a phone number. (Why isn't it more easily found on their website?)

Having explained the situation to an agent, he contacted the supposed owner of the property by telephone, then told me they only spoke Italian. He said he was confident someone would be at the apartment to let us in. He assured me if there was a problem on arrival Booking.com would find and pay for alternative accommodation covering any difference in price. I said while I had to accept his assurances, I would have been happier with more certainty at that late stage.

My fears were more than justified.

As it happened, our flight arrived early and we arrived at the property in good time. I phoned the number I'd been given and spoke to the Italian speaker who presumably the agent had spoken to. I was able to convey in Italian that we had rented the apartment and wanted to know where we should go. His response was that he lived in the apartment and it wasn't available to us.

I find it unbelievable that the Booking.com agent wasn't told that the previous day – if he had actually made contact. The resident then texted saying I should contact Booking.com and indicated that this situation had happened before.

Can you imagine the stress caused by turning up at an address in the late evening in a foreign town I am completely unfamiliar with, where Booking.com has assured me that the accommodation I had booked would be available, only to find we had no bed for the night?

I called Booking.com from the street and according to my call history, was cut off after 3 minutes waiting. In my second call I spoke to a different agent to the night before. After some time she told me she had discovered that the Kali apartment we had booked no longer had a contract with Booking.com. Surely thatshould have been established the previous day? In any event, why did Booking.com sell me the rental in the first place? Was the contract still active then? If so, why did Booking.com not act when it subsequently expired?

I was put on extended hold while the agent sought alternative accommodation. I was disgusted when she came back to tell me she could get us into a hostel in single rooms with shared communal bathrooms. That was entirely unacceptable as an alternative to what we had booked. I didn't expect to be put in the 5* Melia Palace around the corner but neither did I expect a retired couple to be treated as backpackers.

Another extended hold followed, during which I called the friend who had recommended we go to Alcala, to find out where she had stayed. She gave me an address and phone number of the owner of an apartment building in Alcala – Rok Plaza, that happens also to be a Booking.com property.

The agent did eventually come back with a potential property in a different resort, but by this late hour – and 41 minutes on the phone mostly on hold - I was unprepared to travel again to somewhere we didn't know. By the way, what if I hadn't hired a car?

We were fortunate that the proprietor of Rok Plaza happened to be in her property. Although all her apartments were full she could offer a nice single room but only for four nights.She was nice enough to discount the usual cost because of sympathy to our plight and we paid €300 for the four nights.

Which meant we had to then try and find accommodation for the remaining three nights of our time in Tenerife instead of just relaxing and enjoying our holiday. Alcala is quite small and appeared to have little availability, so we looked further afield. We settled on Puerto de la Cruz, searching Booking.com for suitable accommodation of a similar standard to what we had originally booked.

We booked 'Perfect Apartment', owner-managed, situated in Bahia buildings. After having booked we got a message from the owner advising that they only accepted cash on arrival before releasing keys. The information on Booking.com clearly stated the host accepted credit cards though. I sent a message to customer service pointing out the anomaly – but not saying it was unacceptable, just a further inconvenience - and was surprised to receive an email from the owner saying Booking.com had contacted her to say I'd asked to pay by credit card. I hadn't.

By the way – a further aside here that reflects very poorly on Booking.com.

On arrival at 'Perfect Apartment' we discovered that Bahia Apartments generally were also on Booking.com as a property available to be booked through the building's management company – and would include use of 4 pools, secure parking and breakfast if we'd booked that way.Yet the rating for the building is three stars, provided by the property. Booking.com supposedly rate owner managed properties themselves, based on factors including facilities, size, location and service.

How on earth can they rate Perfect Apartment as 4* when the same building rates itself 3*, but offers considerably more facilities and services – the supposed measure by which Booking.com rate a property?

To rub salt into the wound, it was cheaper to book with the management company, but they didn't show up on my search because of the lower rating.

In summary, a very sorry tale of poor management of Booking.com's fundamental reason for being:

  • booking us into a non-existent rental property in the first place
  • compounded by very poor customer service from two of the three agents I spoke to – those two being the one who should have prevented the situation in the first place and the one who should have found a more acceptable solution
  • Further compounded by the incredulous rating issue described above.


It gets worse though.

It's now 5 months since I sent the invoice for the emergency accommodation, my original complaint letter and refund request to include compensation for the distress caused and subsequent wasted time dealing with customer service. After a month I called Customer Service, hoping to finish on at least a satisfactory note… but no… it just got more ridiculous.

I asked to speak to a supervisor after I was told that nothing had been actioned on my refund request because they wanted a 'Zero balance invoice' from where I stayed in Alcala. i.e one that showed I'd paid. Yet nobody had bothered to tell me that was a requirement on the invoice, just 'send us the invoice', When I queried why had nobody then bothered to tell me in the last 4 weeks that the invoice didn't comply with their procedures, I was told I should have chased them up sooner!

In fact, the invoice clearly says – albeit in Spanish – that it had been paid. To all intents and purposes, a zero-balance invoice.

By this time I had also contacted Booking.com media relations, who neither acknowledged nor replied to my message. Customer Service suggested the best way to contact them was to put something on social media about Booking.com media relations and they should reach out to me. I kid you not.

Ridiculous.

I believed the customer service supervisor I spoke to was genuine when he said he wished he had the option to circumvent Booking.com's prescribed procedures to move things forward for me, but he didn't have that discretion and wasn't permitted to escalate calls to his boss, who 'Doesn't take calls from customers'.

He also said that my request for compensation for the distress of being in Tenerife in late evening with nowhere to stay and the stresses of the customer service issues is something that would be considered in addition to the refund of extra accommodation cost – without any promises of course.

Booking.com has for many years been my go-to site for accommodation when we have needed to look for hotel or apartments. It now seems to me that Booking.com has taken its eye off what it did so well in its early days as a specialist accommodation site, and tried to become an all-encompassing organisation by including private owners, peddling and pushing flights, car hire, attractions and transfers too. I got so many emails from Booking,com after I had booked the original apartment offering literally hundreds of activities.

Since mentioning the whole sorry experience to others I've learned of two other instances where private apartments booked and paid for have been summarily cancelled by Booking.com at very short notice (the day before in one case) with no alternative offered and no explanation.

My additional expenditure (and any compensation) has still to be paid, despite further calls to Customer Service in London – and having hand-delivered two letters to Booking.com's global Customer Service directors while I happened to be in Amsterdam, where their head office is. Neither replied of course – or even passed it on for someone else to handle it would seem.

Is Booking.com trying to outdo Airbnb by allowing private owners to use its platform?

I don't know, but the simple fact seems to be that they are much less efficient at it and as a result, I 've lost faith in what I previously thought a very good business who used to do what they did very well.

As for remedying problems when things go wrong (how I judge a business if it does go wrong) Booking.com's is the worst I have ever encountered.

Shame.