Booking.com's Illegal Activities Facing More Class Action Suits

[PeterRS]

The parent company of booking.com is Booking Holdings based in Delaware in the USA and listed on the NASDAQ-100 index. It is a huge travel company controlling booking.com, agoda, priceline, expedia, kayak, cheapflights and others. Its booking.com site is based in The Netherlands. A 2023 study by Hotrec and the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland Valais revealed that Booking Holdings held a 71% share of the European online hotel market.

For years there have been complaints on travel sites and to newspapers about problems with this site - mostly pre-payments which are then cancelled using the "free concellation" clause - but refunds are either heavily delayed (for more than a year in several cases) or not provided (see the complaint site below). In 2016 alone there were 12,000 complaints against the site in the UK. Now, this massive company is again in the news for dubious practices which have resulted in a new class action lawsuit against the company for allegedly overcharging customers through fake discounts and artificial scarcity of rooms. According to the Consumentenbond (the Dutch Consumer Agency) customers have been overcharged for years through misleading practices. If you booked through booking.com since 2013, you might be due a refund (assuming you still have receipts or other proof).

Worse, it made illegal agreements with hotels preventing them from offering cheaper prices or better conditions on their own hotels and other booking websites. Last year the European Court ruled that booking.com broke the rules. Spain then hit the company with a hefty €413 million fine. Even those who used agoda and expedia may be able to join the class action for it argues that booking.com's market dominance artificially inflated prices across the entire sector.

Part of the aim of the lawsuit is to get rid of misleading practices on booking search engines. Anyone can join the the Consumentenbond class action - see link below. Within a week of announcing the class action, over 180,000 individuals joined up. There is no cost and should the claimants win, 75% of the judgement will be divided amongst them.

In April this year a second class action against booking.com was commenced by more than 10,000 leading hotels in Europe. Again this claims for losses as a result of the booking.com "best price" condition making it impossible for hotels to reduce their prices below that rate. Hotels have until August 29 to join the action. Additional lawsuits are being considered by several American Law firms. Details of one and an application to join are also in another link below.  

Allegedly the site used fake discounts, incomplete prices and fabricated scarcity to influence consumer decisions. There are cases where bookings have been made and paid for, reminders sent by the company, arrival at the overseas hotel only to receive emails saying the booking has been cancelled. In one such case highlighted in a British TV programme in 2021, two young ladies had to pay a total over £875 on a short vacation from the UK to Portugal. When calling to complain to booking.com that there was no booking, they were connected to an operator in Japan and the call was cut off. With no funds for other hotels, they had no choice but to return home. The following month booking.com offered £187 in compensation. The girls followed this up with  series of no less than nine emails threatening legal action. During this process, the girls were pushed around various departments and had twice to submit receipts. Booking.com finally came up with another £500. 

I understand that last year following the European Court ruling, booking.com changed it "best price" practice in contracts with hotels. Just last month, a booking.com spokesperson stated, "It is absolutely nonsense to say we artificially inflated hotel prices." Well, faced with a barrage of legal issues, they'd have to say that, wouldn't they!

https://www.complaintsboard.com/bookingcom-b110669

https://www.dw.com/en/over-10000-hotels-join-complaint-against-bookingcom/a-73526132

https://www.agrusslawfirm.com/companies-with-arbitration-clauses/booking-com/

https://dutchreview.com/news/booking-com-class-action-lawsuit-claim-compensation/

Lastly, I have started using smaller search engines. I find Hong Kong's Klook site has better prices in Taipei than agoda and the same with Japanican in Tokyo. I am going to change my November Taipei booking from agoda to Klook (which I have used once before).

[Mavica]

I've successfully used booking.com a score or more times in the USA / Mexico / Ireland for more than a decade without negative incidents and I expect to continue to use the site for bookings if I don't use the lodging's own website.  Sometimes I've paid via booking.com for the lodging but most of the time payment has been made at the lodging site itself.

[PeterRS]

55 minutes ago, Mavica said:

I've successfully used booking.com a score or more times in the USA / Mexico / Ireland for more than a decade without negative incidents and I expect to continue to use the site for bookings if I don't use the lodging's own website.  Sometimes I've paid via booking.com for the lodging but most of the time payment has been made at the lodging site itself.

I think the real question posed above is not how pleased you are with the site but how much you might have been overcharged for all your bookings. Hotels are equally angry and booking.com's practices. As I stated some hotel associations are taking out their own class actions particularly re the site's contract conditions which they believe actually increase prices overall.

[Mavica]

11 hours ago, PeterRS said:

I think the real question posed above is not how pleased you are with the site but how much you might have been overcharged for all your bookings. 

I check / research pricing information before I use any reservation site and read guest reviews extensively.  We can find many complaints about just about any third-party booking sites.  There are places that don't have their own reservation site and have been available only on booking.com. I've personally seen no discrepancies when using Booking.com and I am not saying others haven't.  I've also read through many of the complaints included in the links above; many aren't a fault of that booing site IMO.  

[jimmie50]

Thank you for sharing this information, @PeterRS.  I had no idea that Booking.com was a parent company that included many of the sites I have used previously when making reservations.  I always try to use due-diligence when making reservations and do research before actually making a reservation, but it now appears that many of the sites I have used for comparison are under the Booking.com parent umbrella.  Plan to make a hotel reservation in Silom area of Bangkok this weekend for my upcoming trip in October, and not sure what site to use now in order to get the best possible deal.  Glad to hear that they are finally being held accountable for some of the questionable business practices.  

[vinapu]

1 hour ago, jimmie50 said:

 Plan to make a hotel reservation in Silom area of Bangkok this weekend for my upcoming trip in October, and not sure what site to use now in order to get the best possible deal.  Glad to hear that they are finally being held accountable for some of the questionable business practices.  

generally speaking hotel prices in Thailand ( as well as Laos , Cambodia and Vietnam ) are very good deal so don't sweat price hunting too much as you may find you wasted whole afternoon and saved grand total 17$ on week long accommodation.

Booking websites are assholes sometimes and if you do search on certain  dates on given day you may find day or two later that prices for thee same accommodation rised a bit ie. you may see Raya  at 70 $  a night for period 10.-15 Oct, , two days later you may discover day rate  it's already 74 $ as system remembers your preferences. Again I don't think it's cheating , it's just free market at work.

I'd use agoda as I have moistly good experiences with them

[floridarob]

2 hours ago, vinapu said:

I have moistly good experiences

Explains the 3 housekeepers....no photos required 🥛

[PeterRS]

11 hours ago, Mavica said:

I check / research pricing information before I use any reservation site and read guest reviews extensively.

I have usually done the same, athough I am wary about quite a number of guest reviews if only because we all have some differing views on our hotel requirements and experiences. Also, as one who has travelled frequently to many countries in my career, my requirements are no doubt different to someone just staying in a hotel for, say, the second or even tenth time. That's not to say my requirements are always the same. I am almost always as happy in a near tiny Japanese business hotel as in a large chain hotel accommodated by a client.

Another concern about guest reviews is there is now much more pressure put on guests to complete review questionnaires than there was even ten years ago. Then I found that on checking out a small number of hotels would request I write a Tripadvisor review of my stay. Now I reckon I am asked to review stays - either by the hotel staff themselves (sometimes even going to the length of giving me a little printed request slip) or by most of the booking sites. In general, I find many of these reviews now are dependent not on a guest's total experience but on one or two things that they either liked or disliked. So someone will give a perfectly good hotel just a 2-star (out of five) rating because there was no toothbrush in the bathroom! (Yes, I have actually seen that!) Or you get rave one-line 5-star reviews which have obviously been placed by someone or business associated with the hotel. I even wrote about this to Triadvisor's head office after a dreadfully poor overall stay at Singapore's Marina Bay Sands Hotel. Within a month, most of the reviews I had queried suddenly disappeared!

Business travel magazines have long touted the fake reviews often found on Tripadvisor. Booking site reviews are usually limited to this who have actually used the site to make the booking. But I do now take all of these with a very large pinch of salt.

Last point about @vinapu's comment re pricing. I do tend to book quite far in advance. The concern then is that prices for the period for my stay might come down beforehand. Then I negotiate a reduction directly with the hotel. Usually it works, although now with booking sites more commonly offering cancellation up to 2 or 3 days beforehand, this is less of an issue.

[Mavica]

45 minutes ago, PeterRS said:

I am wary about quite a number of guest reviews if only because we all have some differing views on our hotel requirements and experiences.

Yes.

[a-447]

I've used Booking.com for years and have no complaints.

There have been a few hotel bookings which included a free taxi from the airport. Last year I got one ftom Narita Airport to downtoen Tokyo.  I was wondering if they knew how much it costs - depending on traffic $200 - $300! 
 

Since then, the offers have stopped.

[Connordrick]

Interesting read—thanks for sharing, The EU is really stepping up its efforts on corporate transparency. Apple’s a perfect example—forced to switch to USB-C and the third party apps.  

 

[Keithambrose]

13 hours ago, a-447 said:

I've used Booking.com for years and have no complaints.

There have been a few hotel bookings which included a free taxi from the airport. Last year I got one ftom Narita Airport to downtoen Tokyo.  I was wondering if they knew how much it costs - depending on traffic $200 - $300! 
 

Since then, the offers have stopped.

I am a so called Genius level 3, with booking.com. I use them quite a bit when I am in a hurry. When I have time, and it is a hotel i know, such as the Le Meridien Bangkok,  I book direct, usually  slightly  cheaper, and I get Bonvoy points.  However, in May I booked the Royalton,  in NY, through  booking.com, as it was slightly  cheaper  than booking direct. I was then  offered a free car from JFK to the hotel. To my surprise  it worked really well, good communication,  nice car, well worth it. Saved $100!

[Mavica]

A word about reviews.  How many of us post reviews of businesses, hotels, restaurants, etc. to google, trip advisor, booking.com, etc.?  I suspect not many.  I've posted reviews to booking.com for each hotel I've booked through the site.  I have more than 100 reviews posted at tripadvisor.  Some people are quick to complain about reviews but don't post their own.  Overall, I carefully review the reviews, the posting history of those providing them, and find them, generally, to be worthwhile.  Don't complain if you don't participate, is my opinion.

[PeterRS]

3 hours ago, Mavica said:

Overall, I carefully review the reviews, the posting history of those providing them, and find them, generally, to be worthwhile.  Don't complain if you don't participate, is my opinion.

I am like you. I post regularly and I always try to give an accurate account of my stay. I read a lot of reviews but increasingly find many of them all but useless. My rule of thumb always used to be jettison the best 33% and the worst 33% and just stick with those in the middle. Even now I find that is much less useful.

My only reason for staying with Tripadvsor is they provide you with a map of the world and cities and places where you have stayed. I am sometime staggered that, largely thanks to business, I have stayed in so many countries, towns and cities around the world.

Now I am much more likely to make my own decisions rather than depending on the comments of others.

[vinapu]

3 minutes ago, PeterRS said:

 

Now I am much more likely to make my own decisions rather than depending on the comments of others.

I agree as it's very hard to assess value of comments by people we know nothing about. They are those  who overlook everything and post great reviews just because they are happy about destination they found themselves in and at other end there will be those who will complain about label on the bottle of  free water provided  being uneven or slightly torn .

I gladly pay attention to  recommendations from this forum  as I consider posters 'people I know' even if I never met some.

[monsoon]

I was surprised at the lengths that some of the hotels I stayed at on my recent trip went to get a review. I had one doorman in Pattaya hand me a QR code to their site on TripAdvisor as I was waiting for my grab car. At another hotel in Phnom Penh the hotel manager contacted me twice through WhatsApp and asked to be reviewed on TripAdvisor. Not to mention all the pleas from Agoda or the hotel chain's website. 

[TMax]

I have never used nor will I use any of those booking sites, I always prefer to deal either directly with the airlines and hotels or as with my last trip used my local Flight Centre travel agent (yes I was in a lazy mood and had them book the flights and hotel). At present Trivago is flooding our TV channels with what I call bullshit adverts, they compare prices with a website hotelleap.com, I searched for that website and it seems to not exist as a hotel booking site. Back in 2022 Trivago was found guilty of making misleading representations about hotel room rates on its website and television advertising (link below) so there's no chance I would use them. A friend had no end of trouble using another of those companies some time ago which started me thinking negatively about them. 

Trivagos misleading charges

[Keithambrose]

9 hours ago, Mavica said:

A word about reviews.  How many of us post reviews of businesses, hotels, restaurants, etc. to google, trip advisor, booking.com, etc.?  I suspect not many.  I've posted reviews to booking.com for each hotel I've booked through the site.  I have more than 100 reviews posted at tripadvisor.  Some people are quick to complain about reviews but don't post their own.  Overall, I carefully review the reviews, the posting history of those providing them, and find them, generally, to be worthwhile.  Don't complain if you don't participate, is my opinion.

I'm like you. I try to review every hotel, and include both good and bad points. Not many hotels have only good, or bad, .points. Viroth's in Siem Reap got 100%, especially  for their service in bringing my chosen guy to my room!

[PeterRS]

18 hours ago, TMax said:

At present Trivago is flooding our TV channels with what I call bullshit adverts, they compare prices with a website hotelleap.com, I searched for that website and it seems to not exist as a hotel booking site. Back in 2022 Trivago was found guilty of making misleading representations about hotel room rates on its website and television advertising (link below) so there's no chance I would use them.

I can recall for about 3 years Trivago blitzed TV channels around Asia with advertisements offering all manner of promises. As @TMax mentions they were also taken to court in this part of the world. Thankfully I cannot recall a Trivago ad appearing in the last 4 or 5 years.

18 hours ago, TMax said:

I always prefer to deal either directly with the airlines and hotels

I have found in Asia that some hotels do not want you to book with them. Almost on the same topic, hotels booked direct sometimes do not deliver what is promised. I had a very bad experience about 20 years ago with the Hyatt in Shinjuku in Tokyo. Having stayed there before, I knew the hotel had quite a large number of end rooms that were much more suited to a small business hotel. Not listed on the hotel's website, they were less than half the size of the basic standard rooms and double beds were basically singles. So I called to book their standard room for three nghts stressing "standard". When I arrived, I was shocked to find myself in one of the tiny rooms. When I queried at the front desk and explained I had paid for the standard rooms, I just got fobbed off to the night manager who spouted some gobbledygook that I totally failed to understand. 

The next morning I insisted I meet with the general manager, a Mr. Fujita. Once again the discussion went round in circles - i.e. almost nowhere. But I did pick up a nugget that these rooms were offered primarily to walk in Japanese guests and those in groups - I was with two others. They then leaked that the price of these rooms was only about $5 less than the much larger standard rooms. Being somewhat stubborn, I was absolutely not prepared to let the matter rest. So I wrote to Hyatt head office in Chicago with details of my encounters. I was then very surprised to get a mail asking when someone could call me.

During that call it was pointed out that head office had absolutely no idea about these tiny rooms and were appalled to hear about them. Apparently there were around 98! An executive would be in Tokyo a couple of weeks later and would make an inspection. In the meantime, I was offered three free nights at any Hyatt and a guaranteed upgrade to a suite on that next visit!

The upshot was I actually was able to use those three free nights twice! A year later I had a bad experience at the somewhat ageing Hyatt in Honolulu - mostly to do with the travel desk and being sent on some wild goose chase that wasted half a day. Again I complained. The manager then reposted the three nights back to my account! I finally used them a couple of years later at the lovely Hyatt in Kyoto! So when booking with a hotel now, I want a detailed booking slip with exact details of the room and where it fits in with the hotel's other room sizes.

Finally airines. Yes, I do mostly book direct. But shopping around 18 months ago in Europe, I had to make a quick return trip from Edinburgh to Zurich. Swiss and BA were in the £500 range. Checking booking agents, I found flights on my dates and preferred times on KLM with one plane change in Amsterdam for £220. Six years ago I again found via a booking site an Edinburgh/Bologna return flight on Lufthansa much cheaper than other carriers. So for me booking sites still can have their uses.

[Connordrick]

I havent  had any issues with any of those sites. Also I used them pretty straight e book hotel and buy the tickets  

Actually, I just used Bookin.com for Labor Day weekend in this, I think, new hotel in the Village:Tru by Hilton Montreal Centre-Ville a? The price was really good, and there ok reviews and a great location, so I decided to book it. Every time I look at flights to Montreal, I can’t get over how overpriced they are—especially for a trip that barely lasts an hour. Honestly, that plane ticket hits me hard every time. Maybe it’s because I’m just naturally zuinig; my frugal self always compare prices before I book anything. It really gets to me how much they charge for such a short flight! And is not way around 😕 

[PeterRS]

39 minutes ago, Connordrick said:

It really gets to me how much they charge for such a short flight!

I think this is relatively common, unfortunately. I just checked a fare for mid-September on a popular inter-Britain route where BA has the monopoly. Of 15 daily flights, the one way fare ranges from £53 to £226. But the return sector is even more expensive ranging from £79 to £253. And that is without baggage or seat selection. With the most expensive return, you are close to the price for a return ticket London to Bangkok - 350 miles round tip v. 6,000 miles round trip. Hardly makes any sense!

[floridarob]

4 hours ago, PeterRS said:

I just got fobbed off to the night manager who spouted some gobbledygook that I totally failed to understand. 

Didn't realize Riobard worked in the hotel business too 🥺

If you mention his name three times in a row  he suddenly reappears.... so be careful 😏

[a-447]

I just checked with Japanican to book a hotel in Tokyo and booking.com was cheaper.

And I have just booked a hotel in kuala lumpur for next week through a company called prestigia. Has anyone heard of them??

[Keithambrose]

3 hours ago, floridarob said:

Didn't realize Riobard worked in the hotel business too 🥺

If you mention his name three times in a row  he suddenly reappears.... so be careful 😏

Well, as he is God like, he can be everywhere at the same time. Very useful!

[PeterRS]

On 8/10/2025 at 4:52 PM, a-447 said:

There have been a few hotel bookings which included a free taxi from the airport. Last year I got one ftom Narita Airport to downtoen Tokyo.  I was wondering if they knew how much it costs - depending on traffic $200 - $300! 

32 or so years ago when the Narita Express started, I was in the bowels of Tokyo station awaiting its arrival. Being the first day of operation, there were little red carpets where the doors would stop and a bevy of smiling dolly birds ready to help passengers. With the ticket all in Japanese, at that time I had no idea how to interpret the information. Thinking I was in car 6, I showed it to the vivacious girl. "Hai", she said, indicating I wait by that door. When the train arrived I tried to find my seat. Someone was stting in it. Kindly he explained that I was not in seat 1 in Car 6 but in seat 6 in car 1. Knowing the train stopped only for maximum two minutes, I got out, shouted something at the girl and raced down the length of the train. As I reached car 2, the doors closed, the girls bowed and off went the train. I was furious. The only way I could get to Narita on time was a taxi. That cost around ¥26,000 or $200. Today it would be considerably more.

On my return to my office a few days later, I wrote a letter to Japan Railways explaining what had happened and enclosing copies of receipts. I assumed that was that. Lesson learned - know how to read train tickets! Imagine my surprise when about four months later my secretary told me there was someone to see me. It turned out to be a man from JR in his hideous green uniform. After some explanation and apologies which my secretary translated, he handed me over an envelope with cash. It was all the expenses I had incurred after missing the Narita Expres, including the taxi fare! I thought - only in Japan!