Peter sent a message to Darren R. Huston – President and Chief Executive Officer of The Priceline Group – Email Address that said:
Dear Mr Huston,
Seasons greetings to you.
My family and I run a small serviced accommodation business in Worcester City, Worcestershire UK. We have been delighted with the World-wide presence that registering our business with booking.com has brought us. To guests it makes us look extremely professional and has provided us with considerable business. The website is extremely attractive and we are proud to be part of the overall business.
We started at the end of August 2016 and received our first reservations through booking.com almost immediately. After some teething troubles with your payment methods which required us to select a suitable credit/debit card processor and to pass their stringent conditions to become a merchant, we were eventually able to take payments from the virtual credit card details that booking.com provided with each reservation. We are only allowed to debit those virtual credit cards from checkout dates and up to 2 months thereafter. So once the money began to flow into our account we were able to pay our running costs and your company’s commission. We had previously requested direct payment into our bank instead of virtual credit cards, as that would save us around 2% per transaction, but after waiting for many weeks for a decision nothing changed so we continued to run with it. All went well until very recently, when things suddenly altered.
Without proper warning or explanation the payment system was changed. We received a reservation from a Mr Edward Seekings on 12th December for 6 nights (16th-21st Dec 2016) for 2 guests. Total amount £720. He checked out on 22nd. So on 22nd I attempted to take the virtual CC details to submit them to our processors. No details available. I contacted local support at booking.com and was told that no credit card details were available because it was 10 days after the original reservation date and details were not kept for security reasons. I was then told that the payment system had changed as informed by an email from booking.com sent on 16th. (Later found to be on 16th November, not December!). I was flabbergasted! I hadn’t noticed any specific email (we do get a large amount of marketing messages from booking.com) and nothing on this VERY IMPORTANT message made it clear that this was such a drastic change in procedure, It just looks like yet another advert. (I can forward a screenshot to you if required). After 4 more telephone calls (all instigated by me, as nobody called me back) today I was given the correct date of the email informing us of this change, but it is so ambiguously worded, I still cannot fully understand it). Surely a question like: do you wish to change to this new payment scheme? YES/NO should have been asked before just starting it?
(My contacts at booking.com were: Jazmin Torres and Danny Flodman and, although polite, are not very helpful).
Needless to say, the guest has not paid and does not respond to email, text or telephone calls from us or booking.com . Danny Flodman told me that no compensation would be received from booking.com and we would just have to suffer the loss. This is grossly unfair! The guest also booked for just 2 persons and our cleaners found that all 6 bed-spaces had been used and the apartment was left in an appalling state.
So now I’m writing to ask you whether you can direct me to the right person to get the help that I need to sort out this problem? We really cannot afford to lose this money. I have made several phone calls to booking.com personnel with no result and have been treated extremely shoddily. I do not know how to attach the the ambiguous email received on this message, so could you please let me have an email address where I can forward it to you so that you can see how difficult it is to understand that we should have changed our systems to take payments in a different way from now on?
Kind regards,
Peter
