Review: Booking.com

3.5/5

When it comes to organising a holiday, or a lengthy stay away, you need reliability and transparency when booking your accommodation. It’s not always the case that you get this when booking online, though with the website Booking.com, you can be guaranteed both of these… most of the time.

I was planning a month-long trip around Europe when I used Booking.com. I needed eight different hostels/hotels at a cheap price. Booking.com can indeed provide cheap prices and, on most of their hostels (and some hotels) they don’t charge you a penny up-front. This is fantastic if you’re going away as a group of young friends as not everyone has the money immediately to fork out on hostels left, right and centre.

In terms of the advertisements of hostels on Booking.com, they were always true to the actual place itself, and so were the descriptions of facilities and how close the hostels were to the city centre. Nothing was advertised wrongly, and I really got what I signed up for.

The one problem I had with Booking.com was that, although it was stated no money would be taken out of my bank account, one hostel in Poland did manage to take the full amount (for five people) out of my bank account. Contacting Booking.com was a total nightmare as you have to go through a form as long as your arm and when I submitted the form, it would never register that I had completed it. Trying to contact Booking.com about this was, again, a nightmare as they don’t reply on Twitter.

Luckily, the hostel replied to their emails and staff were very apologetic, gave me the money back and offered me a 10% discount for the inconvenience. Perhaps not all hostels are the same, but as long as you have the proof of the money being taken out of your account, you will be fine. But don’t expect any help at all from Booking.com.

Still, I’d book again through Booking.com, especially if I was choosing hotels. The prices are too good not to.