Travel Website Booking.com Leaves Hoteliers Thousands of Dollars Out of Pocket

The Guardian reports:Travel website Booking.com has left many hotel operators and other partners across the globe thousands of dollars out of pocket for months on end, blaming the lack of payment on a "technical issue". The issue is widespread in Thailand, Indonesia and Europe among hoteliers who are venting their frustrations in Facebook groups as rumours swirl about the cause of the failure to pay.Usually, if a customer makes a booking for a hotel through the website Booking.com and elects to pay upfront, the site takes the payment and passes it on to the hotel operator, minus a commission. Booking.com's partners have reported issues receiving payments since July, and in some cases months earlier. While Booking.com has continued taking payments from customers, the company has not always passed on the amount owed to hotel operators and others whom the Guardian has spoken to. The article adds that last month Hungary's consumer watchdog agency "launched a probe into the company's failure to pay hotel operators in the country and raided Booking.com's local office, after local reporting on the issue." In a statement to the Guardian, Booking.com acknowledged the "frustration" of customers affected by "an ongoing technical issue." They also said "the system errors that affected the payments have now been corrected," and that they had now processed the transactions of "most of" our partners."We acknowledge that for some this has taken longer than it should have and continue to work urgently to finalise the rest of the transactions...." In the company's August results, CFO David Goulden said there were "lower than expected" IT expenses in the second quarter of this year, in part due to phasing IT spend into the third quarter, but did not outline what this IT expense included. Thanks to Alain Williams (Slashdot reader #2,9272) for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.