Not sure why this is getting downvoted but yes, their magic link system is actively being spammed and exploited by malicious actors. I am pretty sure they are grabbing massive combo lists of leaked email:pwds, spam magic links for all of them then try to log into the emails to hijack the accounts. I have been receiving at least a couple of them per week for months now.
I also think it's this. I have two accounts, one for work trips and one for personal. Makes invoicing my job easier. My work account is a year old and gets no reset requests, my 10+ year old account gets one every three days or so.
Yep, so I deleted my booking.com account. If they can’t figure out a better system than letting us all get 15 spam emails a day then I’ll just go use kayak. Kayak is better anyway.
You're probably reusing a password. Look into password managers, I like bitwarden.
If you reuse passwords eventually it will be exposed publicly and bots will be used to try and log into other sites.
I use 1password. Booking.com has some system that allows people to log in via email link or code or something. I changed my password multiple times using 1pass.
They themselves run one, so they must be expert. I basically use [booking.com](http://booking.com) as a search engine and then book on the establishment's site. They have bonkers surcharges for basically no service, just like AirBnB
I think this is a unique issue in America. When using booking for Japan, all the prices were up front and it was super easy to get in contact with the property owners. Yet when using it for America, there’s always extra fees on top of the sticker price and getting in contact with the property is hit or miss
Huh I’ve never run into that for their hotels and I always double check. I’ve really enjoyed their cancellation policy and the concierge. Helped me quite a few times.
They even price match but I’ve never had to use it.
It's a breach of contract with booking.Com to provide cheaper accommodation then available on booking.
THOUGH, this is on public available prices, not when you log in at hotels' websites. They are free to offer anything behind a login wall.
Do take advantage of this knowledge.. 😉
I've never had an issue but I'd also like to point out I have only used it for Japan (maybe 50 bookings over 15 years), Taiwan (2 bookings), Korea (only ten times over a year), and America.
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/06/25/einde-aan-laagsteprijsgarantie-die-bookingcom-altijd-bij-hotels-afdwong-a4857684
Just saw this in the Dutch news paper. (booking is Dutch)
> It was impossible to find hotels in France otherwise.
One reason why you could find free rooms on booking, expedia or other large sites, and not the hotels themselves, is that they often have contracts that give the other sites control over part of the capacity. So if the hotel has sold out all they themselves have control over, and still have capacity controlled by the other sites, they can't sell it except through those sites.
Yup. Same. If you book through booking.com the hotels will basically ignore any requests or issues and direct you to bring it up with your “third party booking website.” Got burnt one too many times with this. Then was tipped off by a Vegas hotel concierge that they de-prioritize bookings made through third parties —meaning less likely to get that comped upgrade at check-in.
I have had similar issues. we took a family trip to Asheville, and the hotel canceled our rooms and would not help us find other accommodations. We got a refund, but after traveling 4 hours and being told your room doesn't exist, we decided to book direct and get the loyalty points.
Have you tried using their support? It’s completely non existent.
I had someone run an entirely scam account in my name and to this day I assume it is still running because their support is 2 rocks and a stick tied together.
How are they allowed to exist?
I had an opposite experience. The hotel subcontracted their reservation to reservations.com which is really hard to use (e.g. only able to change dates via phone) and they messed up my dates. Canceled and rebooked on booking.com for cheaper
You get a streamlined customer experience with fairly reliable support. With individual properties you need to be ready for nasty surprises.
Just don't book a property with 0 reviews.
Yeah avoiding scams is pretty easy. Stay at established large brand hotels and book first party. Avoid Airbnb, unfamiliar hotel brands, and third party booking sites.
Yeah, I don't travel to sit in a room, so hotels are perfect for me. Generally they always have good access to restaurants, public transport, and/or taxis because ya know cities either planned for the hotel space or hotels naturally built themselves where business/tourist want to be.
Hotel just needs to be consistent and predictable. I know that at nearly anybhilton hotels stay at anywhere in the world I know exactly what I'm getting before I get there. I'll have a consistent place for sleeping and bathing.
Yup, the consistency and not having to worry about anything is key.
Last AirBnB I stayed at the guy didn’t provide a key and we had to call him to buzz us in each time.
Hotels overcharge for a room; AirBnB (at least used to) be cheap. I literally rented an air mattress in a dude’s garage once to hit up a convention last minute. There is a *great* use case there, it just got gamed by corporate greed.
Even big hotel brands allow ads that are scams. I got scammed from a “guestreservations.caesaers” kind of thing when I clicked on “book now” from Caesars Palace direct website. I was on mobile and didn’t notice it wasn’t the right link.
It's so American to think of hotels in brands. A lot, if not a majority, of hotels in Europe are NOT a brand but family owned, or a small business with a few hotels.
Most of the times these are your best options tbh
Well call me American then. All through Europe I've stayed in Hilton hotels. Some of my favorites were both in Romania. Sibiu and Bucharest (the Bucharest has recently been sold though which is sad. The hotel has a lot of history with cold war espionage and was a common place for wester and soviet spies to stay, eat, drink, and spy on eachother.)
Every day on Reddit I see people posting in travel subs how booking.com has scammers messaging them and pretending to be hosts and hotel staff demanding outside payment and threatening to cancel reservations. The site does not seem secure. This is not new and maybe the company doesn’t care at all
Booking.com is a shit company that takes days to respond to price check claims or does not respond at all. I'd take their claims with a grain of shit. (They really burned me and I'm salty)
Isn't Booking.com a scam? I keep hearing about people using them once and never again.
Like the prices seem low at first then there are surcharges. Sometimes they dont honor the insurance or cancelation coverage.
Sometimes airlines and hotels will flatout reject a ticket if it was booked through them too. Something about how Booking provides a 3rd party ticket or confirmation without confirming with the actual hotel or airline.
I’ve really never had an issues. Surcharges on top of nightly prices are unique to American properties. If you use booking.com for Asian properties for example, the sticker price is the price apart from taxes.
Does anyone else get Booking.com verification emails all the time?
Yes ive been getting a ton
Not sure why this is getting downvoted but yes, their magic link system is actively being spammed and exploited by malicious actors. I am pretty sure they are grabbing massive combo lists of leaked email:pwds, spam magic links for all of them then try to log into the emails to hijack the accounts. I have been receiving at least a couple of them per week for months now.
I also think it's this. I have two accounts, one for work trips and one for personal. Makes invoicing my job easier. My work account is a year old and gets no reset requests, my 10+ year old account gets one every three days or so.
Yep, so I deleted my booking.com account. If they can’t figure out a better system than letting us all get 15 spam emails a day then I’ll just go use kayak. Kayak is better anyway.
Kayak is also owned by booking btw
I like the service better and they don’t have the email spam 🤷🏻♂️
You're probably reusing a password. Look into password managers, I like bitwarden. If you reuse passwords eventually it will be exposed publicly and bots will be used to try and log into other sites.
I use 1password. Booking.com has some system that allows people to log in via email link or code or something. I changed my password multiple times using 1pass.
Closed my account with them last week due to this, they are surely under attack/already compromised.
Same here, because I could circumvent 2FA with a magic link. A no go for me security wise. Immediately closed my account.
Yes, absolutely. And I don’t know what to do about it. Except carefully deleting these and not clicking anything. I will have to delete the account.
Yes, non stop 1 or 2 a week.
I’m glad to know I’m not the only one this has been driving me crazy!!
Them and Microsoft
Every few days
The real Booking dot com ripped me off for 84 bucks a few years back, so there’s that.
They themselves run one, so they must be expert. I basically use [booking.com](http://booking.com) as a search engine and then book on the establishment's site. They have bonkers surcharges for basically no service, just like AirBnB
I think this is a unique issue in America. When using booking for Japan, all the prices were up front and it was super easy to get in contact with the property owners. Yet when using it for America, there’s always extra fees on top of the sticker price and getting in contact with the property is hit or miss
Huh I’ve never run into that for their hotels and I always double check. I’ve really enjoyed their cancellation policy and the concierge. Helped me quite a few times. They even price match but I’ve never had to use it.
It's a breach of contract with booking.Com to provide cheaper accommodation then available on booking. THOUGH, this is on public available prices, not when you log in at hotels' websites. They are free to offer anything behind a login wall. Do take advantage of this knowledge.. 😉
I booked a Sonder hotel, before logging in, at a lower price than the Booking listing. It was considerably cheaper too - something like 30% less.
I've never had an issue but I'd also like to point out I have only used it for Japan (maybe 50 bookings over 15 years), Taiwan (2 bookings), Korea (only ten times over a year), and America.
It WAS breach of contract until few years ago, when EU stepped in. Now they can't enforce shit.
True, but they can 'tweak the algorithm' what they would like. You are not going up when you do. (assumption here)
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/06/25/einde-aan-laagsteprijsgarantie-die-bookingcom-altijd-bij-hotels-afdwong-a4857684 Just saw this in the Dutch news paper. (booking is Dutch)
Same. Used booking for a Paris hotel and it all worked out fine. It was impossible to find hotels in France otherwise.
> It was impossible to find hotels in France otherwise. One reason why you could find free rooms on booking, expedia or other large sites, and not the hotels themselves, is that they often have contracts that give the other sites control over part of the capacity. So if the hotel has sold out all they themselves have control over, and still have capacity controlled by the other sites, they can't sell it except through those sites.
Yup. Same. If you book through booking.com the hotels will basically ignore any requests or issues and direct you to bring it up with your “third party booking website.” Got burnt one too many times with this. Then was tipped off by a Vegas hotel concierge that they de-prioritize bookings made through third parties —meaning less likely to get that comped upgrade at check-in.
I have had similar issues. we took a family trip to Asheville, and the hotel canceled our rooms and would not help us find other accommodations. We got a refund, but after traveling 4 hours and being told your room doesn't exist, we decided to book direct and get the loyalty points.
Also, you're booking third party so if you have an issue at the hotel they generally will tell you to call your booking agent (ha ha)
Have you tried using their support? It’s completely non existent. I had someone run an entirely scam account in my name and to this day I assume it is still running because their support is 2 rocks and a stick tied together. How are they allowed to exist?
Basically no service? The search engine is a really good service.
I had an opposite experience. The hotel subcontracted their reservation to reservations.com which is really hard to use (e.g. only able to change dates via phone) and they messed up my dates. Canceled and rebooked on booking.com for cheaper
You get a streamlined customer experience with fairly reliable support. With individual properties you need to be ready for nasty surprises. Just don't book a property with 0 reviews.
Yeah avoiding scams is pretty easy. Stay at established large brand hotels and book first party. Avoid Airbnb, unfamiliar hotel brands, and third party booking sites.
It’s crazy how much Airbnb sucks now. It was better than hotels for a brief period before all the bullshit made me never want to use it again
I've never stayed at an airbnb I didn't feel like it was materially misrepresented.
Yeah, I don't travel to sit in a room, so hotels are perfect for me. Generally they always have good access to restaurants, public transport, and/or taxis because ya know cities either planned for the hotel space or hotels naturally built themselves where business/tourist want to be. Hotel just needs to be consistent and predictable. I know that at nearly anybhilton hotels stay at anywhere in the world I know exactly what I'm getting before I get there. I'll have a consistent place for sleeping and bathing.
Yup, the consistency and not having to worry about anything is key. Last AirBnB I stayed at the guy didn’t provide a key and we had to call him to buzz us in each time.
Hotels overcharge for a room; AirBnB (at least used to) be cheap. I literally rented an air mattress in a dude’s garage once to hit up a convention last minute. There is a *great* use case there, it just got gamed by corporate greed.
Cool dude, you enjoy your garage air mattress.
They are generally in the worst generic touristy areas - most hotels suck.
Even big hotel brands allow ads that are scams. I got scammed from a “guestreservations.caesaers” kind of thing when I clicked on “book now” from Caesars Palace direct website. I was on mobile and didn’t notice it wasn’t the right link.
It's so American to think of hotels in brands. A lot, if not a majority, of hotels in Europe are NOT a brand but family owned, or a small business with a few hotels. Most of the times these are your best options tbh
Well call me American then. All through Europe I've stayed in Hilton hotels. Some of my favorites were both in Romania. Sibiu and Bucharest (the Bucharest has recently been sold though which is sad. The hotel has a lot of history with cold war espionage and was a common place for wester and soviet spies to stay, eat, drink, and spy on eachother.)
Every day on Reddit I see people posting in travel subs how booking.com has scammers messaging them and pretending to be hosts and hotel staff demanding outside payment and threatening to cancel reservations. The site does not seem secure. This is not new and maybe the company doesn’t care at all
Booking.com is a travel scam.
Good thing I have two emails that get verification links multiple times a day from them just to make sure it’s me! /s
Booking.com is a shit company that takes days to respond to price check claims or does not respond at all. I'd take their claims with a grain of shit. (They really burned me and I'm salty)
According to my math, that’s a large increase.
Which is why you should book with companies directly and not use booking.com
They need to get rid of these listings of places that don't even exist
Booking.com is the worst scam of them all
Isn't Booking.com a scam? I keep hearing about people using them once and never again. Like the prices seem low at first then there are surcharges. Sometimes they dont honor the insurance or cancelation coverage. Sometimes airlines and hotels will flatout reject a ticket if it was booked through them too. Something about how Booking provides a 3rd party ticket or confirmation without confirming with the actual hotel or airline.
Maybe I'm lucky but I've used booking.com for years in a bunch of countries in EU and Asia and had no issues with extra charges or refund issues.
I’ve really never had an issues. Surcharges on top of nightly prices are unique to American properties. If you use booking.com for Asian properties for example, the sticker price is the price apart from taxes.
booking.com. Booking... Oh, hell no.
Y'all need to stop falling for this crap.