Booking.com Scam Sees 100 Tourists Turn Up to Stay at Private London Home
Booking.com is apologizing and offering support after around 100 customers traveled from all over the world to stay in a house that had never been listed for rental by the owner.
As the BBC reports(Opens in a new window), 23 groups of tourists, totaling around 100 people altogether, knocked on the door of a private home in north London expecting to stay there last month. The house is owned by a woman called Gillian who had never listed her residence for rental on the online travel agency's website.
The tourists started turning up on July 4 and continued to do so until July 29, originating from Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Los Angeles, and other parts of the UK. In each case Gillian had to apologize and turn them away. After the first six groups of tourists knocked on her door that first day, Gillian decided to investigate. A quick search of Booking.com brought up her address listed with photographs from a different property located in Chelsea. She reported this to the company on July 5, but people kept arriving for another 24 days.
Booking.com didn't pull the scam listing until July 13 and clearly didn't contact customers who had booked the property telling them not to go. Worse still is the fact the travel agency was called by one of its customers to ask about the status of the property ahead of their arrival and was told it was fine. That call was made on July 29.
A spokesperson for Booking.com said, "Scams are unfortunately a battle many industries are facing against unscrupulous fraudsters looking to take advantage and it is something we are tackling head on ... We can confirm this property has been completely removed from our site and all customers are being contacted by a member of our customer service team to
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