‘We ended up stranded in Spain after a Booking.com error'
Do you have a legal question to put to Gary? Email askalawyer@telegraph.co.uk, or use the form at the bottom of the page.
Hello Gary,
I would like some advice regarding Booking.com.
My wife and I recently booked a holiday through the site. However, when we arrived, the accommodation was not available, leaving us stranded in a small town in Spain.
I contacted Booking.com and spent a lot of time on the phone with their team. They said they were trying to find alternative accommodation, and this went on for a couple of hours to no avail.
We booked into a nearby hotel for the night, and I advised Booking.com that I would expect to be reimbursed for the cost.
Now we are back home, the site has reimbursed me for the difference in cost for the alternative apartment that I booked the next day. But not for the first night hotel.
I sent receipts for the hotel and for the restaurant for our meal that evening – though we had booked self-catering, we had no alternative but to eat out.
I also asked for repayment for the taxi to the hotel which was €20 (£17) and telephone costs which amounted to about £40 from having to contact Booking.com, as they never rang me back as promised.
I also asked for consideration of the stress that had been caused, bearing in mind my wife and I are 76 years old, and I was carrying a quantity of medication that required refrigeration.
The response from them was for us to send them the receipts, which was positive. But now they are just ignoring any contact.
– Tom, by email
Dear Tom
I completely understand you feel very much let down by Booking.com. It must have been dreadful to arrive in Spain and find there was no room at the inn, as it were. And then it is very stressful to scramble to find somewhere else to stay, never mind having the worry of your medication and keeping it refrigerated.
In fairness to the company, it is good they quickly offered to cover some of your losses.
The precise legal status of your relationship with Booking.com and their legal responsibilities towards you are relatively complex to understand. You say you booked a 'holiday' with Booking.com, but in a strict legal sense you did not do that. You simply booked accommodation through the website.
In legal terms, a so-called 'package holiday' is an entirely different entity from what you did. A package holiday has enhanced consumer protection when any part of the different elements of the package goes wrong.
But you and your wife were independent travellers arranging the different elements of the trip yourselves. In that sense, Booking.com is what I would describe as a 'third party booking site'. It is a business through which consumers like you book a travel service, but the site you are booking through is not providing the service.
This can lead to confusion about the precise legal duties which the third party booking site has towards the consumers who use the site.
Central to this is the law of agency. An agent is a party that is authorised in law to act on behalf of another party, often authorised to create a contract. Here, Booking.com acted as agent with the party that owned the accommodation you booked in Spain. This means your legal contract for the accommodation was with the owner.
Hence, Booking.com would no doubt say any legal claim arising from the failure of the contract is a claim between you and the owner of the accommodation.
For instance, if you had stayed in the accommodation you booked with Booking.com and were injured because of a fault with the accommodation, your personal injury claim would be against the owner of the accommodation.
That's the basic law, and hence why Booking.com might feel they have gone beyond their legal duty in stepping in to tidy up the mess created by the accommodation you booked not being available.
However, I would say that where the legal status of your relationship with Booking.com becomes more of a grey area – and where the law of agency is not relevant – is in relation to the actual booking process.
Booking.com is a third party site, so I would say if the booking process itself has gone wrong, they do have a duty to you to sort it out because you are a direct customer of their booking service.
To put it another way, Booking.com might not be responsible to you for the quality of the holiday accommodation, but they are responsible to you for the actual booking process. And in this case, it seems the booking process went wrong because the accommodation you booked was not available. And that failure in the booking process led to you suffering financial losses.
A package holiday contract is a rare example of a contractual claim for loss suffered that can include a claim for loss of enjoyment because an essential part of a holiday is to enjoy it!
In this case, you did not book your 'holiday' through Booking.com, so you cannot claim from them for loss of enjoyment and the stress you suffered. But for the reasons I have explained, because of the problems you encountered arising from the failure of the actual booking process, you can claim for losses arising under that contract.
Readers will be pleased to hear that after I sent you my initial thoughts on this situation, Booking.com have said they will reimburse the financial losses you incurred for which you are able to produce receipts. So, a good result, and I am glad Booking.com have in that sense acknowledged their limited responsibility to you.
A Booking.com spokesman said: 'We apologise for the delay in processing the refund for the price difference of the alternative hotel booked by the customer. This refund is now being processed, along with reimbursements for the meal and phone charges.'
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