Post

PSA about booking hotels: never book any hotel on booking.com whose payment method is "give Booking your card details and the hotel will attempt to take payment at some random undisclosed future date" - ALWAYS pick hotels that either take the payment instantly, or when you check in / out.

Booking's customer support said pretty much the same thing. Our fault the card declined, hotel is under no obligation to keep our room blah blah. We booked it weeks ago, if they had tried payment earlier and contacted us to say it failed we obviously would have arranged something else.

Luckily we managed to squeeze into another hotel about an hour later with our very tired baby - but I won't be booking any hotels in future that can't guarantee the stay the moment you book. Hence this PSA!

Close call. One time our hotel was turned over to refugees fleeing Afghanistan a few days before our booking and we only found out we weren't going to be able to stay there because I recognised the hotel on the news.

Heard a number of stories like this about booking dot com, so i always just use it to find and compare hotels only now, then go direct to the hotels website to book on deciding on one. Hope you managed to find something in time, thats awful.