Booking.com will pay compensation. You can get your money back

Booking.com has started sending e-mails to its customers. It informs about the possibility of receiving compensation after submitting a complaint. Who does this apply to?

The President of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection, Tomasz Chróstny, obliged Booking.com to provide proper information about whether the person renting the accommodation is an entrepreneur or a private person. The company was to make changes and provide compensation to users who complained about the lack of this information. The website violated consumers' interests. The process of paying compensation is just starting.

Who is entitled to compensation from Booking?

The company has just started sending e-mails to its customers who made a reservation between January 1, 2023 and the date of introduction of changes and have submitted or will submit complaints regarding one of three issues:

• Booking.com's failure to inform whether the accommodation provider is a business or a private person;
• not informing you that consumer protection rules do not apply to contracts concluded with private persons;
• not informing about the division of responsibilities between Booking.com and the entity offering accommodation.

As the service points out in its e-mail to customers, complaints must be submitted via the Help Center Booking.com BV “At the same time, we suggest that consumers submit any complaints via the website or app Booking.comafter logging in with your reservation number and PIN, which will allow Booking.com for the quickest and most effective consideration of complaints,” we read.

“We suggest using the word “UOKiK” or the number of the binding decision of the President of the Office in the complaint, which may facilitate and speed up the examination of the complaint (use this link to log in using the reservation number and PIN and send the complaint),” writes Booking.

Compensation will depend on the customer's Genius loyalty program level

What happens if consumers who were at least level 2 in Genius at the time of their individual notification? The company announces that the “consumer benefit” will consist in permanently increasing consumers' level in the Genius program by one level without having to meet the usual conditions for such an increase.

And in the case of customers who have already reached the maximum level in the Genius program at the time of providing them with individual information, “the consumer benefit will consist in granting them Travel Credits in the Wallet in the amount of PLN 40, which can then be used within one year from the moment they are made available on any bookable platform Booking.com a service for which Wallet payments are accepted (whereby the benefit to each eligible consumer will be one-off, regardless of the number of bookings made by that consumer in the indicated period)”.

The benefit will also be available to consumers who do not currently have an account on the website Booking.com (especially if they had it and deleted it). To obtain them, such consumers (in addition to submitting a complaint) must create an account on the website Booking.com within one week of receiving information about the grant being granted to them.

As the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection pointed out in the summer, the Booking.com case is not the first intervention of this type by the President of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection as part of the enforcement of obligations arising from the Omnibus Directive. Chróstny previously issued similar decisions regarding Zalando and Travelist.

As it was explained then, Booking.com did not provide clear information about whether the entity offering accommodation was
entrepreneur or private person. The proceedings of the President of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection indicated that in the case of booking accommodation with entities that do not have the status of an entrepreneur,
the platform incorrectly informed that the scope of consumer legal protection was changing. The division of responsibilities between Booking.com and service providers was also unclear.

As the Office emphasized, information on this subject was scattered, ambiguous or available only after clicking on additional links and regulations, which made it difficult for customers to make informed decisions. As a result of such practices, consumers could conclude contracts without realizing that they were not entitled to protection under consumer law. They also did not know who was responsible for providing the accommodation service – Booking.com or the entity offering accommodation, which was of key importance for consumers in the event of, for example, filing a complaint – it was emphasized.

prepared by KWS based on the announcement of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection and PAP

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