[elahieh]

Part of his frustration has been the struggle to get in contact with anyone at Booking.com about the issue.

“There is no way to contact them. Online it says you must talk to finance or credit control, neither of whom have a phone number or email address.”

He said you can call a contact centre, which then lodges a ticket for those teams. But the ticket expires every four days, requiring another phone call to lodge a new ticket. The Guardian has been told by multiple hotel operators that this is the practice.

This sounds like innumerable other HN front page stories. Once the company is big enough (e.g. AirBnB host cancellations/bait-and-switch, Amazon book piracy) they apply super-duper ML revenue optimization. This guides the behemoth company to decide it's not worth responding to small customers - unless the victim causes a social media firestorm (e.g. makes the HN front page, iamharaldur on Twitter).

The one and only time I tried to use AirBnB in April 2016 I got a last minute host dodgy cancellation in Amsterdam, after which I never used it again. It was good that I learned that lesson on my first attempt.