Tony Hetherington is Financial Mail on Sunday’s ace investigator, fighting readers corners, revealing the truth that lies behind closed doors and winning victories for those who have been left out-of-pocket. Find out how to contact him below.
Ms A.S. writes: We booked villas in Turkey through Booking.com for our group of 19 people, but when we arrived, the owner told us to leave as we did not have a reservation. He then called the police.
We had paid €8,400 (about £7,300), but had to spend two days in emergency accommodation costing €2,000 (about £1,740) and a further €6,000 (about £5,200) on new villas. This was a very expensive nightmare holiday.
We have been asking Booking.com for a refund and hope you can help us.
Promise: Villas were in Kalkan, Turkey, but the owner called the police
Tony Hetherington replies: Your party of 19 people included four small children, and you paid in advance for three villas.
Just a few days before your holiday, you were given confirmation of the arrangements to transfer you from the airport to the villas at Kalkan. But when you landed, there was no transport waiting for you, and when you called the owner of the villas, he denied that you had a reservation and told you not to go to the villas.
You went anyway, and found the owner waiting there. He called the police to have you removed and you spent seven hours at the local police station.
The police were actually sympathetic and helpful. They found you hotel rooms for the next two nights and even gave you an online link through which you successfully found new villas, though this meant paying all over again.
Meanwhile, there was confusion and contradiction over why all this had happened. The owner of the original villas said he knew nothing about your booking, and suggested that a previous owner had scammed you. But he gave a slightly different explanation to Booking.com, saying you had been double-booked.
You contacted Booking.com and were assured that you would have a refund within a fortnight. But no refund arrived, and you have told me that Booking.com explained that you did not have ‘documents in the correct currency’, whatever that means. At this point, having spent a month trying to get your money back, you contacted me.
I asked Booking.com to comment, and was quickly told: ‘We would like to apologise to the customer for their experience and the obvious inconvenience they faced. We will, of course, be refunding them for the original booking and relocation fees, while we investigate further to understand what happened.’
But in a message to you, Booking. com said: ‘Booking.com does not own any rooms, apartments or other accommodation units, and we are not responsible for this situation.’
The company did refund all the money you paid originally, and it said it would pay you a further £819 ‘as a gesture of goodwill’.
The £819 was the cost of the two days you all spent in emergency hotel accommodation. There was nothing to make up for the thousands of pounds you spent from your savings and holiday money in order to pay on the spot for the replacement villas. And nothing to make up for a ruined holiday when you had paid for a restful one.
And, of course, none of this explains what went wrong in the first place. Booking.com does not believe this was a scam, and it confirmed that the Turkish property company employed by the owner of the villas had accepted your booking. Booking.com has removed the villas from its website.
The final outcome is that although you have now received just over £8,000, you are still about £1,000 out of pocket. And your trip was hardly the holiday you expected.
Booking.com emphasised: ‘To the extent permitted by mandatory consumer law, we will only be liable for costs you incur as a direct result of a failure on our behalf.’
It added that the £819 it paid on top of the refund ‘is not an admission of responsibility’.
This is not reassuring.
My mortgage was rejected – over a £36 unpaid phone bill
S.M. writes: I sold my buy-to-let property, which had a Santander mortgage with three years left to run on a five-year fixed rate.
This incurred a £10,000 fee, but when I applied for another mortgage within the permitted three-month break period, I was turned down.
The reason was a bad debt connected to my property, which I bought from my late father’s estate.
Tony Hetherington replies: When you were told about the bad debt, you realised that this was actually just £36 which was owed to Virgin. Your father died before paying his phone bill, you bought the property and the £36 debt appeared under your name. This was enough to mean an automatic refusal by Santander to transfer your buy-to-let loan to a fresh property, even though you paid Virgin.
I asked Santander to look into this, and a few days later the bank told me: ‘We have reviewed Mr M’s case as part of our routine appeals process and have approved the mortgage application, subject to a valuation.’
As a gesture of goodwill, Santander is also refunding its valuation fee.
If you believe you are the victim of financial wrongdoing, write to Tony Hetherington at Financial Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TS or email [email protected]. Because of the high volume of enquiries, personal replies cannot be given. Please send only copies of original documents, which we regret cannot be returned.
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