An eighty-year-old Melbourne man and his wife, both with documented mobility issues and a stated requirement of step-free access, paid $2,382 in full to a major online travel platform three weeks before flying to Galway. On arrival, the lockbox was empty, the door was answered by a child, and the apartment was, on the family's own account, already occupied.
The booking had been taken in April. The family inside had been tenants since March. A replacement address was sent overnight, in the rain, to a property with forty outdoor steps and fifteen indoor steps, unsuitable for the customer's mobility profile. The couple spent two of their five days largely confined indoors.
The customer states he sent four emails to the platform and could not locate a working phone number for an Australian customer. The platform states, in response to media enquiries, that it has "no records" of being contacted. The platform is the only party to this complaint that holds its own correspondence in a form it can neither produce nor confirm.
The platform's public materials describe its customer service as operating "around the clock" and available to Australian travellers "via phone, the Booking.com app, and online." An eighty-year-old Australian customer, abroad, was unable, on his own account, to reach any of those three channels. The stated worldwide service and the observed worldwide service are not, in this instance, the same service.
"These intermediaries like Booking.com are quite impersonal and not transparent and not accessible for you. So if there's an issue, you suddenly have somebody in the middle, you either cannot contact or is difficult to contact or doesn't respond." — Prof. Daniel Gschwind, Griffith Institute for Tourism.
The platform says it is reachable around the clock. An elderly customer says he could not reach it, by any channel, in the days that followed. Both statements are on the public record, in a service the platform markets to Australian travellers as available worldwide at any hour. Both cannot be true. The file is open until reconciled or quietly buried.
Source: Sharples, S. "Couple find family inside accommodation." news.com.au, 10 July 2026. All parties named are named in the public report. Editorial copy is the work of the house.
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