How NOT to Treat Loyal Customers — I’m looking at you Booking.com and Hotel L’Antoine
I like traveling and I travel often. I’ve been a frequent user of Booking.com with currently around 50 bookings on the site in total and as I’m writing this post, I still have 3 upcoming reservations in Belgium and Italy — some already paid.

Two weeks ago my girlfriend and I were in Paris for a long weekend and we stayed at Hotel L’Antoine. Right at the very first night on Friday, when we came back to the hotel, we saw that someone had been in our room, rummaged through our luggages and other belongings and stole my Bose noise cancelling headphones, Apple Airpods and a charging kit — all worth around 500 euros. For the first time in my life I was experiencing theft in a hotel.

Next few days, the rest of my holiday, was all about reporting the situation to the police, dealing with very incompetent hotel staff and the manager Sara, who didn’t even give me a call during her weekend to apologize or take action on the matter. I had to wait 3 nights, until she showed up on Monday morning, to be able to speak to her (!).
One would think that theft is a big big red flag situation that a hotel management needs to deal with immediately, at the very least by starting with an apology right? No, not in Hotel L’Antoine.
On Monday morning I wrote a letter to hotel management. I asked them to take responsibility and mentioned that the least they could do is to refund me for this very bad experience, which by the way is 300 euros, still much less than the damage that theft caused me in the first place. And with that, we left the hotel to catch our flight back to Amsterdam.
I think you can already guess that nothing came out of their “investigation”. Hotel claims that they’re not responsible with what happened because there’s no damage on the door (!). So if hotel staff or someone else used other means to get into my room that’s all fine (!). It turns out Hotel L’Antoine has had similar issues before:


A textbook example of bad customer support by Booking.com
After having repeatedly bad experiences with Hotel L’Antoine staff and the manager following the theft, I decided to contact Booking.com. Without boring you to death with details here’s a brief log of my interactions with the customer support team:
- First 3 days. Support agent: Andrea. Very helpful and understanding. She assures me that Booking.com is dedicated to assist me and also refund me if the hotel doesn’t do so. She repeatedly mentions that I’m a loyal frequent customer and Booking.com will make things right.
- Next 7 days. Andrea disappears. So does Booking.com. No replies to my emails nor am I getting any calls.
- Day 10. I decide to call customer support again. Support agent Brad picks up. Totally opposite of Andrea. Drastic change in tone. Tells me that Hotel L’Antoine is not refunding and Booking.com cannot do anything about it.
- Day 10. I ask him to connect me to his supervisor. Supervisor: Priscilla. Similar communication style with Andrea. Helpful, informative. She promises for a resolution in 48 hours. If hotel still doesn’t refund, Booking.com will refund.
- Day 13. I get the final email. Support agent: Wee. He goes:
Hotel L’Antoine advises that there have no record that the door were broken. In this case, as we are only the intermediate, we are unable to take any further actions.
Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this situation may have caused.
If you need us again, we’re always here.
The whole interaction with Booking.com for these two weeks has been a customer support disaster. Not only because they’re not taking any corrective actions but also because they’ve failed big time on giving me a consistent message across different support agents that I’ve interacted with.
But I find this last message above to be extra ironic.
It says “as we are only the intermediate, we are unable to take any further actions”. So please hear me out here. I make the reservation on Booking.com, I pay the whole cost of this service to Booking.com and yet Booking.com is only an intermediate and unable to take further actions! Do you see the irony here?
The ending sentence is also ironic. I think that one doesn’t need explanation.
Goodbye Booking.com
My answer to all this is very simple. If Booking.com “is only the intermediate and can’t take any actions” then I don’t need Booking.com.
Especially not when I’m making ~50 reservations over the years and not getting supported when I need it once.
Before I close, I’m still puzzled with one final question. Why would both of these companies try so hard not to do the right thing? For example why wouldn’t Booking.com refund me for this rare bad experience? Or why wouldn’t Hotel L’Antoine do that? Is it malice or incompetence? Is it greed? Maybe it’s a combination of all.
Last two weeks, I spent a lot of time on this matter. Emails, phone calls.. and now writing this post. I did all these not because I need the money. I’m a well paid professional and in fact getting back the 300 euros refund doesn’t really matter to me financially. I followed this up until the very end because I wanted these companies to do the right thing.
