Oh yes, my friends at booking.com...!
I once booked a 5 day trip to Rome. The hotel we wanted to stay in was full only booking.com offered free rooms.
I booked it but immediately wrote an email to ask them if they could really guarantee the room as the hotel was booked full on every platform of travel agency.
They said if I got a confirmation from their website the reservation was guaranteed.
My wife is Italian, so she called the hotel and they said they were booked full.
A few weeks later we call again, the hotel still has no reservation in our names.
Emails to bookings.com provide the same answer that the confirmation means a guaranteed reservation no matter what the hotel said.
You guess the ending, don't you?
30 hours before departure I get an email from bookings.com to call a number because there is a problem with our reservation. Well duh!
Didn't I tell you from the start?!?
A very friendly guy from an Italian travel agency they work with tries his best to relocate us to a different hotel but there is a convention in town, so that proves difficult, especially at such short notice.
Long story short, we get another hotel room in the same category but it is too far from where we initially wanted to stay. We have to walk for about half an hour before we get out of the residential area and into the old historical part of town.
Well it's still better than nothing but I end up writing a very explicit email to bookings.com and I will never, ever ever ever (Taylor Swift style) do business with bookings.com again.
I mean I told them from the start that I thought they might have screwed up but they were in complete denial and did not look into it until the very last day when it was basically too late to do anything about it.