PeterRS

I think the real question posed above is not how pleased you are with the site but how much you might have been overcharged for all your bookings. Hotels are equally angry and booking.com's practices. As I stated some hotel associations are taking out their own class actions particularly re the site's contract conditions which they believe actually increase prices overall.

I'm listening - and hear nothing!

If there is one thing on my bucket llst that will never happen it is seeing the earth from space. Jim Lovell, one of the second group of NASA astronauts, did that four times, most notably in 1970 when, as commander of Apollo 13, he not only almost died in a weightless grave, he, his two colleagues and a ground team working feverishly on near impossibilities, managed to bring his crippled spacecraft back to earth safely. It was a time when the world quite literally watched in wonder. Jim Lovell died two days ago aged 97. Although I was one of those who did follow almost every moment of Apollo 13, I was more in awe of his first Apollo flight, Apollo 8, the first manned flight to reach the moon and then fly around it at Christmas 1968. This was when one of his colleagues pointed his camera at the earth and took what has become an iconic photo. Science & Society Picture Library / Getty Images Many were against that flight, fearful of what might happen on the moon's dark side when there could be no communication with the earth. I recall that one was Sir Bernard Lovell, the British Astronomer Royal. I cannot now recall what doubts he then expressed about that mission, but others were very concerned about engine reliability. If it failed and the spacecraft could not get out of lunar orbit, Lovell's's heroics on Apollo 13 would never have happened. Presumably his body would still be circling the moon and we would have mourned his passing 55 years ago. These astronauts were true adventurers. I salute them all

I became increasingly depressed as I watched that vdo. As the OP states, there is little there that has not been included in other similar videos. At one point I wondered if everyone he spoke to in the expat community is as downbeat on Thailand as his monotone delivery! He certainly makes useful points, but in my view spends 35 minutes saying what could have been condensed into 6 or 7. His main point about knowing what you might be getting yourself into before commiting to retirement in Thailand is one that everyone must take to heart and mind. It has been stressed time and again on this Board. Thailand is not a retirement paradise unless you know quite a bit about the country and the part you wish to retire to. An understanding of how things can quickly change here is also important. The importance of an existing medical insurance policy prior to coming to Thailand and of not burning bridges and cutting oneself off from friends and family at home are other important points. And of course having enough cash to cope with emergencies which almost certainly will arise for some. On the other hand, there are many expats who have come to Thailand and remain here, most being more than reasonably happy with their choice.

The parent company of booking.com is Booking Holdings based in Delaware in the USA and listed on the NASDAQ-100 index. It is a huge travel company controlling booking.com, agoda, priceline, expedia, kayak, cheapflights and others. Its booking.com site is based in The Netherlands. A 2023 study by Hotrec and the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland Valais revealed that Booking Holdings held a 71% share of the European online hotel market. For years there have been complaints on travel sites and to newspapers about problems with this site - mostly pre-payments which are then cancelled using the "free concellation" clause - but refunds are either heavily delayed (for more than a year in several cases) or not provided (see the complaint site below). In 2016 alone there were 12,000 complaints against the site in the UK. Now, this massive company is again in the news for dubious practices which have resulted in a new class action lawsuit against the company for allegedly overcharging customers through fake discounts and artificial scarcity of rooms. According to the Consumentenbond (the Dutch Consumer Agency) customers have been overcharged for years through misleading practices. If you booked through booking.com since 2013, you might be due a refund (assuming you still have receipts or other proof). Worse, it made illegal agreements with hotels preventing them from offering cheaper prices or better conditions on their own hotels and other booking websites. Last year the European Court ruled that booking.com broke the rules. Spain then hit the company with a hefty €413 million fine. Even those who used agoda and expedia may be able to join the class action for it argues that booking.com's market dominance artificially inflated prices across the entire sector. Part of the aim of the lawsuit is to get rid of misleading practices on booking search engines. Anyone can join the the Consumentenbond class action - see link below. Within a week of announcing the class action, over 180,000 individuals joined up. There is no cost and should the claimants win, 75% of the judgement will be divided amongst them. In April this year a second class action against booking.com was commenced by more than 10,000 leading hotels in Europe. Again this claims for losses as a result of the booking.com "best price" condition making it impossible for hotels to reduce their prices below that rate. Hotels have until August 29 to join the action. Additional lawsuits are being considered by several American Law firms. Details of one and an application to join are also in another link below. Allegedly the site used fake discounts, incomplete prices and fabricated scarcity to influence consumer decisions. There are cases where bookings have been made and paid for, reminders sent by the company, arrival at the overseas hotel only to receive emails saying the booking has been cancelled. In one such case highlighted in a British TV programme in 2021, two young ladies had to pay a total over £875 on a short vacation from the UK to Portugal. When calling to complain to booking.com that there was no booking, they were connected to an operator in Japan and the call was cut off. With no funds for other hotels, they had no choice but to return home. The following month booking.com offered £187 in compensation. The girls followed this up with series of no less than nine emails threatening legal action. During this process, the girls were pushed around various departments and had twice to submit receipts. Booking.com finally came up with another £500. I understand that last year following the European Court ruling, booking.com changed it "best price" practice in contracts with hotels. Just last month, a booking.com spokesperson stated, "It is absolutely nonsense to say we artificially inflated hotel prices." Well, faced with a barrage of legal issues, they'd have to say that, wouldn't they! https://www.complaintsboard.com/bookingcom-b110669 https://www.dw.com/en/over-10000-hotels-join-complaint-against-bookingcom/a-73526132 https://www.agrusslawfirm.com/companies-with-arbitration-clauses/booking-com/ https://dutchreview.com/news/booking-com-class-action-lawsuit-claim-compensation/ Lastly, I have started using smaller search engines. I find Hong Kong's Klook site has better prices in Taipei than agoda and the same with Japanican in Tokyo. I am going to change my November Taipei booking from agoda to Klook (which I have used once before).

Agreed. And also to read the small print. I have always found agoda adds service charges and taxes after you have decided on a room. In the two cases listed by @Moses above, the prices on the two sites are identical. Please see my new post on Booking.com's illegal activities in the Beer Bar forum.

Stupid people remain stupid - that's their problem.

I have been taking and editing photos for as long as I can remember. Sometimes photos are best left at some angle.

Don't you realise we are getting a life????

Why would anyone bother? Fact of your life obviously.

Not at all. I was referring to you as you are the one who raised that stupidity about "getting a life" in yout post about my post. Clearly you have difficulty reading.

If that is indeed the price, surely it must mean tearing town and erecting one or more high-rise buildings. But the soi is too narrow for any single building over 8 stories. I suspect it has to be for the entire soi and the house at the end so that the soi can be eliminated with just one really big high-rise.

Perhaps you might learn to read.

As clearly does @Riobard 🤣 🤣

Being grounded for any length of time is not welcomed by anyone involved with an airline. But I think a touch more realism is worth considering. Not mentioned in the above post by @daydreamer are the comments later in the article about some problems having arisen partly as a result of the aircraft being grounded by most airlines for some years during covid and the belief by most at that time that they would not reenter service. It is largely thanks to the inefficiency and many other problem issues at Boeing - in particular with the massively long 7-year delay in getting the 777X ready for delivery - that the A380s were brought back into service in the first place. Some of the problems that have arisen are unquestionably the result of airlines bringing them back without doing at least a small number of regular checks which naturally is unforgivable. Worrying though that can be, I personally have no issue whatever flying the A380 on a scheduled airline as it is an aircraft I love flying in, whereas nothing will persuade me to ever get on a 737 Max. Being such a large aircraft, the time for regular maintenance was always going to take considerably longer than smaller aircraft. For Blomberg to suggest this is a problem is stupid in my view! What is the comparison in terms of time, I wonder, compared to maintenance schedules for, let's suggest, two older A330s or two of the original 777s, both aircraft types having been in the air for 30 years? Interesting that the Bangkok Post - never the most accurate reporter on quite a number of issues, although being fair in this case it is merely quoting from a Bloomberg article - should accompany the article with a photo of a THAI A380. As we all know, for years THAI left its A380 fleet out in the open air in the heat and very high humidity at BKK without any maintenance whatever. Most airlines parked their unused A380s in very dry desert conditions in the USA or Australia. As a result THAI's A380s cannot fly and will need something like US$30 million each in maintenance we have been told before they can even get off the ground. THAI has them up for sale in an "as is where is" condition! Another gross waste of masses of cash by TG who have always ended up with too many different types of aircraft, some of which it cannot sell - e.g. the A380s and its fleet of A340s. Buying the A380 was purely a vanity exercise and a total waste as it was not a good fit for either its route structure or its existing fleet.

I have always believed that by far the weakest (and, frankly, the most idiotic) of any 'put down' of another's contribution is the phrase "get a life". It is so monstrously stupid. As though the contributor does not already have a life and one that, in most cases I presume, he actually enjoys in his own way. That people have different views is part of all our lives. Thankfully we are all different and "get a life" means precisely nothing other than to illustrate the bankruptcy of the writer's ideas on what life actually means.

And i suppose you think that is funny. Haha!

I have no desire whatever to start a topic on sex meet ups, thank you. As for my point, it relates exactly to the thread title.

I wish I could understand that post!

I still fail to understand why bios are regarded as accurate when we know so many are not!

It still pisses you off? The history of Hollywood and indeed most of the entertainment world has for well over a century had gay men and women who stayed in the closet for one reason or another. Why it should concern any of us today rather amazes me. Do you plan to out him or anyone else for that matter? Surely there is much more in our world that is a great deal more important.

Does anyone really believe in the accuracy of bios on the apps and social media?

Never heard of him. Is he famous or something? It frankly doesn't matter to me one jot if someone is in the closet but pretending to be straight. Why should it concern others? There may have been a certain fascination about a movie star or two possibly being gay more than four decades ago. We're surely beyond that now. It should be no-one else's business.

A new book likens him to a figure from Shakespearean tragedy: an outwardly haughty and sometimes magnificent figure, inwardly insecure and indecisive, self-regarding only in his own downfall. A Richard II perhaps; even Hamlet. In a book of many ironies, the fact is that of those close to him, few loved him. Certainly not as much as he loved himself. Most in his country came to loathe him with an intensity that surprised much of the world. “He was a difficult man to like – so suspicious, so certain we were all trying to do him down,” said the British Ambassador, before surprisingly adding, “And yet there was a naked vulnerability about him which made you genuinely sorry for him.” So writes a reviewer in The Guardian of an important and telling book “King of Kings”. The book’s subtitle “The Unmaking of the Modern Middle East” may promise more than it actually delivers, but there is enough to demonstrate that the Shah of Iran was not merely the author of his own downfall. It had vastly greater international consequences. In fact the world has still not recovered from the events of January 1979 when the Shah of Iran finally left his country for good. As the reviewer states, the aftershocks resulting from that departure and what followed are still “not over yet.” As has been discussed in other threads, the destabilisation of Iran really started with the actions of the CIA and its British allies when in 1953 they engineered the overthrow of the elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh. In his place they put back on the throne the young Shah, a man whom they considered far more likely to become a pawn of the west. Mosaddegh had planned to nationalise Iran’s oil industry which, till then, paid Iran peanuts. The western governments had no truck with the nationalisation plan, the more so at a time when the Soviet Union was also looking to get its hands on Iran’s oil. Even when the Shah had become a megalomaniacal figure, he was still courted by the west. By then the west lauded him as a figure of stability in an increasingly unstable part of the world, lavishing on him billions of $$$ in armaments and cash to secure his regime. Then he turned on those masters by siding with OPEC when it raised the price of oil manyfold in the 1970s resulting in a major international recession. In the meantime he allowed a tidal wave of corruption to overwhelm his country. As unrest grew his Savak secret police became a hated organisation. The author Scott Anderson suggests that the immediate cause of the revolution that brought the severe Ayatollah Khomeini to power was one now rarely discussed. Exactly a year before he was forced from Iran, the Shah entertained US President Jimmy Carter and his wife in Tehran. Carter complimented the Shah on multiple achievements, even as crowds were beginning to demonstrate on the streets against the Shah’s hated rule. The Shah took this as a further acknowledgement of his success. He decided to further vilify the exiled cleric Khomeini then resident in France. He instructed a minister to publish an article about Khomeini being a British agent. This lit an intense fire of indignation and loathing against the Shah. It was one he could not extinguish. The reviewer suggests that the book overly concentrates on the US/Iran relationship to the exclusion of others. But it offers a clear-eyed extensive portrait of a man who was to consider himself, like King Lear, more sinned against that sinning. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jul/28/king-of-kings-by-scott-anderson-review-how-the-last-shah-of-iran-sealed-his-own-fate

Nice cartoon from today's Guardian in the UK.