The traveler website Booking.com has left thousands of dollars unpaid to hoteliers and other partners around the world for months, citing "a technical issue" to blame.
The issue is widespread in Thailand, Indonesia and Europe among hoteliers who express their frustration in groups at Facebook as rumors flare up about the causes that caused the problems of payments.
Typically, if a customer books a hotel through Booking.com and chooses to pay in advance, the site takes the payment and passes it on to the hotel, deducting a small commission.
Booking.com partners have been reporting problems with payments since July and in some cases months earlier. Although Booking.com continued to receive payments from customers, the company did not always forward the amount due to hoteliers according to the Guardian.
The article adds that last month Hungary's consumer watchdog "launched an investigation into the company's failure to pay hoteliers in the country and raided Booking.com's local office."
In a statement to the Guardian, Booking.com acknowledged the "frustration" of customers affected by "an ongoing technical issue".
It also said that "the system errors that were affecting payments have now been fixed" and that they have processed the transactions of "most" of their partners.
"We recognize that for some this has taken longer than it should have and we continue to work to finalize the remaining transactions..."
When banks were banks, within them, a saying prevailed: "bank means valeur", where valeur is defined as the interest-bearing date. In simple words, you deposited your money in the bank but the bank started paying you interest after 1, 2 and 3 WORKING days after that. In between these days, the bank LENDS your money with INTEREST from the FIRST DAY!
In the present case, if we think positively that the bookie company is not going for a cannon, then it will mean that for as long as it had collected the claims from its customers, but did not pay its partners, "maybe" one of its banks was also charging interest on them of the universe.
The matter is not only unethical but also criminally hellish by virtue of "unjust enrichment", as defined by the Civil Code.