Tourists start turning up to woman’s house after Booking.com error

People have started randomly turning up on a woman’s doorstep after thinking they booked her home to stay in online.

Karin Arsenius, 37, said around 20 guests from countries including Algeria, Canada, India and the US have turned up over the last month at her Plumstead home in south-east London quoting Booking.com.

She said she was even forced to make up beds for three students from Argentina over the weekend because they were unable to find other accommodation.

Some guests searched for a key safe inside her home and Karin is now considering legal action against the travel website.

She told the BBC: ‘We just need it to stop somehow. It is very frustrating.’

Booking.com has since removed the listing, which appeared to use Karin’s street postcode where her house happened to be under the pin drop.

Her address was listed as a flat in Greenwich which all the guests had booked for.

Karin’s partner tried to resolve the Booking.com issue with the three students but to no avail.

‘They had nowhere to go and we tried all the local hotels but everything was booked out,’ Karin said.

‘There was nothing free so in the end we said “we’re not comfortable with just letting you go out in the night, so let’s just make up some beds in the living room and you can just stay here”.

‘But it shouldn’t ever have got that far. It should have been taken care of, even if Booking.com is put out.’

Lisa Webb, a consumer law expert for Which? added: ‘Booking.com needs to take every step it has in its arsenal to make sure that first of all, if it does happen, people are protected, people are given compensation, but secondly that these scams cannot appear on their platform at all in the first place.

‘[Scammers] will target individuals in any way that they can and they are very unscrupulous people doing this. There needs to be checks and balances in place though to make sure that it cannot happen.’

Booking.com said in a statement: ‘We have a number of robust security measures in place, but in the very rare instance there may be an issue with a specific property we always investigate immediately.

‘We can confirm this property has been completely removed from our site and all customers affected were contacted by a member of our customer service team to apologise and offer any support required in relation to refunds, relocations and additional fees, and we of course extend our sincere apologies to the homeowner.’

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