Yesterday, I was almost scammed by some Cairo hotels listed on booking.com. When I say hotels, I am very positive that there was an organized group of scammers who listed their bogus hotel information on booking.com. I don’t understand their scheme fully, as this could be very risky for me. But I believe that their return on investment must be so high that very sophisticated techniques as below are deployed.
It is sometimes mandatory for the visitors to reserve hotel rooms before entering a foreign country. This not entirely unreasonable requirement has been a nuisance to me. I just don’t like being inflexible. My normal counter-measure is to reserve a refundable room online. And then, mostly depending on the timely arrival and deepened understanding of the destination, I will decide whether to stay in the original hotel or not later. Normally, due to the feeling of guiltiness when cancelling the order without good reason, I will choose to stay at the same place.
So before I was in Cairo, Egypt, I had some cursive look at the hotels listed on booking.com, of which I chose Aida of pyramids view. This is a hotel with good reviews (or simply a perfect booking.com score 10 out of 10, I didn’t really read any of the reviews) and free cancellation. This is perfect for a stay in a place whose location is completely unknown to me.
On the day of my arrival, I spent some time in sleeping in the resting area, immigration check, sim card registration and currency exchange. So it was almost 6:00 am when I hopped onto the bus. This is a time already too late for my sleeping but still too early for my check-in. I am in desperate need of an extra hotel nearby to have some rest. It would be perfect if it allows early check-in, a rare quality for hotels outside China. This was how I found Saqqara Nights Hotel, 500m away from Egyptian Museum. The name and the pictures on booking.com made no sense for me. How would a hotel named Saqqara Nights Hotel be near to the Egyptian Museum? How is it possible to have a pyramid view in Cairo center? I still decided to take a look at the place, as the trust level on booking.com is high. Booking.com, the app, is always hard for navigation and I didn’t see the place on Google Maps. So I made a phone call to the hotel owner. By the way, this is only possible after the reservation on booking.com. booking.com, a broker with the existential fear to the free flow of information, will take all measures to block customers from learning the contact information of the hotels until it can be sure that their deal is settled. After the reassuring answer of possible early check-in, I decided to walk to the location shown in booking.com. This serves two purpose, to ease the hunger for food and to satisfy my wanderlust.
On my way to (any) breakfast stall, I made a staggering discovery. Both Aida of pyramids view hotel and Saqqara Nights Hotel had the same mobile number. Even though one is in Giza and one is in city center. A more surprising fact is that of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, these two were chosen. This is too unexpected a coincidence to be ignored. It suddenly dawned on me that I was lured to the hotels like a prey. These hotels are all too good. Among all their shared qualities, perfect reviews, pyramid views and free cancellation are the baits that I will fall for. Saqqara Nights Hotel was even promoted (a euphemism for advertised that is that is always disturbing to me) by booking.com. When I booked this Saqqara Nights Hotel, booking.com expected an even larger commission. This abomination is even greater than ads being listed on Google Maps, as booking.com already earned their commission through my booking and it is supposed to be fair. Now they are optimizing their platform for even bigger profit. All these must be at customers’ cost. I did notice all these nuances, but was unable to grasp their implications. I just happily accepted the deal.
Some big boss maybe behind all the hotels, but it does not automatically translate to malign, right? As the curtain gradually rolled up, I became more and more conscious of the fact that I was a prey. I was contacted by a different number from the one listed on booking.com, this guy was very reticent to the location of the hotel and insistent to ask me for the airport pick up service. I tried to contact the number listed on booking.com. It was obvious that this guy managed multiple properties and was oblivious to the fact that I reserved two hotels under his management. More fishy things emerged while I was having breakfast, the guy contacted me proactively deleted some of the messages he sent to me (both for him and for me). They must have realized that there was something wrong while talking to me. And the guy (supposed to be boss) seemed to be not very enthusiastic for his client any more. It must be unsafe for me to scratch more itch of curiosity.
To be fair, I still don’t have concrete evidence to show that these hotel owners are malicious. There are simply too many dubious things. All these things seem to be a set-up trap, whose cost is too high to be covered with legitimate business profit. Moreover, I found even more similar hotels on booking.com, all with perfect reviews, excellent location and free cancellation. They even used AI to generate the hotel images. Any way, I was lucky enough to not accept their airport pick up service. In the end, I chose a hotel near to city center. Thanks to the free cancellation, I lost nothing but some time.
I want to lament over a few things.
- The easy accessibility of the Internet is not always a good thing, it can make life harder for the not so technically savvy people and can make life easier for the sophisticated scammers.
- Brokers, by definition, fear for people to skip over their responsibility, and strike deals directly. They will prevent the free flow of information and thus sometimes make life harder.
- booking.com, in particular, has not done a good job in preventing spammers (if not scammers) from posting bogus information on their platform. Even more abominably, booking.com is making profits from listing these bogus information.