anyone else have problems booking Premier Inn (reservation dates potentially off by one day?)

That has happened quite a bit over the last couple of years, on and off. I've seen some posts here about it, like the one linked below. Some have suggested cleaning your cache and so on, but if you have tried two different browsers, that's probably not the problem. https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/ireland/premier-inn-glitch-help

You might try sending them a private message on their Facebook page. That's what they suggested to one person who was having problems: https://www.facebook.com/premierinn

FWIW, I just tried a dummy booking at the PI Paddington Basin, and had the same problem as you.

Thank you so much, Mardee!! I hadn't thought of seaching past posts (oops!), I guess b/c so many people had posted recently saying cheerily that they had booked PIs. I will check out the thread you linked, and also the FB group (another thing that didn't occur to me). Thanks again!

I can't say I have ever used Premier Inn's site, but I have seen that with other booking sites for train tickets and a few other "reservation" type sites.

Basically put in a date, it reads it as either the day before or after (can't remember). I think it has something to do with the way the site calculates the Date/Time and error due to your computers internal clock and your local time zone. It may even vary depending on the time of day you try to purchase, and if it is "today" in Europe, or "tomorrow"

I think I have just gotten into the habit of always verifying, then double checking my dates before hitting the "purchase" button.

Thanks, Paul! Good advice to check carefully.

Mardee, that thread you linked to has a lot of useful advice ... and I also see I am NOT alone. Thanks so much.

(And that thread is from less than two months ago! how did I miss it?! 🤦‍♀️ Sorry, everyone, for cluttering up this forum!)

Not sure if I can 'turn off commenting' on this post, but I have everything I need now, thanks to Mardee's help. I'll search the archives before I post next time!! (classic rookie mistake 🤦‍♀️)

No worries, Laura! Glad it was helpful!

Try the app.

I had a few glitches using the website (not this specific one) but the app works better.

Thanks, Helen! I'll do that. I really want to be able to stay at Premier Inns :-)

We had the same problem until we switched to the app

We had the same problem. Had to call to find out the dates we tried to get were indeed correct in the system, just not reflected right in the returned email confirmation. While on the phone they sent me a confirmation with the corrected dates. Surprised to see in this post that it is still an issue, they said they were in the process of fixing it and that was last fall.

Helen, that's good info—thanks! My stays at PI are already booked for this trip but good to know for the future.

Yes, I booked today actually, after it telling me it was expecting me on different days. I emailed their local office, and messaged through Messenger to their head office, and long story short, they had me on the correct days, and sent a receipt to confirm this. Strangely, I booked two sets of reservations in London at different places, with no problems, last month.

It has been a problem, at least intermittently, since the spring of 2019.

I think one of our other posters suggested changing the time zone on a smartphone or tablet to match London's.

I used Firefox browser on a pc laptop last October while traveling around England to book with several Premier Inn's around England and don't recall having any issues. I usually keep 3 or 4 browsers loaded on my travel laptop to cope with any website glitches.

Yes, the PI people wondered about the difference in time zones too. Since you already tried it with Chrome and it didn't work, it has to be something else (often these online things are designed for Chrome). It is a symptom of the fact that we are going to travel on another continent, with different ways, and means of doing things. This is what makes it all so interesting though, right?

Thanks, everyone, for the replies. It's nice to know I can still book Premier Inns, even if it takes a bit more work. And it's nice to know I'm not alone ;-)

Fortunately, we had no problem booking other hotels for our stay (the Pilgrm near Paddington, a pub/inn in Northamptonshire, a different hotel near Paddington), coach tickets (Nat'l Express), train tickets (London Northwestern Railway), IWM Duxford talks, Tate tickets, West End tickets for a play, and so on. So I was baffled by the PI glitch. But it's good to have more tricks in my arsenal in case this kind of thing happens elsewhere, too.

For what it's worth, I sent a message to the PI on Facebook about this glitch, and got this response back from them. I know this ties in with what people have said before, but thought I would go ahead and post it as an added affirmation.

Hi Mardee, thanks for getting in touch and we're sorry to hear you're experiencing an issue booking on our website. If you're booking from overseas, we would advise changing the time zone on your device to GMT , this will stop the dates from changing.

We hope this helps and if we can help further please get back in touch. Jade

Hi Mardee, thanks for getting in touch and we're sorry to hear you're experiencing an issue booking on our website. If you're booking from overseas, we would advise changing the time zone on your device to GMT , this will stop the dates from changing

This is exactly what we did when having the date issue described by OP. It fixed the problem for us!

Mardee and Barbara – thanks for this! What a simple idea, but one that had never occurred to me. Great to know!

Had the same issue. BTW: Good for you for catching this before your trip!

It's known by the company ( i ended up calling customer service & booked over the phone with our desired hotel.) - ended up costing me $100 of international phone usage to get to the bottom of the issue!

The fixes suggested above work. The company advised a fix is "on the way" ( such as a drop down on their website ) but don't wait for them - use the above fixes.

Good luck!

Thank you, dmjohnson! That is good to know. I also tried calling, but didn't follow up b/c I was afraid of a big phone bill. I appreciate your getting to the bottom of this issue. I hope they do fix it soon!

I am booking a PI in Oxford today, and it's very useful to know I should still use the 'hacks'.

Thanks!

Laura, have fun in Oxford! I loved it and really wish I would have had more than one night there.

I have a young wedding party coming to England this June. We all booked separately on the Premier Inn website and got the wrong dates (off by a day). The app and confirmation email had the correct dates. I panicked just a little until I discovered others had had the same issue.

In a similar vein, not PI but GWR trains. Their app, which is the only way you can get paperless train tickets from them, ONLY works in the UK??? I tell you, it is a different world over there.

On GWR, their App is NOT the only way to paperless tickets. You can also get them from the GWR website.
Payment problems on the GWR website seem to be due to how they apply bank two factor authentication. But as has been said countless times before tickets for any UK train operator can be purchased through any other operator- LNER is the most user friendly for overseas customers, but we know that Northern also works very well, and the Man in Seat 61 swears by Transport for Wales for whatever reason.
Some rail operators also allow payment by Pay Pal, as opposed to credit/debit cards- The same as Vy trains in Norway and Sweden do which is the standard payment work round there.
The other benefit of buying on a website, as opposed to an app, is that you usually get a PDF ticket. So there is no meddling around with needing to authenticate a ticket straight before travel as on many of the apps.