bookings.com

Hi Suzanne,

I haven't used that particular site, but it's ALWAYS a good idea to personally confirm with the hotels no matter who you book through. Saves you a very unpleasant surprised late at night/early in the morning when you are jetlagged.

Case in point: I self-booked directly with a B&B in Italy several months before our trip. Everything was agreed on and confirmed via email. A month or so before we were due to leave, I emailed all of our hotel reservations to confirm, and the B&B had either lost our reservation or double booked, and didn't have a room for us. The hostess was very apologetic, and was able to guide us to a friend of hers who rented us a small apartment at a good price, but it was still stressful when it happened, and I'd hate to think how bad it would have been if we had arrived with no place to go.

Over the years I've booked about 20 different hotel reservations from booking.com, no problems-I've never confirmed directly with the hotel. It's a dutch company which originally only did hotels for Amsterdam, but is now one of the fastest growing travel sites in the world.

Thanks for your reply to Suzanne. I recently did a few hotel reservations with Booking.com for the first time for my upcoming trip to France and UK, and wasn't very confident until I read your reply.
I feel much better now. Gwen.

I used them to book hotels in Amsterdam this summer. When I had to change one of them, it was very easy to do on their website and no penalty like I have paid with expedia. I also received a email directly from the hotel telling me that they had received my cancellation.

I booked almost all our hotels through this site, our trip is not until next month so don't know yet if there will be any problems, but the bookings were easy, I found some of the best prices on any site, and they had no penalty to cancel up until 3 days before. I actually booked a few places that said 1 room left, until I could confer with my group and then cancelled the one we didn't want. I had a change to another reservation and both booking.com and the B&B emailed me confirming the change. So seems legit to me.