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Booking.com Problem with International (All?) New Bookings from Turkey

I hope this situation will be resolved before it affects anyone (including me--my current hotel reservation runs out on the morning of September 20). If you're connecting from Turkey, Booking.com has a pop-up announcement saying it's only possible for customers in Turkey to book international properties at the moment. Actually, it's not letting me enter domestic destinations at all and international destinations aren't working well, either; there's less information than usual being shown on the list of available hotels. Basically, the website is pretty much broken if you're connecting from Turkey.

It's inconvenient for me, because I plan about 20 more days in Turkey, and I don't want to extend at my current hotel. If the issue isn't resolved soon, I'll have to do my initial research on a different website. The horror! I really like the booking.com reviews.

I don't know whether a VPN would allow me to avoid this problem, but that's too much hassle for me.

Posted by
2746 posts

That is good to know, since I will be in Turkey next week but hopefully I won't have to change any of my reservations. Are you using your phone or computer for searching? Curious if the booking app has the same problem.

And though you don't want to mess with a VPN, if you have Google it's relatively inexpensive for a one subscription ($1.99/month, $19.99/year) to Google One which comes with VPN.

Posted by
28189 posts

I was on the website via my Android tablet rather than the app, but the wording of the apology to customers left me with no doubt that the app is also affected. There was, for one thing, no suggestion to use the app instead.

I appreciate the suggestions about viable VPNs but hope I'll be able to work around the problem without going that route. I tried a VPN on my 2015 trip, for security reasons, and I couldn't connect to the internet at all. I'm easily frustrated by things like that.