A Scottish soccer fan travelling for the ongoing Euro 2024 continental soccer tournament in Germany alleged in a series of viral tweets Sunday that using a popular hotel reservation website landed him in a room with a cardboard bed and another that seemed like a disused hospital.
The fan — who went by Rory on X — alleged that the travel website Booking.com put him and his friends in an “absolute shambles of a situation,” according to the first post in the early-morning thread on X. They all arrived at about 8:30 p.m. local time (2:30 p.m. ET) Saturday to find that the place they had booked “was an absolute mess. One of the beds was made out of cardboard and also held together by duck [sic] tape. The 2nd bed was a sofa bed that was broken and disgusting,” Rory alleged.
One of the accompanying photos shows partially lifted bedding revealing a latticework of carton boards which might have been intended to pass for a mattress base.
The posts have collectively garnered nearly 27.5 million views as of the time of this report.
Rory and his friends allegedly spent the next three hours speaking with a total of three customer service representatives, after which Booking.com agreed to defray the men’s expenses for a new place, according to another post. “So at around 12:30am we walked across the city to the new digs,” he continued.
“Once we arrived, we were STUNNED by what we found,” the next post by Rory read. “@bookingcom had sent us to a dungeon that must have been some sort of abandoned medical facility as there was hospital beds and industrial equipment lying around the entrance.”
Videos accompanying the post show a room strewn with pieces of wood, wood chippings and what seem like hospital bed frames. A downward narrow flight of steps gives onto another room with coiled-up corrugated plastic conduits, a vessel holding some powdery substance, various plumbing odds and ends and even an axe.
The axe “looked like something out of a murder film. The whole place had the vibes of a human trafficking horror film,” Rory posted.
The men continued to find “hazard after hazard” and “a serious smell of damp,” Rory further alleged. (RELATED: American Man Dies After Electric Shock Hits Mexican Resort Jacuzzi, Officials Say)
Not normally one to post customer service complaints on twitter but me and the boys are in Germany for @EURO2024 and wait till you see the absolute shambles of a situation @bookingcom put us in last night
— Rory (@RoryB96) June 16, 2024
There was even a malfunctioning front door, Rory alleged. The men then allegedly phoned Booking.com again “and spent 2 hours on the phone only to be told that the only way to resolve the issue would be for us to pay for a new place and invoice them.”
“We have spent over £2000 on accomodation through them for this trip and now they expect us to pay more and wait for a refund when we don’t have the money to pay now,” he claimed.
The men then booked a hotel, again via Booking.com, but claimed they could not afford it without help from the company, according to another post.
“Hopefully this absolutely wild story and videos/pictures make it clear to them how crazy a situation they put us in,” Rory wrote.
Rory tagged various media outlets, including BBC Scotland and the Daily Mail.
Booking.com replied to Rory seeking to review the situation but took flak from other X users.
Support poured in, another of Rory’s posts indicated, and the men secured new four-day lodging apparently without Booking.com’s help.
Having gone through the saga, Rory begged the Scotland National Team for a good performance. “6 points massively required for what we’ve been through. We’re on our knees here,” Rory’s post partly read.
The Scots lost their first game and the first in the ongoing Euro 2024 to the host nation Germany 5-1, with the lone goal to Scotland’s name in the shellacking accidentally gifted to them by German defense ace Antonio Rüdiger in the 87th minute.
Scotland, sitting at the bottom of Group A, will play second-placed Switzerland Wednesday.
