In the spirit of sharing terrible airbnb experiences, I recently had to endure Booking.coms immense incompetence. I was staying in Tarifa on the southern tip of Andalusia, and was driving up to Seville for a dinner, and dinners in Spain are late so I used Booking to get a room in the centre.

Turns out the hotel room I got from Booking was actually a VRBO booking (like airbnb), and the actual apartment was managed by that management company, so I had to attack both top down from Booking, and from the company side to try to get hold of someone at all.

Navigating phone queues at three different companies finally somehow got me the name of the apartment owner, and eventually we managed to get hold of him. He denied having any relation at all to VRBO, which is strange since they had his number. The room was of course taken, and he got angrier.

So now it's 11 on a Saturday, and the entire world seemed to have decided to go to Seville, there wasn't a single room available anywhere, nor back in Tarifa. Closest I could find was some boring resort hotel in Huelva, two hours north, away from Tarifa, close to Portugal.

Got there at 1, getting really sleepy, turns out it was on the very edge of town, across the bridge and along winding coastal roads for another 45 minutes. When I eventually got there, the night porter was very friendly, but check-in took 40 minutes, almost passed out at reception.

Huelva was very cool though, some amazing sand banks and cool swimming places with almost no people. And after only 5 more phone calls or so, they did eventually refund me.

Before meeting my friend, I went by the room to drop off my stuff, but nobody answered the doorbell. There was a number for an apartment management company, so I wrote that down. This was around 9 o clock, and I spent the entire dinner trying to sort things out.