Stayforlong Uses Misleading Popups On Their Booking Platform

On July 19–20, I booked a room at the Holiday Inn Express in Wiesbaden, Germany through Stayforlong. During the online payment, the site requested a Visa card payment which in Germany is processed via the SecureGo system. This process can take some time to finalize. While the SecureGo payment was still being completed, Stayforlong displayed a popup saying “Oops! Something went wrong!”. At that moment, my transaction was in fact still finalizing, but the popup led me to believe that my payment had failed. Because I trusted the information on the Stayforlong website, I assumed that the payment had not gone through and immediately booked the same room again. Later at the hotel reception I was informed that I had a double booking, which is how I discovered that the first payment had actually been successful. As a result, I was charged twice for the same night and ended up with an unwanted extra reservation. The extra, unnecessary booking cost me 64 euros. I contacted Stayforlong customer service by phone and via multiple emails and messages within about 20 minutes of learning about the double booking. Despite my detailed explanations, I repeatedly received the same standard reply stating that they are sorry but not responsible, and that only their “providers” decide about refunds. They have refused to refund the 64 euros for the second, unwanted booking. In my view, this situation was caused by a technical fault and poor design of the Stayforlong booking system. The misleading “Oops! Something went wrong!” popup is not synchronized with the SecureGo payment process and can appear while the payment is still being processed, which naturally leads customers to believe their payment has failed. I am convinced that this problem can affect other consumers as well. Stayforlong’s technical team should be able to review the transaction logs, including when popups are triggered, and clearly see what happened in my case. I request that Stayforlong investigate this incident in their systems, acknowledge the misleading popup behavior and refund the 64 euros charged for the unnecessary second booking. I also expect them to correct this technical issue so that other customers are not misled by incorrect popup messages during SecureGo payments in the future.