Is there anything wrong with booking a partner offer?

It's always the safest to book directly with the provider (airline or hotel). It's a clear contract between you and the provider and it's quite clear who is repsonsible.

Booking through an OTA (Online Travel Agent like Booking, Expedia, Agoda, Travelocity etc.) complicates customer service. OTA's terms and conditions say "talk to the provider" and the provider's terms and conditions say "talk to the OTA".

So booking directly is in most case the best choice unless the OTA is substantially cheaper and/or direct booking is not available or particularly cumbersome.

Most reputable OTAs work decently but you can run into snags if customer service is required.

A "partner offer" adds a another 4th party to the arrangement which complicates things even further. Personally I would stay away from that. It may work fine, but if you need to change or cancel, things will get murky.

Against my better judgment, I decided to try booking a "partner booking" on Booking.com in Germany. I am well aware of how hotel bookings work in general from being in the industry, but I was morbidly curious. I would recommend strongly against ever making a partner booking.

Booking.com displayed an almost but not quite "too good to be true" suite available, reasonably clearly marked as a partner booking. This was priced at about the same level as their regular rooms (~200 EUR), so I thought there was some chance this was either a last minute deal or a prebought inventory situation. It was neither. The confirmation I got from Booking was extremely sparse and just had a confirmation number, the hotel name, and not much else. Notably missing was the room type.

When I got to the hotel, the hotel had a booking for a regular room. The front desk showed me the reservation they had received, and it was for a regular room. Fine, whatever, at least they had a reservation and I had a room, which is all I really needed.

Everything really went to hell when I tried to check out. The hotel owner claimed I hadn't paid. I showed her my credit card statement showing that Booking.com had charged me earlier. She showed me her hotel management software showing that she had no records of being paid by Booking. We eventually had to get a Booking representative on speakerphone to tell the hotel manager that Booking would pay her...eventually. She was not particularly pleased about this but did let us go. Dealing with all this with a train to catch was somewhat stressful, but I had budgeted some extra time because I thought something terrible might happen.

Throughout all this Booking support was mostly useless. First level support staff barely understood about partner bookings at all and tried to tell me I didn't have a reservation because the confirmation number for partner bookings is in a different format. After multiple phone calls I managed to walk one of their staff through the booking process to show that they were still displaying the suite as available on their website, when it clearly wasn't. That eventually convinced them that something was wrong and they promised to get back to me about refunds. That was a month ago and I have received no contact. Booking also has a method to request an invoice that is supposed to arrive within a month - that has also not arrived.

I tried going through my credit card company to chargeback part of the bill. However, since Booking's confirmation email for partner bookings is so sparse, there's nothing on there that shows the room type, so my credit card company couldn't do anything. If for some reason you make a partner booking after reading this story, I'd recommend making a video of the process so you have some proof for future chargebacks.

The kicker for all this is that the "partner" involved is Agoda - which is owned by Booking.com.