Double booking's galore at Booking.com

I had booked my accommodation about 5 days before we arrived at the WEX 1 apartment. On Monday the 8th July my wife and I arrived at the WEX 1 apartment around 12:15AM due to us having to pack up our home as we are emigrating to the UK in a few weeks and were going to be in Durban with her family for the next week or so and only flew out on Wednesday the 10th of July.

On arrival, we were greeted by a security guard at the front desk who had no clue who we were, or had any clue if we even had a booking and couldn’t do anything until we showed him our booking email. I was able to give him the room number and the person we had booked with, and still, it wasn’t enough. My phone had died as I got out of our Uber and couldn’t access my emails via my laptop or wife's phone due to security steps that needed my phone active.

Eventually, I was able to charge my phone to 1% with the guard's charger and then showed him the email. Finally, at around 12:40AM We were then handed the keys and started to wrangle all of our luggage towards our room.

With our room in sight, I asked my wife to go ahead and open the door. Tired, stressed and emotional after months of packing up our home and dealing with a lot of different emotions we could finally relax and enjoy cape town for one last day after a peaceful sleep……

When my wife opened up the door a gentleman and his girlfriend were busy watching tv, the shock was clearly visible on both my wife's face and his when he came out of the room asking how we got a key to his room. After a long discussion and pointless calls to Josh who we were told via email made our bookings my wife and this gentleman decided to head back down to security while I tried to charge my phone again and find out what had gone wrong.

My wife and the other guest had told me that security didn’t know what the issue was and told my wife that we would have to leave. Being 1:00AM in the morning in an area that is far from decent or safe with 8 fully loaded bags my wife asked if there was a manager or someone higher up we could speak too, the security manager was incredibly rude to my wife and only after the other guest actually lost his cool with the guard did he eventually come upstairs to see my booking confirmation. At this point, I had no clue what had been happening downstairs and met the rude and uninterested head of security myself.

After he had seen my email confirmation on my phone he finally changed his attitude and said he would make a plan for us. We were taken to another room that he said he would first need to go into and check that no one was in it?!?! Why does security have no idea who is checking in or if rooms are occupied or not?

With the room finally cleared we were told that we could only stay for the night and would have to be out early in the morning.

At this point, I was pretty ****ed off beyond tired and sent an email to the booking agent via the link on the booking.com site telling them what had happened and that I didn’t want to stay the night and would expect my money back. After my wife had broken down with tiredness we eventually decided to just stay the night and leave in the morning. We only got to bed at 3:00AM.

This night ended up having a knock-on effect that ruined our last day in Cape Town and had us crawling to bed yesterday.

I haven’t had a single reply from anyone at the WEX 1 apartments and want my money back. This is also not the first time that i've had an issue with a booking through booking.com