Scotland fans fume over 'nightmare' accommodation 'out of horror film'
A Scotland football fan has told how he and three pals were left fuming during a trip to Euro 2024 in Germany after being sent to an "abandoned dungeon" by travel agency booking.com.
Rory Bradley, from Glasgow, said the accommodation the group were sent to in the middle of the night after problems with their initial property was like "something straight out of a horror movie".
He described how they found "abandoned hospital beds" and items including an axe among "industrial equipment that could have been used to hurt someone".
This was replacement accommodation following several hours of phone calls to booking.com advisers after they arrived at an apartment to find cardboard beds held together with duct tape and a "mouldy, dirty" sofa bed "falling apart".
The four men travelled on Saturday to the district of Düren, west of Cologne, where Scotland will play Switzerland on Wednesday in their second Euros group game after a calamitous opening 5-1 defeat to Germany on Friday.
After arriving at their booked apartment around 20:00, Mr Bradley, 28, said the property was "just an absolute disaster".
"As soon as we opened the door, there was a mould patch in the bottom left of the wall," he told BBC Scotland's Drivetime programme.
"We turned the corner into the room and one of the beds was made out of cardboard. It was held together with duct tape. The other one was a sofa bed which was falling apart and mouldy, dusty and dirty. We thought ‘we can’t stay here’."
They called booking.com, one of the largest online travel agencies, and spent three hours speaking to three different advisers.
"People we spoke to initially were trying to help us and find us a place," Mr Bradley said.
Around midnight they were eventually told the company had found them another property on the other side of Düren.
"The one we were going to wasn’t online but by that stage we thought, ‘we’ll take anything’," he said. "We were just desperate for a bed at that point because it had been a long travel day and we needed to get somewhere to sleep."
But worse was to follow after making their way to the second property.
“It was like nightmare fuel. It was honestly like something out of a horror film about human trafficking or something," said Mr Bradley, who posted a video and pictures of what he called a "dungeon".
“It was as bad as it could possibly be. We went through the gate and underneath a kind of mezzanine or old storage locker. There were abandoned hospital beds, abandoned equipment and rubble and planks of wood lying all the over the place.
"You go down a big flight of stairs and it was so creepy. You opened the front door and within six feet we found an axe, a massive big drill bit and lots of different industrial equipment that could have been used to hurt someone.
“We are four big guys and we were scared straight away. That could have been a more vulnerable group of young people or girls or women. We were thinking ’this place is really dodgy’. It was really big and really spooky.
"All the lights were off, so we were turning each light on as we went down. There were exposed wires and pipes in the living space. We thought ‘Nah, we need to get back on the phone and get out of this place’."
After phoning booking.com again, Mr Bradley said this time the agency was unwilling to help fund alternative accommodation, "even though they paid for us to go to that dungeon".
The group eventually booked a hotel in the early hours of the morning before finding a hostel for the remainder of their four-day stay in Cologne, "which cost double the original price of the apartment we were supposed to be staying in."
Although booking.com have issued a refund for the initial purchase of the apartment, Mr Bradley said he and his friends are currently over £1,000 out of pocket.
"We are waiting on invoices getting sent across to booking.com and we don’t know how long that will take or how long we will be waiting to get our money back," he added. "They will probably need to do some kind of investigation.
“We are very lucky we have got good family and friends around us who have helped us out with a bit of dough to keep us going, so the trip is saved for the time being.”
A statement from booking.com said: "This is not the experience we would want for anyone booking a stay on our platform and are in touch with the customer, so we can look into what happened and to make sure they are properly supported."