It's simple. Booking.com will fuck you over and have all sorts of fine print to cover themselves. However I can simply recommend if they do something like cancel a confirmed booking don't bother contacting customer support. Simply get on Facebook and start swearing and causing a huge fuss till they sort it out. They will tell you 100 times that they are very sorry and they would love to help but they just can't and they feel horrible about it all but "the policy" forbids them doing anything that could smell like genuine customer service. Simply raise the temperature of agitation just as this customer did and eventually booking.com will buckle.
I had exactly the same case. I had a non cancellable room booked for an event and a week or two before the event it was cancelled and booking tried to claim they were not an agent, they were not part of the contract, that they cared very deeply. Customer support in English cost 1€ per minute and they kept putting me on hold. Eventually I just went to Facebook and asked GPT to start incrementally generating more and more offensive posts direct at their social media account. It's much cheaper than their customer support line and it actually reaches someone who can do something.
I had exactly the same case. I had a non cancellable room booked for an event and a week or two before the event it was cancelled and booking tried to claim they were not an agent, they were not part of the contract, that they cared very deeply. Customer support in English cost 1€ per minute and they kept putting me on hold. Eventually I just went to Facebook and asked GPT to start incrementally generating more and more offensive posts direct at their social media account. It's much cheaper than their customer support line and it actually reaches someone who can do something.