Originally Posted by
venturi95
In hindsight, I agree that the service is legit and usually reliable. I have no idea why I could not book a room online but instead had to call a toll-free phone number to use their service. I think this was an outlier and "something fishy" was definitely going on.
I'm using windows (10 or 11, it's old) and Spectrum is my ISP. The very first search result on Bing is Booking dot com. I went to the same Motel where we stayed and went through the motions of getting a room.
Not saying it happened here, but one thing I am on the lookout for is scam sites pretending to be familiar sites. So I am careful with those types of links. For example, I won't click on a link that says it is my bank - instead I have the URL and go direct.
At the point at which it tells me booking.com but the link doesn't seem to go there... before I called, I probably would have gone directly to booking.com (or expedia.com or airbnb.com, etc). This is because I've used these sites enough that it is really bizarre if a link to them doesn't seem to work. Having an older windows shouldn't matter other than virus protection getting out of date (including the browser).