Your Downing Street Booking Includes Security, But Not Admission

Imagine the review: excellent central London location, unusually attentive security, disappointing attitude toward letting you inside.

Researchers at Which? managed to create a fake Booking.com offer for a stay at 10 Downing Street and accept payment through it. This was a consumer-group test, not an invitation from the prime minister. The distinction might have been useful somewhere before checkout.

You can see the attraction of the property. Famous door. Historic surroundings. People permanently stationed outside to ensure your booking never becomes a stay.

The Guardian reports that EU regulators opened an investigation Wednesday into whether Booking.com has done enough to prevent fraudulent listings and phishing scams. The inquiry does not establish a violation. Booking.com says security and trust are priorities and that it is working with regulators and law enforcement.

For an accommodation site, the Downing Street experiment suggests a useful new filter: the people inside know this is a hotel.

Less famous properties are also being fraudulently listed, with customers discovering the problem on arrival. That moves a surprising amount of the verification process into the holiday itself. Passport, charger, toothbrush, delicate conversation with a stranger about whether their house is your room.

The regulators are also examining whether the site makes clear when accommodation providers have paid for greater visibility. These are separate questions, but together they give the traveler a demanding research assignment: is this place being recommended because it's good, because someone paid, or because nobody has yet told the people who live there?

Booking.com claims 28 million accommodation listings. It is a magnificent range of choice. Once you've selected the dates, the price and the location, all that remains is to establish whether you and the building are taking the same holiday.