Cancelled our Booking Less Than 2hrs Before Check In
On 22/Nov/2025 i booked a stay in Sandbach for my wife's sisters wedding for the weekend just gone (3rd to the 5th July). We booked this place as it was very close to where my wife's sister lived and we call walk too and from there to help. My wife was maid of honour and needed to be involved from the start of the day. Our car was packed with everything for us and our kids and all of our plans were in place.
On the day of check in, less than 2 hours before check in, Yourstays cancelled our booking with the excuse that there was a ‘maintenance issue’. Booking.com stated the property had been overbooked in their email? This did not add up. Who was lying? All of our weekend plans for the wedding were ruined!. No phone call, just cut and paste emails.
The contact number given to contact the owner of the property on Booking.com did not work! so we could not contact Yourstays directly to discuss, I had to go through the messenger function on Booking.com, which is time consuming and completely reliant on the other person/company replying quickly. So frustrating. We had our 3yr and 6yr with us, a car full of belongings and i had just done a shopping trip of over £80 which was ruined. We had to return home causing a lot of stress.
Before we left, however, we called by the property to find the door open, front window open, yet no one there? We thought this extremely strange.
From then on we had to use Ubers to go too and from to help with the wedding plans that we were heavily involved in. Far from ideal. All in all, we are now approx £160 out of pocket.
The check out time for the property we booked is 10am, why were we contacted at 14:10pm to tell us our booking was cancelled? That's over 4hours we could have had to try and salvage our weekend? And also – I booked this in November last year, to cancel less than 2hrs before check in? So bad.
Contact with Yourstays has been terrible. I replied back to ‘Gail’ on Monday 06/07 morning about what had happened to us - she still has not responded, even with a chase message on Thursday 09/07. We had a couple of messages on the day, nothing else. All very vague. I also wrote the MD directly and have not even received an acknowledgment from him, even though i called the office to make sure they had forwarded my letter to him.
What has angered me the most is throughout the cancellation there has been zero compassion with regards to our 2 children in this process. It was a ‘like it or lump it’ attitude, leaving us in a terrible position. Yourstays had my phone number and are a local company, to not call to discuss or help with matters is so disappointing.