German hotel asking cancellation fee

If you thought the cancellation fee was too high, why did you agree to it?

The hotel may well be entitled to take action to recover the debt you owe it; that would depend on the detail of the local law and the conditions of the contract you have. If you are interested in that, please do go over to law.stackexchange.com for a fuller discussion. Whether the hotel will bother over 99 euros is a different matter, particularly if you are domiciled abroad.

A high cancellation fee is not unusual for a hotel. A guest who cancels a reservation with only eleven days notice represents a real loss to the hotel, unless the hotel can fill that room in the remaining time. The hotel has to protect itself against that possibility.

For future reference, hotels are often happy to accept changes to dates on non-refundable reservations, even if they claim not to be.

Just to address specifically where to find out the cancellation fee for Bookings.com

When selecting the specific room, Bookings.com has an entire column dedicated to conditions. Sometimes there is free cancellation offered up to a specific date (usual some X days before the booking starts)

Sometimes the hotel will offer some rooms with free cancellation, and other rooms without. Sometimes they even offer the same rooms, one with "free" cancellation and the other without, but the one with "free" cancellation might cost more.

You should be able to find the cancellation conditions if the room does not offer free cancellation. If it is not spelled out as free cancellation, you should assume it is not free. If it is not free, it is usually up to the hotel to specify how much the fee is.

The only question is: Was the fee listed in the booking.com reservation? This is always included in the booking confirmation you receive by mail. Please check it there.

If the fee is there, then you are obliged to pay it. You can of course refuse, but I don't think that this is a good idea. It's clearly non-ethical and it can lead into troubles.

If the fee is not there, you should not pay it. Rather you should contact booking.com directly and report the issue to them. While this does not happen in Germany usually, it can happen in some places that the hotel just tries to get some money from you this way. Booking.com staff will let you know whether you need to do anything more; they do care about people being satisfied and they don't like cheating.

In my experience booking European hotels, it is often possible to select between different rates for the same room, with higher rates corresponding to more relaxed cancellation policies. This seems fair, since it lets you choose who bears the risk in the event of a change of travel plans. If you're certain you're going to be there, you can pay less; if you're not, you pay the hotel a bit more to help compensate for the chance that they won't be able to fill a room they expected income from.

It may be that you had this option (and possibly didn't realize it) — or it may just be that this hotel always has a strict policy, which, really, allows them to offer lower rates overall because of that decreased risk. Either way, they are almost certainly within their rights now — you should pay them, and remember to read the fine print next time.

As others have correctly stated, high cancellation fees are quite normal for non-refundable room rates and certainly will be stated in the terms you agreed to at booking. Many places will offer both (cheaper) non-refundable rates and (more expensive) refundable rates. The latter tend to be popular with business travelers whose plans tend to change more frequently, while the former tend to be more popular with tourists who tend to be more price-sensitive and whose plans tend to be somewhat less likely to change.

My advice would be to check booking.com and try to find what terms you actually agreed to. If you can't find it on their website or in confirmation e-mails, etc., you might try calling or e-mailing them to get the terms. They should have records of your reservation and should be able to provide you with the terms. You can also check the local laws in Germany, as those would supersede whatever might be in the hotel's terms, but it seems quite doubtful that those would ban cancellation fees, since a quick search seems to reveal that non-refundable booking rates are quite common there.

11 days out is hardly unreasonable for demanding payment of a cancellation fee. 11 days is generally considered relatively short notice for most travel bookings. As others have correctly pointed out, when you reserve a room, that room is then unavailable for them to rent to someone else. If you then cancel the reservation on short notice, they might not be able to sell the room to anyone else. Cancellation fees or higher refundable rates are common ways for hotels to mitigate the risk of having rooms left empty (and, thus, generating no revenue) due to cancelled reservations.

For future reference this is a tip from an experienced traveler. If you get in a jam like this about a date you can't make, instead of trying to cancel and incurring charges, you change your booking to a date far enough in the future to avoid possible cancellation charges. You thank them profusely apologizing for the inconvenience and hang up. You then call back a little later and cancel the new booking with no charge. It takes a bit of a thick skin but the hotel is not going out of business any time soon and you're the one with the cash flow problem. If their policy forbids changing a booking or adds a charge for that, stay somewhere else.