Booking.com deletes Serbian host for banning Jews

After receiving many complaints, the company said it had “terminated the listing” due to the owners’ discriminatory practices.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Global travel reservation site Booking.com has deleted a Serbian host from its website for cancelling a reservation once he found out the visitors were Jews.

Two weeks ago, a pair of Israelis were booking a bed and breakfast in the southern town of Sjenica when the owner asked where they were from.

When they answered “Israel,” the owner immediately responded, “Sorry, Jews are not welcome in our apartment. Please cancel the reservation. Thanks.”

According to the daughter of a friend of theirs who heard their tale, Aya Bochman, the Israelis were “forced to list ‘Jews are not welcome’ as the reason for cancellation,” which, she commented, “is a HUMILIATING process NO ONE should go through.”

Asking on her social media for people to share the story and complain to booking.com and protest their listing properties of people who demonstrate “shameful, antisemitic discrimination against guests,” Bochman said she had received no reply from customer service.

Others who wrote, however, did receive satisfactory replies from the company.

One man wrote to her that he had addressed his complaint to the company’s Human Rights Department, which wrote back, “Booking.com does not tolerate discrimination of any kind. After assessing this specific case, we did indeed terminate this listing from our platform.”

The Betzalmo human rights organization took at least partial credit for the company’s ban.

CEO Shay Glick told World Israel News that he wrote to Booking.com several times, insisting that the Serb’s actions had violated the company’s anti-discrimination rules, which include a ban on even making antisemitic remarks, let alone refusing to serve paying clients.

Glick was gratified that persistence paid off, tying the whole incident to Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is being commemorated today (Monday).

“Eighty-five years after the line, ‘Jews not welcome here’ returns, and without any shame at all, people have no problem saying it again, in exactly the same way they said it to Jews in Germany, Poland and other countries,” Glick said.

“We saw then where this led and we cannot allow it to happen again,” he continued. “I’m happy that booking.com removed the properties from the website, and I call on all other companies to act accordingly.”

“This is a pandemic,” he added. “All international bodies must understand that antisemitism is Enemy No. 1 of the enlightened world…. Anyone who acts in an antisemitic way, making calls against Jews or Zionists, or does any violent or hateful act, should be dealt with unforgivingly. If we all work together, we’ll win.”

AntisemitismBetzalmoBooking.comDiscriminationSerbia