Travel App Reviews 2026: Support Complaints Up 15%, Service Praise Down 22% Across 50,497 Google Play Reviews

Usually something that went wrong after the booking, not inside the app. Take one review posted on 12 February 2026. A traveler had paid in full for a room through OYO. At 2:00 PM the hotel demanded an extra early check-in charge and wouldn’t hand over the room until it was paid. The traveler waited more than an hour on customer support, got moved to a second property, and was asked for the same charge there. Exhausted, they paid it.

233 other users marked that review helpful. Only 12 of the 50,497 reviews in our dataset reached that many, and among the 15,166 negative ones it ranks 6th. Hundreds of strangers read it and recognised their own trip.

That is the pattern this report follows. Across 13 travel apps and nine months of 2026, the complaints that dominate are about what happens when money is stuck and nobody answers: refunds, unreachable support, and bookings the property won’t honor. And on the measures we tracked, that gap got wider through the year.

On what reviewers write, yes. Negative reviews complaining about customer service went from 6.06% of all reviews in January–March to 6.95% in July–September, a 14.6% rise. Over the same months, positive reviews praising helpful service fell from 2.35% to 1.83%, a 22.4% drop. Both moves are statistically significant (chi-square, p < 0.01).

The two signals come from different people. One is counted in angry reviews, the other in happy ones. When complaints about service rise while compliments about service fall, our read is that service quality across these apps is slipping, not just the mood of one crowd.

The overall mood follows. Excluding Airbnb, 1–2★ reviews were 29.8% of the total in Q1 and 32.2% in Q3. Month by month the line is noisy, with a spring peak in April and May, but no month after March dropped back to January’s level.

Refunds and customer service, by a wide margin, not bugs. Of 15,166 negative reviews, 21.7% describe a refund or cancellation problem and 19.9% describe a customer-service failure. Bugs, crashes and a slow app come to 7.0%. Travel apps mostly fail in operations, not in code.

It produces the angriest reviews in the dataset. Bookings refused at the property, overbooked rooms and reservations the hotel had no record of appear in only 2.0% of negative reviews (308). Yet 98.1% of them give one star, the highest share of any category, and they run 66 words at the median against 25 for negative reviews overall. Reviewers describe arriving late at night, being turned away, and then trying to reach support from the lobby.

Not the most common, but the one other users agree with most. Hidden fees and price changes appear in 4.3% of negative reviews. Those reviews average 5.72 thumbs-up, nearly three times the 2.00 average for negative reviews. Two of the most-upvoted complaints in the dataset ask for the same thing:

The Booking.com review is the second most-upvoted negative review of the 15,166. Price surprises are the complaint readers most often recognise from their own bookings.

Mostly because their money got stuck, not because they found fraud. When a negative review mentions money (a payment, a charge, a refund, a fee), it calls the platform a scam, fraud or theft 20.3% of the time. When it doesn’t, the figure is 8.2%. That is 2.5 times the rate, across 5,367 and 9,799 reviews.

Bad reviews rarely describe a single failure. Of the 7,066 negative reviews our rules could categorise, 1,871 (26.5%) describe two or more problems. The most common pairing is a refund problem plus a support failure, in 1,004 reviews. The sequence reviewers describe is the same across apps: a booking or payment goes wrong, the customer can’t get help, the money stays stuck, and the conversation becomes a refund fight.

Most booking apps reply to nearly every review, some within minutes. Trip.com and OYO have a median reply time of about five minutes. Agoda and Traveloka reply in under half an hour. Booking.com replies to 98.6% of its reviews, at a median of 5.6 hours.

Speed is not resolution, and many replies are templates. Booking.com answered 3,154 negative reviews with 184 distinct texts. One of them appears under 1,094 negative reviews, and 287 of those were complaints about customer service itself. The reply tells them to contact customer service.

Personalised replies can carry the same problem. Traveloka addresses reviewers by name, but 38 of its replies to negative reviews say it was “unable to find any case matching your description in our system” and ask the customer to email support. They sit under refund disputes, failed bookings and login errors alike. The customer has already said support failed them; the reply sends them back to support.

Four of the 13 apps leave almost every review unanswered. Among the apps that do reply, complaint type barely matters: they answer 98.1% of negative reviews, and every complaint category sits between 97.9% and 100%. The real divide is between apps, not topics.

That matters most for Airbnb. Login and identity-verification problems make up 10.5% of its negative reviews, nearly three times the average, and those reviewers are often locked out of the app. Airbnb replied publicly to 5 of its 9,800 reviews.

In this dataset, Agoda: 73.6% of its 4,308 reviews are 1–2★, with an average rating of 2.03. tiket.com (65.2%) and Access by KAI (53.7%) follow. Tripadvisor has the lowest negative share at 12.2% and the highest average rating, 4.41. These shares describe the reviews we collected, not each app’s overall Play Store rating.

Because the complaint follows the business model. Apps that take the customer’s money and hand the trip to a third party (hotels, airlines, hosts) collect refund and support complaints. Apps that only search, or sell a single product they run themselves, fail somewhere else.

Booking platforms such as Agoda, Booking.com and Traveloka carry the refund-and-support burden: 25.7% and 24.1% of their negative reviews. Access by KAI sells its own train tickets, so there is no third party to blame and no refund chain to break; 30.6% of its complaints are about the app itself, some written in Indonesian despite the English filter (“lemot”, “sering error”). OYO’s signature is the room: 8.0% of its negative reviews say the property didn’t match the listing or wasn’t clean, about four times the average. Skyscanner and Tripadvisor don’t hold the customer’s booking, and refund and support complaints make up about 5% of their negative reviews each.

The data points to five moves, ordered by how much trust each one protects. Each one can be tracked month by month in the same review data used here.

Disclosure: Intura builds social-listening and sentiment-tracking tools, the category the month-by-month monitoring above falls into. Read the recommendations with that in mind.