The Booking.com hotel and accommodation booking service has suspended the provision of services in Kherson and Zaporizhia regions, according to a letter sent to partners on Wednesday.

"Currently, we are facing such great operational difficulties in your region that today we cannot continue to work in it. Therefore, we have made the difficult decision to suspend the provision of Booking.com services in Kherson and Zaporizhia regions," the letter reads, the text of which is available to Interfax-Ukraine.

As reported, with the outbreak of war in Ukraine, Booking.com left the Russian and Belarusian markets and canceled the 15% service fee for Ukrainian hotel partners as a gesture of support.

The owner of the Admiral Hotel in the temporarily occupied Kyrylivka (Zaporizhia region) Denys Katiukha considers the decision of Booking.com regarding the territories temporarily not controlled by Ukraine to be correct.

"After the start of the war, Booking.com stopped working in Russia and Belarus. However, hotels and recreation centers in the temporarily occupied territories were not disconnected from the service. We saw not only propaganda stories from the occupied bases, but also reviews on booking," he told the Interfax-Ukraine.

In his opinion, it would be more logical to remove the temporarily occupied territories from the service, but this is technologically difficult, given the changing front line.

The general manager of Khortitsa Palace (Zaporizhia) Fedir Chanev told the agency that the bulk of bookings in 2022-2023 went through the hotel's website.

"Booking.com is an important tool, it generated 7-8% of bookings, mostly for the weekend," he said.

As one of the alternatives for finding accommodations that customers will now use, Chanev named the domestic service hotels24. To date, it offers 45 options for Zaporizhia and three for Kherson.

The Booking.com platform is a subsidiary of Booking Holdings. As of December 31, 2022, Booking.com offered accommodation booking services for approximately 2.7 million properties, including 400,000 hotels, motels, and resorts, and 2.3 million homes and apartments in more than 220 countries.