Dissapointing, Embarassing experiance

This was the first time i had used booking.com. I booked a night away in London with my girlfriend for a short christmas break, we booked this through booking.com two months previous. We made the 3 hour journey down from the west midlands only to find on arrival that booking.com had cancelled our booking with the hotel due to our card being refused. This would not of been a problem if booking.com had communicated with myself and notified me of this problem! Instead myself and my girlfriend were left stranded in London with no reservations!! We had originally booked a superior room but were then left with no other choice but to pay the day rate which added an extra £100 to our original booking fee for a standard room and no breakfast, this all happened within a busy reception area and caused a great deal of embarrassment! Once we had made alternative arrangements for another room we tried contacting booking.com to find out what had gone wrong, I finally got through to one of the operators, who seemed very helpful at first and assured me he would resolve the issue and call me back within half an hour. 45 minutes later I decided to call back to chase things up only to be told the operator i spoke to previously was not available! I then had to proceed to explain my issue to a completely different operator. I had been in London for two hours at this point and was still no closer to an explanation. This operator was very unhelpful yet again, telling me he was not able to get hold of the manager of the hotel to resolve the issue. He then advised me that the only other option left for me would be to try and get hold of the manager of the hotel myself! For him to suggest that I must go and find the hotel manager is a COMPLETE joke! What kind of company asked the customer to resolve there own complaint! This would of not even happened if they had contacted me in the first place. Finally 3 hours and a hefty phone bill later booking.com managed to honour the original booking fee. But never the less the whole experience has left a very bitter taste behind and a disappointing, embarrassing experience as a whole. I would not recommend booking.com to anyone looking for high standards of customer service as I said above this was my first time with booking.com and will most defiantly be the last.