Hotel Joli & Booking.com

[Barquentine]

Booking.com’s Terms & Conditions state that, for a ‘non-refundable’ room a property may cancel your reservation or charge you the full cost of your reservation for a no-show. Booking.con warns customers to check the property’s own terms and conditions for its cancellation policies.
Does this mean that if you turn up at your hotel one day late, the hotel can cancel your entire reservation and take full payment for the full period of your reservation? There are no terms & conditions on website of Hotel Joli in Florence, Italy.
‘No show’ is not defined on the Booking.com website. The ‘fine print’ & FAQ pages for Hotel Joli on Booking.com’s platform do not answer these questions.
We were delayed one day by a flight cancellation. We kept Hotel Joli, Florence informed by email throughout (they replied to our first email but later emails conveniently went to their ‘spam’ folder).Hotel Joli cancelled our entire booking. We had a peculiar email from Booking.com with only two options to reply with – buttons labelled “I stayed at the property” or “I didn’t stay at the property”.
When we arrived, Chiara, the hotel owner was so apologetic. Booking.com had made this mistake many times before – telling her to cancel guests’ bookings. She found us an alternative hotel for the two nights she had relet our rooms, assured us she would only charge for the one night we had missed, and said we could stay with her the last night for free. In fact, Chiara and Hotel Joli actually charged us for all four nights. She told us to deal with Booking.com if we had any complaints. Booking.com told us to sort it out with the hotel. Booking.con explained that the last night which we had paid for was ‘free’ in the sense that Hotel Joli could have charged us twice for it but chose to waive these additional charges.
We pointed out that hotel properties whose activities they facilitate via their website are entitled either to take full payment or cancel our booking. They remain defiant and dismissive and explain our contract is with the hotel and we have to sort it out with Hotel Joli. They tell us to refer to the property’s terms and conditions. Where are these?
We have asked Booking.com many times to tell us where to find Hotel Joli’s terms and conditions, or send us a link or a copy since there are no terms and conditions on that hotel’s website (though they have had time since we started this complaint to draft and post some). If Booking.com could point us to where it says a hotel can both take your money & cancel your rooms then we might have given up by now. On the contrary, Booking.com have replied that they have approached the property a number of times on our behalf but Hotel Joli refuses to refund monies wrongfully taken from our bank account. These approaches may be recognition that there are grounds for Booking.com to try to assist us.
Does anyone else have similar experiences and does anyone know of regulations or statutes governing the responsibilities of intermediaries (Booking.con claim they are not responsible for the property’s actions, they are merely intermediaries). We emphasised that Booking.com is facilitating potentially fraudulent activity but their approach is to send automated, anodyne responses expecting that we will eventually give up.
What would be the best way to disseminate our experiences as widely as possible to warn other travellers to avoid the fleecing we have experienced. The wry observation of the irony that all this happened in the hometown of Macchiavelli and that Chiara is the spitting image of Cosimo de’Medici has not mitigated our disappointment or financial loss.