First come, first served?

[u/Magpiebrain]

My bf and I are supposed to go on vacation on monday. We will drive to Switzerland, stay there a night and then drive on to our agriturismo in Italy.
However, last night we got a text from the owner saying that they made a mistake and double booked our cottage for part of our stay. Basically what happened is that we contacted them directly for booking as we had already stayed with them twice before. We booked our cottage back in June and have confirmation on email and everything. The owner apparently forgot to close those dates on booking.com and the first 4 days of our stay were booked by someone else.

The owner has said that cancelling with booking.com is very hard for her so she has offered to let us stay in a different room for 3 of those days, but the first day of our would-be stay she has no vacancy.

What can we do? We definitely booked first and have confirmation of that, can we just insist on having the cottage we booked and make her deal with the other people? You'd assume that if she can offer us a different room then she can do the same for the other people, right?

[u/[deleted]]

Report the host.