Hotels.com are dead to me

I’ve just returned from a short (amazing) trip to Hong Kong. Being a web nerd (or *ahem* internet guru) of course we booked everything online - flights, hotels, research, day spas, etc.

We booked 5 nights through Hotels.com a week before we left, received our confirmation email and printed it out, everything was hunky dory.

We arrived at our hotel in Hong Kong at about midnight after a 9 hour flight to be told that the reservation had been cancelled by hotels.com the day after we booked it. After a lot of confusion we managed to sort out a room with the hotel and pay for it to the hotel directly (a lot more than we had to pay on hotels.com too).

When we called Hotels.com the next day, they tried to blame us for the cancellation! They first said that there was a problem with the credit card, although changed their mind when we told them that the girl who owned the credit card works for the bank and knows straight away about any problems. Then they said we must have cancelled it ourselves, although they had no record of that.

Anyway to cut an enormously long and boring story short, we eventually sorted it out - it turns out they were having a problem with their payment gateway accepting Amex.

My biggest gripe is the complete lack of communication at any point from Hotels.com. Even though they cancelled our booking (due to a problem with their own payment system, not our card) we never received an email or a phone call - we only had our confirmation email saying that we were booked in.

When we found out about the cancellation (at midnight) we sent an email for them to call us immediately. Nothing. We had to chase them and chase them to get through to someone who could help, even when we said we had no hotel and we were stuck in a typhoon.

Their website still shows them as accepting Amex today, even though they told us they’d been having problems with Amex for weeks.

I understand that that screw-ups happen occasionally but Hotels.com really need to get better at communication. When a screw-up happens, get right on it and empower the call centre to actually fix the problem (we were put on hold about 15 times so the rep could speak to his manager). And too much communication is better than no communication - if they had just sent us an email when they cancelled our booking, none of this would have happened, we could have been alerted to a problem and fixed it.

So I guess the moral of the story is, be very careful if you’re booking with hotels.com - you might turn up after a long flight to find you don’t have a hotel.

This post is tagged under: customer experience