Hotels.com Expedia.com Horrible, Potentially Costly Hotels.com experience and Wretched Customer Service

Hi - I wanted to share my story because I’m absolutely gobsmacked. Hotels.com has the most horrible reviews across every  social platform available, from Facebook to the Better Business Bureau to Tripadvisor. I wanted to share my story in case it resonates or can help with a complaint.

Hotels.com messed up a trip I took last May and it just tried to mess up another that I had booked for September. Last trip, they arbitrarily cancelled my booking, and didn’t tell be that the hotel I had booked had become a HOMELESS SHELTER.

They did this day-of arrival. In the instance of the first trip, and trying to fix that -  I was on the phone with them for 2 hours.   On my upcoming trip, they arbitrarily ADDED an additional booking (so now I had TWO different bookings for the same date)… and also additional rooms to the actual booking I had MADE...

So I had TWO rooms at the property I was going to stay at, for a total of FOUR beds… AND, I would have been on the hook for an extra $400 on check-in day, PLUS the payment for the OTHER BOOKING, which was about $250… Over $650 what I was going to pay for the one room I had actually booked.  

If I hadn’t called the hotel I was going to stay at directly, I would have been in hot water… Multiple calls to customer service resulted in them literally gaslighting me to believe that I had made these changes when I absolutely hadn’t.     

When I emailed corporate HQ to complain and still got the same stock answers that I was getting everywhere else, I asked for an escalation. They said "this is the escalation" and told me goodbye with a canned response. So I have literally no way to complain further up, so I am trying every single avenue I can to inform hotels.com that their service is atrocious. This is absolutely unfair to consumers.  

Therefore I will make no more bookings with Hotels.com. I’m just going to book at the hotel, as honestly the rate is likely to be the same, or LOWER than what they advertise.  

Their muffled, cutting-in-and-out foreign call center, with people who literally spoke in broken English, and the automated email responses are the absolute WORST customer service I've ever experienced, and nobody has said one single word to try to make any of this right or acknowledge that it even happened.