Menu
Login
I made a reservation online thru expedia.com as part of our vacation to the redwood national forest. The vacation is for the week of July 11 thru July 17, 2011. I mistakenly booked your hotel for the wrong dates. I wanted to book for July 15 thru July 17, 2011 and accidently booked the wrong dates. Expedia called your hotel on my behalf and asked if we could switch the dates and we were told that the dates that I wanted were fully booked. I understand your cancellation policy and also understand the difference between having a room reserved and booked. I had the room reserved which means after a certain amount of time, the room was released and could be booked by someone else. So because of my mistake the hotel ends up making twice the money off of the room I had originally reserved. I understand the policy, but want to appeal to your sense of what is right and wrong. I’m not a scam artist. I’m just a man who is getting old, and made a huge mistake, while trying to make the reservation on his ipad. It was not intentional, and all I would like is a refund on something that I paid for but never used. I understand the need to pay some fee for the process, but I have a hard time accepting the fact that you can just keep all of my money.
The trouble with all these "cheap" reservations companies, Expedia, Hotwire, Travelocity, Orbitz, etc., is when you make a change, cancel, mistake or not, they do not refund all your money.
They are the "middle men" and they are in business to make money. Because you dealt through them to get a cheap room, the hotels really don’t know or care if you’ve lost out.
You are always better off dealing directly with a hotel when making reservations or bookings. Hotels offer discount rates (AAA, AARP) if you ask for them.
Hotels have their own reservation and cancellation policies and are more accommodating to customers when plans have to change
Good news! You don't need middlemen to get screwed over by HIE. They will gladly take your reservation and cancel it with NO REFUND. Don't let a middleman put it to you' go straight to HIE for it.
The cancellation policy is beyond absurd. I booked today through hotels.com. They quoted HIE's policy - the first sentence said that I would be charged for 1 night if I cancelled AFTER 7/23/13. In a subsequent, separate paragraph it said that I would be charged for 1 night if I cancelled BEFORE 7/23/13. I tried to cancel within 30 minutes of booking. I called hotels.com and they called the Boston HIE while I was on hold - HIE refused to waive the penalty. Then I called the Boston HIE myself and the GM was so rude and disrespectful! He said he was "Ready to charge [me] for the whole thing, " i.e. 3 day reservation, as if he was threatening to teach me a lesson! What an unprofessional individual. Then he tried to blame hotels.com, but finally admitted that he could waive the penalty but did not want to.
Don't put this on hotels.com - I checked, and the cancellation policy they give is different for different hotels, which means that his misleading statement of being able to cancel before the 23rd was the responsibility of Holiday Inn Express, not hotels.com.
I have never been treated so poorly by a business in the US. It was as if I was dealing with some third-world hotel after every penny they could get! I am considering filing a consumer protection action against HIE. I have found several forums where people express having had the same thing happen to them!
I meant to say 7/28/13, not 7/23