I am back from vacation and feeling rejuvenated. Well, sort of. All did not going according to plan during my trip. I was scheduled to make a two-night stop in Bowling Green, Kentucky on the way back home from Hilton Head Island so my girlfriend could scope out Western Kentucky University. She’ll be attending there in the fall for her masters and wanted to see the place before she started classes, and also needed to do some apartment shopping. And, as you can tell by the headline of the post, Hotels.com sorta screwed up our hotel reservation. Here’s my letter to Hotels.com that I will be mailing to their corporate offices.

To Whom It May Concern,

This letter is to express my concern and frustration with how Hotels.com handled my recent hotel reservation. I had booked two nights at the Super 8 in Bowling Green, KY on May 25 for a June 7 arrival – I was satisfied with the service up to this point, it was easy and painless to make a reservation, and I promptly received notification emails that the reservation was booked and paid in full. Thinking Hotels.com would take care of the rest; I relaxed and waited to check-in.

I arrived at the hotel in Bowling Green at 11pm on June 7, I was exhausted after a long day of driving and was ready to simply lie down and fall asleep. I told the front desk clerk I had a reservation for Bodnar and she responded by telling me she had no reservation under that name. I showed her the Hotels.com confirmation email and she responded by informing me that oftentimes reservations from Hotels.com fail to make their way to the hotel. Luckily, she had a room available for me; she took my credit card and assured me the manager would take care of the problem in the morning by contacting Hotels.com and having payment and reservation information faxed over.

After another long day of paperwork and apartment shopping in the area, I returned to the hotel and spoke with the manager about the ordeal, my hope was it would be completely taken care of, payment would have been received from Hotels.com and I could relax after the long day. That was not the case. Instead, the manager told me he could not get in contact with Hotels.com and that the information still had not been faxed over. Furthermore, he showed me his computer system that indicated no reservation under my name was made on May 25 – indicating Hotels.com never forwarded the information to the hotel. I decided to take matters into my own hands and call Hotels.com customer service.

Upon calling customer service the phone line hung up on me twice. The third time, I spoke with Karen; she promptly asked for my confirmation number and told me she was going to look up my information. She never asked for security verification, something I did not realize until the two other customer service agents I spoke with asked for verification. While Karen was looking up my information I was not sure I was on hold, there was no music or any indication I was officially on hold. After ten minutes Karen finally came on the line and claimed her computer was slow and her headset was not working. Again she asked for my confirmation number and told me she would contact the hotel to make sure they got the payment information. After a few minutes on hold she came on the line and told me the hotel confirmed to her that the payment and reservation fax had been received. Skeptical, I called the front desk to verify. The front desk clerk informed me someone from Hotels.com did call and asked if the fax machine was working; the front desk clerk responded that it was because she had received several faxes earlier in the day, she did not confirm to Karen that the Hotels.com fax was received. Karen took this confirmation of the fax machine’s functionality as the hotel confirming the fax had been received.

Determined to get this ordeal smoothed out, I called the customer service line again and spoke with Sam. He correctly asked for security verification and told me he would have to call the hotel to send them the reservation and payment information. After several minutes on hold, Sam informed me that the hotel would have to call their manager to see if they could verify the Hotels.com payment over-the-phone instead of via fax. I am not sure if Sam attempted to send a fax again, or if he simply asked to verify the payment over the phone. The hotel could not contact their manager for another hour and a half, so I waited and then went down to the front desk.

The front desk informed me that their manager would not authorize payment over the phone; they would only authorize the payment from Hotels.com if a paper fax had been received. So, once again, I dialed up the Hotels.com customer service number and spoke with another customer service representative. This time, the fax was finally able to go through and the hotel seemed satisfied with the situation. I am not entirely sure why it took several hours and three phone calls to customer support to send a fax, but it did, and I was satisfied that the matter was complete.

But it wasn’t over. The hotel informed me that they were unsatisfied taking the extremely lower rate from Hotels.com two weeks later because their going rate that night was much higher. This was understandable, Hotels.com failed to lock in that rate on May 25, so it would be entirely unfair to assume the hotel would take that rate on June 9. Luckily, the hotel was extremely accommodating and told me they would match the overall price from my Hotels.com order. For the fourth time, I contacted Hotels.com customer service and asked for a refund, luckily this was easily accommodated and I had no issue receiving the refund. However, I am extremely grateful that the hotel in Bowling Green was accommodating to this issue.

I am writing this letter not to ask for money or severance from my horrendous experience with your organization, but rather to bring this to the attention of someone who might be in a position to assure this never happens to a customer of Hotels.com. There is no worse feeling than walking into a hotel far away from home at eleven-o’clock at night and being told there’s no reservation in your name. Had the Super 8 in Bowling Green had no vacancy that night, I would have been sent on a wild goose chase around town to find a hotel room. This is the absolute worst nightmare for a traveler. And it is the absolute worst mistake your organization can make. Customers are right to be under the impression that their hotel room is there waiting for them when they book through Hotels.com – if that is not the case that you have failed as an organization. I did not want to leave this experience on deaf ears at the call center; rather I wanted to bring this to the attention of the front office to make sure future customers of Hotels.com do not replicate this experience. I hope that you take this issue seriously and work with everyone involved in your organization to make sure communication is swift and nimble between Hotels.com, customers, and the hotels where they are reserving rooms.

Thank you for your time, and I hope that in the future I have a better experience with Hotels.com.

Sincerely,
Jacob Bodnar