Avoid Hotels.com

[hostlead]

Excuse my rant, but the customer service at hotels.com is a pure joke and so is their price match policy. I've been purchasing close to $10,000 worth of hotels (work related) for the last year and a half and today I want to price match a hotel, which is impossible to do, due to the stupidity of the agents. I don't call people stupid, but it got to the point where I had to spell out the competitors website 3 times and they still couldn't get the URL right, then the site wouldn't load, then they pretended they had no idea how to search a travel website. And of course the repetitive questions...what city again, what dates, how many people? GO CHECK YOUR EFFING COMPUTER WITH MY RESERVATION FOR THE PRICE MATCH. Next they can't find the hotel I booked even though it's one of the first to show up once you hit the search result and even after the used the "filter by hotel name" feature, they still weren't able to find it. They sure know how to drive somebody up the wall. After wasting 40 mins of my time I hung up and called again hoping I'd be getting a different CSR. Turns out the next one wasn't much smarter. She ended up finding my hotel after "only" 20mins though, but the competitor's website didn't list the taxes, so they can't price match it. They'll always find an excuse. I'm done with these idiots. FIVESTAR service my ***** .

Note to Hotels.com: Your only competitive advantage is that you have the domain hotels.com. Nothing else! Not your VIP program (which is a joke), not the rewards nights. Your competitors offer the exact same thing. I hope they take every bit of market share you have.
Good luck (you'll need it) in the future.

[Kris81]

I don't understand pricematch, especially when you are doing online purchases. Why not just shop where you found it cheaper?

[hostlead]

I already had it booked on hotels.com
I ended up cancelling it and rebooking at the other site.

[gilboman]

I already had it booked on hotels.com
I ended up cancelling it and rebooking at the other site.

why not just booked directly with the hotel?

[hostlead]

it was surprisingly half the price.

[TrevorK]

I don't understand pricematch, especially when you are doing online purchases. Why not just shop where you found it cheaper?

Hotels.com has a rewards program where you purchase 10 nights at participating hotels over a period of time and you get 1 night free (value is the average daily rate of your other 10 nights). This is most likely why the OP wants to stick with hotels.com because the rewards program could be more beneficial than booking with other rewards program (Such as Expedia for TD and their 4.5% cash back).

[kareshi]

I had similar experience as op but I was lucky. I also felt that the rep was dumb but he sounds like he was very willing to help.. and in the end I could have it price matched and got my refund of the difference. I also had another good experience of them refunding me the money for breakfast.

[HungJai]

Excuse my rant, but the customer service at hotels.com is a pure joke and so is their price match policy. I've been purchasing close to $10,000 worth of hotels (work related) for the last year and a half and today I want to price match a hotel, which is impossible to do, due to the stupidity of the agents. I don't call people stupid, but it got to the point where I had to spell out the competitors website 3 times and they still couldn't get the URL right, then the site wouldn't load, then they pretended they had no idea how to search a travel website. And of course the repetitive questions...what city again, what dates, how many people? GO CHECK YOUR EFFING COMPUTER WITH MY RESERVATION FOR THE PRICE MATCH. Next they can't find the hotel I booked even though it's one of the first to show up once you hit the search result and even after the used the "filter by hotel name" feature, they still weren't able to find it. They sure know how to drive somebody up the wall. After wasting 40 mins of my time I hung up and called again hoping I'd be getting a different CSR. Turns out the next one wasn't much smarter. She ended up finding my hotel after "only" 20mins though, but the competitor's website didn't list the taxes, so they can't price match it. They'll always find an excuse. I'm done with these idiots. FIVESTAR service my ***** .

Note to Hotels.com: Your only competitive advantage is that you have the domain hotels.com. Nothing else! Not your VIP program (which is a joke), not the rewards nights. Your competitors offer the exact same thing. I hope they take every bit of market share you have.
Good luck (you'll need it) in the future.

If it is work related...just expense it...why care about it??? your company is paying...

So you don't have to deal with these **** ppl....

[hostlead]

I wouldn't have bothered honestly, but I thought it was worth calling as it came to half the price on the other website.
To me the price matching is false advertising especially if everything matches (except for the other website not listing the tax breakdown).

[Kris81]

Hotels.com has a rewards program where you purchase 10 nights at participating hotels over a period of time and you get 1 night free (value is the average daily rate of your other 10 nights). This is most likely why the OP wants to stick with hotels.com because the rewards program could be more beneficial than booking with other rewards program (Such as Expedia for TD and their 4.5% cash back).

And they probably couldn't price match for a reason that was against their T.O.S. Would like to know why they refused to price match.

[hostlead]

I listed the reason twice.