The hotel I booked online became a homeless shelter and no one told me
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
They had no indication as to which door they were supposed to go through or how to get through it. There was nobody in sight at the facility. After trudging up a few flights of stairs and back down again, they elected to ask some students passing by where they could find a hotel. Fortunately they were able to find a place that had a vacancy.
Then they had to fight the OTA for a refund. Fortunately they are retired and had nothing better to do all day long than call them until they finally gave a refund.
I've had a couple of really obnoxious problems with OTAs involving event tickets. In one case I bought the wrong type of Disneyland tickets. I had to purchase different tickets once I got to the park. Then trying to get a refund from the OTA was a living nightmare. After about a week of daily calls I finally reverse-engineered enough of their process of moving money between them and the park and what not to convince them to refund me for the wrong (and unused) tickets. Another time an OTA with a customer service stand at a hotel in Hawaii had worked with me for 20 minutes to book tickets for an event, and then at the very end they said, "The booking fee is $250. But we'll waive that if you attend a 1-hour sales pitch!"
My strategy these days is to use an online travel agency to learn about hotels with vacancies and events in the area and then to go directly to the hotel or event web sites to purchase. If there's no way to book except through the OTA, I'm not going to have anything to do with said hotel or event.
I booked a massage at the Banyan Tree on Koh Samui via Expedia back in 2021.
My email confirmation of the booking said I needed to contact a company Newway Travel via phone to confirm the reservation time. I attempted to call Newway Travel five times throughout via phone but nobody ever answered. I called the Banyan Tree Spa and they had no record of the booking. I waited until later in the day to see if there were just processing delays.
Later in the evening I received an email from Newway Travel stating that “for chinese speaking , right ? Becasue this package 90 mins available for that market.” I asked them to call me to clarify their policy and they replied via email and reiterated "*Inform you that 90 mins package available for chainese market only and 60 mins package for worldwide market. Pls inform us guest what nationality ?”
I told them I object to such race based discrimination and Newway replied: “As the hotel needs us to report the customer’s nationality and it’s about the different rates for each market as well.”
I had to spend about 10 hours on the phone with Expedia trying to get a refund since we were refused service even after sharing the email correspondence I had with them. Horrible experience, horrible customer service.
Regardless, I'd try to chargeback this from the credit card
Did they check the reviews?
If you're in the USA (elsewhere I don't know the rules) there is a big difference that isn't immediately obvious.
With a credit card, you are not liable by law (regulation) so you always have this benefit.
With a debit card, most reasonable banks offer no liability as a customer retention perk, but nothing requires that to be true. They could at any moment decide to leave you hanging, if they decide it's cheaper to lose you as a customer than offer the benefit.
How quick do you want it to happen? I know Barclaycard set the debt to one side, so you don't have to pay, aren't charged interest in the interim.
It's my understanding that in US you "just" ask the bank to reverse the transaction and they do - if the company still believes you owe them money after that, they can pursue you through collections or other legal means. The bank isn't in charge of "investigating" anything.
I'm not saying it's better - just that when Americans mention "just do a chargeback" it doesn't really work this way for people outside of US.
If it was a non chip transaction, and the merchant has a physical presence, then the chargeback is almost always immediately approved due to the merchant not having updated their machines to accept chip transactions.
https://www.merchantmaverick.com/the-emv-liability-shift-now...
If it was an online transaction, it gets murkier depending on how secure it was. I have been asked for SMA 2FA confirming charge and amount when buying from BestBuy.com, which I imagine is harder to chargeback than a hotel reservation made without the hotel even verifying the card name/address or requiring CVC.
But 99% of the time, if a product/service is blatantly not delivered or the charge was fraudulent (stolen, higher than receipt, etc), the bank will almost always immediately reverse it for you. Although, with chip transactions, I am not sure how it works if you wait a week or month to report it stolen. Presumably, the onus is on the cardholder to report it lost/stolen within a certain period of time.
Of course, whether or not a bank reverses a transaction for you, the merchant can always take you to court or collections (not that they would win, but it would be an inconvenience to deal with).
I bought something online that was supposed to come in two packages. One package arrived. The other didn't arrive even after three weeks. The tracking information they sent me was wrong, and when I figured out what it was supposed to be, it showed as being stuck in one of the sorting facilities.
I tried to contact the vendor over a period of a week- emailed them, called them multuple times- no response or reply.
I called Amex and they opened a report. They asked me if I'd tried to contact the vendor- what had they said. I even explained that I didn't feel I was entitled to the whole amount, only the part for the second package.
Amex told me that they'd need to open up their own investigation, attempt to speak with the vendor, etc. and I should expect to hear back from them by email in two weeks.
That seemed reasonable to me.
Three days later, I got an email saying they'd give me the entire amount, including the part I didn't ask for.
A few days after that, the vendor got back to me and it turns out the tracking info was wrong, and the package had been delivered but I hadn't seen the package.
I felt bad for them that they were out the money for the product, but the fact that they sent me wrong information, didn't contact me for a week, only responded after the bank contacted them, and then misspelled my name and offered no apology helped curb some of those feelings.
All in all, the process was easy and reasonable.
I've only done two chargebacks in my life, and I think the other took a bit longer but was roughly the same. The bank is doing very rough justice but if the amount is small enough, they just offer it back to the customer as in my case, which was ~$500. If it was a larger amount, I'd expect a longer, more involved process.
It's this way in the US...for major credit cards and banks.
If your bank is a community credit union or you have a usurious credit card, the chargeback experience [can be] as onerous as yours. It starts with you needing to fax all of the required forms and evidence.
I booking with Gotogate.com, but the flight was canceled. Then when trying to get a refund Gotogate systematically try to stall time as much as possible. You have to call support, and are answered by people with very thick Indian accent which is impossible to understand.
Luckily I had paid with Paypal, so I could request a refund through there.
Unfortunately, when booking flights that needs connections, you have to use an OTA. If one flight is cancelled, the others should be too, which an OTA fixes.
Some OTAs will book connections on airlines that aren't partnered as separate tickets so if you're incoming flight is delayed and you miss a connection, tough luck.
Today, I found a Delta itinerary that actually fits our plans better than the original flight. I called back and got my original flight canceled and the new one booked. It still took 3 agents to get everything settled but I can't imagine how much worse the whole experience would have been if I had booked through Expedia or Kayak or any other 3rd party.
Now to hope nothing else changes between now and our departure.
I always try to check places like Wikivoyage etc for the neighborhoods
As per comparing it with "offline travel agents", I've had some bad experiences with them as well.
Agoda also have a scam going - where if you elect to pay later in a foreign currency then they add on a 17% service charge which is hidden in some fine print which I still haven't found. This is illegal here in Australia and I am contemplating taking them to small claims court over it. The amount is small ($100) but I would like to set a precedent.
Both times a call to Airbnb quickly resolved the issue and they even payed the increase in rent.
Your experience is by far the outlier from the typical way Airbnb handles this.
I'm more inclined to think they're very inconsistent, and people are more likely to complain about bad experiences than to loudly proclaim "this company is reasonably okay to deal with!"
Companies are more willing to bend over backwards in their early days, when they're still trying to make a name for themselves (the honeymoon period). The abuse starts once they've bested the competition and become a household name.
There used to be many, but the City bought most of them outright and converted them into homeless shelters. The remainder serve as overflow, so you probably don't want to stay there either. The common wisdom in the frequent flyer community seems to be to just head to Manhattan, or go to Flushing - it's more fun that way anyways.
* The exception is probably the newly opened TWA hotel on JFK, which is really nice, albeit pricy
it's not one "of the busiest airport in the country". I can confirm that it's malebolge, the VIII circle of hell.
I had my share of trips in my life: european countries, uae, Japan...
But I never experienced anything remotely comparable.
All the times I went there the flights were 3-4 hours late.
One time I was in a plane that was taxing through the Airport for one hour just to wait for a free line to depart.
The lines at the immigrations entrance started from the plane itself!
And there was one time where, after waiting for the gate to open, already a couple hours late, the captain said that someone stole the airplane!!
I just flew out recently and it took... maybe a half hour to check my bag and get through TSA security with an opt out request (for the scanners, so they pat you down instead).
Maybe I'm lucky, but I've flown through JFK and LaGuardia a fair amount and never really had any staggering wait times.
I do wish they could have just made the Air Tram part of the subway system cause taking a taxi during rush hour was certainly a mistake but Q ->... hmm I guess the A or J or whatever train would get me to the Air Tram -> Air Tram is a bit of a pain.
Although, I will say, if you stand at the front of the air tram at night so you can look out the front window as you zoom down the track, that's pretty neat and beautiful.
Unfortunately, federal law essentially prohibits cities from having subways connect directly to airports, which is why nearly every city in the country has a separate train shuttle to the airport (assuming they have a subway system in the first place at all).
For what it's worth, if you're taking the Q to the A, you're probably coming from a place where it's actually faster to take the LIRR (from Penn Station or Port Authority) to get to JFK.
The law applies to heavy rail, not light rail - the NYC subway system is entirely heavy rail.
However, transit infrastructure is locked in once, built, so almost every other transit system in the country has this issue, because it was built before 2021.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3v5j3/us-airports-no-longer...
Could you kindly provide a citation for this claim?
Do you have a link to a news article? I find this hard to believe.
Because of the pandemic or some other reason?
I've got a contract with you, not with the hotel. I upheld my end of the bargain, now you uphold yours...
Once I had booked a hotel in Hong Kong for a week, pretty expensive, and I finally couldn't go. But this was in an especially hectic moment (personally and professionally) so I missed the full refund deadline for cancellation. It was obviously my fault, as the deadline had been clear from the beginning, so I just cancelled without refund (or maybe with partial refund, I don't remember) and moved on.
The next day, and without having asked, I got an email from Booking saying that they would negotiate with the hotel to see if they could give me a full refund anyway. A day after that, I got the refund. It was a substantial amount of money so I'm quite grateful to whomever did that at Booking.
On the other hand, I hate their pricing practices, e.g. presumably because I am a relatively frequent customer, the website often offers me worse prices than my wife who almost never used it. Also different prices on mobile and PC, etc.
I don't know what service it was but they were very proactive about it.
I haven't had much issue with Booking.com but I haven't had any times where I needed to refund either.
I went out and sat in the car, and eventually got to chat with a Booking.com agent, who said they could do nothing at first. After 15 minutes of chatting with them, they said, "We don't have any relationship to that hotel. What is the local number you have for them?" And about 15 seconds later, "I am issuing a full refund."
Frustrating, but I did get my money back, and did find another room elsewhere in the city (unbelievably, with the one hotel chain where I use their rewards program!)
Turns out someone had simply set up a fake hotel profile for this prominent hotel in the city and was collecting booking fees from people like me! Like I said, at least I did get my money back...
The further we get from the factory/industrialized IS9000(1) standards of the 1960s where quality control was king, the further we get into wildly inconsistent and personally variable experiences, with spectrums of experience that fluctuate wildly from yours, and the person in the article. And that's a big problem.
Consistency is really hard, but when companies are built on software which can more or less withstand moderate failures, errors like this are more prone.
I hate to be "we need to go back" - but we really do need a return to consistency of experience and product.
When travel agents were unable to get us something affordable in Paris, we attempted to solve it ourselves with an app. The experience was so bad I refuse to travel to Paris ever again, and now we only ever book through agents. My fault? Maybe. Enabled by a faceless marketplace that doesn't give a crap? Absolutely.
If a travel agent goes "Yeah, you probably don't want to do that" even ONCE while you're sorting out your travel plans, they just paid for themselves.
"Travel agents offer a more personal touch"
No shit, who didn't know this?
Most of my friends are more avid than myself at traveling, and they also don't use travel agents.
It's possible it's just because I'm not super picky about my accommodations.
Likewise, we wanted to stay in a resort for a few days afterwards and relax, so she sent us some ideas, but they were so lacklustre that we almost gave up on the idea of that part of our holiday altogether. Then we found something ourselves that was much nicer, and have been enjoying lovely beaches and incredible food for the last few days.
Even her flights were weird choices that involved a lot of waiting around at airports and would have brought us back a day earlier - booking them ourselves got us cheaper and more convenient options.
I always assumed that a travel agent would be more convenient than looking for something yourself, but I was amazed at how poor our experience was using one. Less choice and flexibility, and as you say, less self-service, and for us self-service gave us exactly what we wanted.
I think the best "cheap" travel agents nowadays would just do the job of searching for you for an explicit fee, and then just send you the links. This is generally useful when you have specific requests and not much time to find them.
Most people think they're useless, because they've never used a great one.
When articles like this are posted I often see comments like "a travel agent is more personal" or "it's an app with less control than a hotel"
Who wasn't aware of this? These aren't a revelation.
I'm almost sure I left money on the table the last time I booked a holiday. I could probably have optimized my rail pass choice more, not sure I picked the absolute best departure days (I could probably have gone a week earlier or later) and there was probably a better way to book a hotel when I needed two non-consecutive stays (Visit $major_tourist_city for four days, then spend three days with family, then back to $major_tourist_city)
I ended up staying in the hotel said family used when they would spend a weekend in that city, which was extremely convenient and passable, but as much as anything, I went for it because I figured I couldn't trust random weirdly cropped photos and dueling reviews on travel sites. If I want to go somewhere else, I don't have that opportunity.
But will a travel agent really do that for you? Most likely they just use more or less the same booking interface as you do and give you some package deal and that's that.
The problem is finding that elusive competent travel agent and for that travel agent to find a way to market their skills so that they can be paid more than the vast majority of incompetent travel agents.
My experiences with booking (in Europe mostly) have been very positive and I find them way more transparent about fees, etc than Airbnb.
I don't understand why the NYT is getting into company-internal blame. The customer's interface seems to have been Booking.com. Shouldn't any blame -- from the perspective of customer and this NYT writer -- stop at the company?
Better to book directly from whatever hotel / airline / whatever you want to use. Whatever savings you might get is not worth it and a lot of times hotels appreciate direct bookings and they're cheaper anyway.
I recently wanted to extend a stay and the front desk quoted me $120/nt while Hotels.com was $107 (plus 10% back as a reward, so ~$96).
I wish that weren't the case because this is 100% true:
> never know what's going on and when anything goes wrong they just tell you they can't help you. Then the place tells you that they can't help you because you didn't book through them and they just point fingers at each other.
I've come to rely greatly on in-app ratings/reviews before booking.
Over the year I have learned to overcome my aversion to calls when making one is beneficial, but a call to someone totally unknown, and not in my native language, is one of the cases where... yeah, I'd pay the premium too.
What if another hotel was willing to go lower ?
~5 years ago the EU was starting to push back on the legality of the MFN clauses and I was under the impression that Booking.com had scaled back their usage of them in some ways, but I don't know the current state of things.
While I'm at it, my usual rant about Booking.com's review system - the scale is actually from 2.5-10, and the median score is 8.1. Don't be fooled by those "above average" 7 scores.
That guarantee still exists but I find the prices are now usually the same for those mega chains.
This is it, but generally only during high occupancy/peak periods.
Really? My last vacation we booked the first few nights and then decided where to go and booked the next night on booking.com and my take-away was that they must mostly keep the good reviews online and remove most of the bad ones.
I'll also check back closer to arrival to see if there's a better rate. It's been about 50/50 this year.
Usually, the price discrepancy is because someone is comparing prices on different dates/times after the prices have changed, or the price is not actually advertised (auctioned rooms at random hotels like on Priceline), or some type of car rental/flight package pricing by the travel agent.
https://www.marriott.com/look/claimForm.mi
https://www.hilton.com/en/p/price-match-guarantee/
https://www.hyatt.com/info/best-rate-guarantee
https://www.ihg.com/content/us/en/customer-care/best-price-g...
https://www.choicehotels.com/deals/best-rate
https://www.wyndhamhotels.com/hotel-deals/best-rate-guarante...
Sometimes they are not cheaper, the price on their site is higher compared to what you see on booking.com.
Some hotels dont have a website and I dont like to book using the phone.
My grandfather taught me a decade ago (more even) to use Wotif (now Expedia) and similar to find places, then call directly. For someone who definitely did not grow up with this sort of tech, he was quite excellent at working the boundaries of tech and people to get good results.
And worst-case, they'll match it usually, and I'd rather be booked directly to avoid the crap that the article is discussing
Norms do seem to vary between regions and countries.
Come again? You lose out on saving using hotel instead of third-party booking service, but at least the hotel is cheaper?
In South East Asia hotels are cheaper on Agoda and even contacting the hosts directly wouldn't get you a better price most of the time. It's a waste of time to try so I stopped doing that.
If however, you wound up in the parts of town truck drivers in the UK have to put up with (they call them lorry parks, not truck parks) you could find similar things. Not that the drivers are a problem: far from it. They just get shunted to some of the worst parts of town.
Lots and lots of cheap hotels and B&B in the UK are now de-facto housing otherwise homeless people: this started to be routine under Margaret Thatcher if not before, and has continued at varying pace ever since.
Have contacted customer service only twice and can’t really complain. When reviews or other information weren’t available in the app I’ve called directly.
This seems really unfortunate.
The crazy thing is that I hit gold level staying at $30/night places in SE Asia.
Their IT manager once told me that he didn't understand how people can actually get their rooms in an hotel since most reservations come to the hotel as an email (unless you are going to a big girl chain).
Most hotel management systems do not talk with booking management systems and all transactions come via email. Of course they don't have their full inventory in the platforms just in case something like a spam filter happens.
Booking.com operates like a monopoly and doesn't need to care whatsoever if the money they collect from you will correspond to a night of accomodation.
Last bad experience: I successfully booked - and paid! - a room in an evening emergency (broken-down car) to find out that the hostel door was locked and no one would open. Called Booking.com customer support about them collecting money for a service they were not in a position to provide: a total back-and-forward mess and they couldn't care less. I did not get my money back.
Anything bought and paid online should not be trusted.
Hotels are a luxury, in my view, so unless you pay a real price, expect to have problems.
This person arrived to check in at 11:30 PM and intended to catch a 6 AM flight the next day. So their original plan involved only sleeping from around 11:45PM to 4:30AM assuming they were right next to the airport.
This is a complaint about missing out on less than 5 hours of sleep in the first place.
Here’s the real issue: her itinerary wasn’t realistic to begin with, and she was never going to be properly rested regardless of her possession of a hotel room.
You can’t catch a friend’s wedding on Saturday night and then expect to make your husband’s family reunion in a whole different state on Sunday without some major fatiguing circumstances.
Arguably, Booking upheld their end of the bargain by refunding the hotel. This is all they’re obligated to do. No other type of business gives you any more than that.
Sure, Booking had crappy ineffective customer service. What else is new with the corporate world? Even if they had a perfect concierge level process they physically couldn’t accommodate the customer’s needs because they can’t materialize vacant rooms.
Every minute wasted in this situation defeats the purpose of a hotel room in the first place (I.e., she could have gotten a room further from the airport but that would have eaten up travel time that would have netted her 2 hours of sleep instead of 4, because of her own bad itinerary. If she could check in at an earlier hour this wouldn’t be a problem).
When your flight gets canceled, you aren’t owed another flight at the same date/time. I’m not sure what kind of emergency service anyone would expect to receive from a business like this. At no point was she in tangible danger, and this entire experience was a piece of inconvenience that was essentially self-inflicted.
One of those options would be to find a hotel elsewhere in NYC. If her check-in time was more like 9PM that would have been entirely reasonable.
The golden rule of travel is “shit happens” and that’s why you run a risk of all kinds of issues when you run a tight itinerary. When that shit happens, correctly assigning fault doesn’t tend to change one’s predicament.
If I had a weekend with a family reunion and a friend’s wedding in two different cities I would personally just pick one.
No, but you are owed another flight in a reasonable timeframe. The airline doesn't get to give you your money back and say "we've upheld the end of our bargain" and leave you stranded. I'd argue that Booking (and friends) have a similar obligation not to leave you homeless in a city you're probably unfamiliar with. In fact, the article itself claims that it's standard policy for Booking to find you alternate accomodations and that their rep (allegedly) screwed up.
> At no point was she in tangible danger
She was a 5-month pregnant woman who found herself without a roof in front of an NY homeless shelter at (almost) midnight with no place to go. She may not have been in actual danger, but that's pretty high on the "unsafe" scale.
Source:
https://www.transportation.gov/individuals/aviation-consumer...
The only time you are owed anything in addition to a refund is in the case of being bumped due to overbooking.
Her situation was high on perceived danger. You said so yourself. She wasn’t in any tangible danger, it’s best described as discomfort.
Being in front of a homeless shelter is not a permanent affliction. You can just…not be in front of it.
…Which is what she did. She got an Uber to the airport. She wasn’t stranded. She didn’t have “no place to go.” Even though the airport was closed for the time being, I’m sure she could have found a 24/7 diner to kill some time. It’s New York, there are establishments open.
NYC is statistically safer than the town she came from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/new-york-city-is-a-l...
But as soon as someone says “stranded in the big city” our minds wander over to getting mugged or getting initiated into a gang or something like that.