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I will never use an OTA again too.

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.

Oh so the Chinese market had the "special package" I guess?!

Regardless, I'd try to chargeback this from the credit card

I had a similar experience with booking.com. I booked a place in Australia and when I got their I found it was a house run by a junkie who chain smoked inside. I cancelled it on booking.com but they refused to refund me because their policy is that they will only do that if the provider agrees. That was the last time I used their site.

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.

Agoda and Booking is the same company.

And priceline I think too

Is it not possible to dispute and chargeback via credit card provider? My strategy of giving three attempts to get a refund as per their procedures, then warning about dispute, then eventually issuing a chargeback worked quite fine so far across multiple vendors. It rarely goes as far as the actual chargeback, typically the warning is sufficient.

If you paid via Cc sure, but, in the EU at least, bank or debit card are pretty common, and while it is possible to charge back with those, it is pretty hard depending on the policies and size of the bank. I have a bank acc in Spain who chargeback without questions when I pop over an email, while my dutch or uk accounts require stacks of paperwork and often say ‘nope’.

I'm in UK (so until not that long ago, EU :) ). Don't need credit cards for the "credit" part, but I'm exclusively using them for online (or any) shopping, purely for the safety reasons mentioned. As far as I can see, there's no downsides as long as you're paying it all off every month.

Exactly, plus I believe paying off a credit card improves your credit score. Some debit cards at least do offer protection (mine is Santander) but it’s not by law so I don’t know if it is as effective as chargebacks, which I’ve had cause to use a couple of times and thought worked great. I also only pay on credit online now and pay off in full, and tell others to do the same.

So I'm in the UK as well, and have you ever actually tried issuing a chargeback? Because I have - and unlike in US, where I understand that you can just issue a chargeback by just asking your bank to do it, in here I was asked to provide all kinds of proof, then they had to wait 30(!!!) days for a reply from the seller to give them their version of events, then it took another 2 weeks for the bank to reply that yep, looks like you've been scammed alright, here's your money back.

And after those two months you got your money back, unlike when paying directly when after two months you're just as scammed as before.

I mean, I can do(and have done) the exact same thing with a Debit card payment, so using a credit card has offered no extra benefit here. But yes, if you just used a direct bank transfer then you're screwed.

> I can do(and have done) the exact same thing with a Debit card payment, so using a credit card has offered no extra benefit here.

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.

I've done it a few times. It isn't exactly onerous. Just proving you've bought the item, tried to resolve the issue etc.

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.

>>How quick do you want it to happen?

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 chip transaction, the bank may or may not agree to temporarily reverse the transaction for you depending on the transaction and your history with the bank while they contact the merchant and investigate.

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 recently went through this process with American Express. Here was my situation and experience.

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.

I understand you feeling a bit sorry for the seller, but unless it was a very small entity (like a person on etsy), I wouldn't give it a second thought. I think it incentivises the seller to clean up their processes, to everyone's benefit. Also, buyers feeling comfortable about chargebacks and returns promotes more sales in the long run.

> just that when Americans mention "just do a chargeback" it doesn't really work this way for people outside of US.

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.

For what it's worth, some places in EU at least used to have "debit cards with credit-equivalent consumer protection". My MasterCard back in the day explicitly advertised that. Just don't rely on every debit card doing that.

Book direct with the hotels. 3rd party bookings are most often not worth it.

+1 the last time I used such a service to book a hotel they confirmed it and gave me a confirmation number. I printed everything on paper. When I arrived at the hotel after a 13 hour flight, I showed the receptionist the confirmation number and they 'couldn't find it in their system'. I compared my confirmation number with a colleague's who was traveling with me and they were the same unique format. How the hell does that happen

Very bad experience. I wonder what the reviews say (and you might actually want to read the recent reviews and check more than one website)

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.

When flying, I will avoid using an online travel agency (OTA) as well if I can .
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.

There are good ones and bad ones; gotogate so far is awful; I avoid them like the plague. Direct with the airline is better anyway.

Worst experience ever with gotogate. Never ever ever.

credit card chargeback worked, Gotogate wanted to charge $30 to refund a flight cancelled by the airline

You should book directly with an airline who will book all the connections so long as they're all with partner airlines (i.e usually in the same alliance). Often you can even book with an airline in that alliance that you won't even be flying to possibly get cheaper tickets.

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.

This. I booked an international flight with Delta for next month. On Saturday I awoke to find that KLM changed my European connection to 28 hours later than originally booked and this would screw up all of our hotels and rental car. I talked to Delta and after about 30 minutes of the agent doing everything she could including escalating was told that they couldn't make any changes for 10 calendar days as KLM was blocking them out.

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.

An important note is this will not work with budget airlines, easyjet or the likes. They won't do the travel agent for you and you will struggle to get any cent back in case of trouble.

Anecdotal: there are bad things to say about Airbnb... But (for me) their customer service has been top notch. We were twice in a situation were we had to rebook spontaneous, once because the the original host canceled minutes before we arrived, another time because the host was very generous with their descriptions and we found ourselves in a tiny room without AC and shared accomodations instead of an apartment.

Both times a call to Airbnb quickly resolved the issue and they even payed the increase in rent.

Is this a shill or do you work for Airbnb? The internet is overwhelmingly filled with negative Airbnb experiences...

Your experience is by far the outlier from the typical way Airbnb handles this.

I've only one experience with airbnb support (a host that blamed a cracked window on us that we had not touched or looked at) but they were reasonably okay to deal with that one time.

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!"

I would sooner assume this was an outdated anecdote.

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.

Second time was just two month ago, so not exactly outdated. Maybe geographically? I'm from Germany.

Hmm no ... Maybe I just have been lucky?

> My elderly mother and her (also elderly) friend recently booked a place in Lyon, France using a well-known online travel agency (OTA).

Did they check the reviews?

At least on Booking.com there are tricks the hosts can pull so you cannot leave a bad review: they cancel your stay as "no show" and booking.com will not do anything about it. The only way is to check reviews in other places as well - google and whatnot.