Why Smart Travelers Should NEVER Book With Expedia
Tara Hunt travels a lot. No, I travel alot. Tara LIVES on the road. Here is her experience with Expedia and why she believes they are no longer good for setting your travel plans.
Expedia charged her credit card for a hotel room that never came to be and it will be WEEKS before she can get a refund.
We showed up at a hotel the other night that had no record of our reservation. We understand that mistakes happen. This hotel receives their reservations via fax machine (yep, old skool), so perhaps there was a paper jam that day? Either way, I just wanted options as the hotel was fully booked. I got on the phone with Expedia, who refused to take any responsibility for the mishap. “But ma’am,” I said, “I booked at Expedia.com, giving you my credit card and trusting this to be taken care of, yet you say you can’t rectify it now? You can’t put us in a similar hotel?” Nope. In fact, she indicated that it would take a couple of weeks to refund the money I paid for this hotel room and I would have to pay for whichever replacement hotel room I could find.”
I don’t know about you, but there have been times in this last year when I’ve had to travel because of family emergencies. If Expedia had taken my money and left me high and dry like that, we would have been sleeping in our car. We barely had the money to go there, but pay TWICE and wait for weeks for a refund?
Completely unacceptable!
Here is a site with links to the problems that Expedia has been having:
Me? I use Expedia to find out what hotels are where I need to be and then I book with the hotels directly. I’ve had my own issues with Expedia and I refuse to use them any longer.
Plus, Tara is right. Booking with the hotel, car rental or airline directly is usually cheaper.
I’ve had a similiar experience but with Travelocity. (I actually use expedia quite a bit for my travels and have never had any problems) I booked a flight through travelocity and experienced no problems until I tried to return home from my trip. I arrived at the airport to be told I was booked on a flight that was never for individual sale and could not transport passengers domestically for any reason. The flight was going from vegas to japan with a stopover in LA and I was somehow booked to LA on this flight. I called travelocity from the agent desk and they were no help and needed to call the airline and finally after begging, agreed to talk with the agent in front of me instead of calling and waiting to get someone from the airline on hold. After the agent spoke to them, the supervisor I was speaking with promptly hung up on me without resolving any issues and my ‘flight’ was supposed to leave in 45 minutes. I don’t know if you’ve ever flown back from Vegas on a Sunday but flights are packed so I had to spend my own money on a one way flight – which actually turned out be more than my roundtrip and book it myself at the airport. Then I had to call Travelocity for months before they agreed to give me a refund after contacting my credit card company to issue a stop payment on their bill. When I finally spoke with someone I asked what they could offer me for my trouble and they were willing to offer me a 5% discount on a hotel/flight even though I only booked a flight through them to begin with. Infuriating!
Comment by Traveller2 — November 19, 2007 @ 4:57 pm
Wow thanks for the link to that site!
Comment by 'liya — July 25, 2012 @ 9:51 am