Ever argued @ Front Desk whether you’ve paid? (booked via Expedia|Hotels.com)
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Have you ever argued at check-in with the Front Desk whether you’ve paid or not? You’ve booked a pre-paid rate on Expedia or Hotels.com (same company) and you’re sure you’ve already been charged but the hotel insists that you haven’t paid?
Front Desk: Is it okay to charge your card now?
Me: Hang on, I’ve paid [Expedia / Hotels.com] already. Are you just taking an authorisation for incidentals?
Front Desk: No. You haven’t paid. If you want the room, you’ll have to pay now.
Me: [Reluctantly hands over the card] Ok.
Front Desk: [Charges my card; not a pre-authorisation check]This scenario and variations thereof has happened to me enough times the past few months that I finally found out from Expedia / Hotels.com what’s going on – because I then need to sort out the mess with them afterwards. (When this has NEVER been an issue for me before).
To help with their own cashflow management, Expedia/Hotels.com charges me (prepaid rate) but still doesn’t pay the hotel until after I’ve checked out. Expedia instead sends the hotel a Expedia’s virtual card (once-off card number only good for the room rate) and that gets attached to my reservation.
I’m not sure whether the hotel is supposed to know this. I certainly didn’t. So here’s where it might go wrong:
– If I booked some weeks ago and doesn’t remember precisely whether my credit card DID get charged or not by Expedia / Hotels.com. When Front Desk insists that I haven’t paid, I hand over a physical card and I effectively charged a second time.
– There’s a separate city tax or resort fee that’s NOT included in the prepaid rate, payable separately – most of the time, the front desk might ask you whether you want it the city tax to be paid on the same card. Even if Front Desk is clued in on the whole “Expedia virtual card thing”, if they click to charge the card on file, the card will decline due to the extra charge. Front desk then says, “oh, your card is declined. Do you have another one”. You then get charged a second time too.
If you book prepaid with Expedia / Hotels.com, you may want to know this. The correct answer to say to the Front Desk is “charge the Expedia virtual card on the system for the room rate” and I’ll give you another card for city tax, resort charges, service charges etc.
Dealing with Expedia / Hotels.com customer service is a PAIN. I booked this time due to my 20% Vitality discount and it may be the last. Switching over to Booking.com when I can’t book direct…
Hopefully this is useful to someone!
I’ve never found prepayment for hotels, other than via the property’s own website, to be reliable.
Had some very fraught conversations at check-out, with a plane to catch, in the days before mobile phones with roaming were ubiquitous, and I don’t really think things are much better now.
Well over 100 nights with hotels.com and never experienced this. Stays would be Europe and USA, so maybe related to region?
Surely it states on the booking confirmation if you’ve pre-paid? I make sure I always have this to hand for this eventuality plus the slight chance that they have “lost” the booking and I need to prove I made it.
However, the only dispute I’ve ever had was when a GCM hotel tried to slap extra taxes on a hotels.com booking. I tried to argue that the inclusive price has to be advertised on bookings made from the UK but they wouldn’t let us check in until we coughed up. Fortunately hotels.com were very responsive at that time and refunded the extra charges without quibble.
I have never experienced this and have booked via hotels.com across well over 50 countries on all continents not just for myself but for others. As @NorthernLass said, I always have a print out on hand to show them I paid just in case.
Same as meta, never had a problem with hotels.com not telling the hotel I have paid. Yes they do get a virtual card from expedia which the hotel charges (sometimes they don’t understand that it’s not my personal card, but nobody has ever asked to see it).
I always prepay hotels.com in the currency of the card I’m using, because their exchange rate is close to interbank whereas paying at the hotel incurs a risk of the hotel applying DCC and/or charging the card incorrectly.
Booking.com on the other hand I’ve had problems with and therefore I don’t use them.
A hotel in Chiang Mai I booked months ago via Booking, for a stay at the end of May, recently messaged claiming their reservations system had gone down, and asking me to clarify a few things for them including, among others, whether I have paid yet!
I was suspicious this was a scam and so only provided the details I was happy to. They have now gone strangely quiet… trying to decide whether to rebook elsewhere!
I’ve probably booked 50+ on hotels.com over the past 15 years, almost all of them pre-paid and never had such an issue.
This happened to me last month and it was the most stressful experience. Hotel said we hadn’t paid. Hotels.com said we will deal with it with hotel, hotel kept contacting us and harassing us to pay or get Hotels.com to contact their revenue manager. It was for a £6k holiday so it was hugely stressful and really messed up The whole experience. I think they sorted it the night before we checked out and hotels.com did keep referring to the virtual card but I didn’t know or care- just wanted it all resolved. It’s the first time it has happened to us in probably 200 nights or so we have booked with Hotels.com.
I find this extraordinary – you presumably had the confirmation from hotels.com plus your credit card/bank statement, so where did the hotel think the money had gone? Can you share which property it was? I would be putting in a complaint to their head office (if applicable) for disruption to the enjoyment of your £6k holiday.
Hotels.com is just another OTA, so having a confirmation from them, even if it includes the fact you have paid or your credit card statement, means absolutely nothing to the bean counter at a hotel. It will remain a complete mystery to me why people book via hotels.com as, if you can’t beat their price and terms even including the subsequent ‘free’ night, you really aren’t trying hard enough.
Hotels.com is just another OTA, so having a confirmation from them, even if it includes the fact you have paid or your credit card statement, means absolutely nothing to the bean counter at a hotel. It will remain a complete mystery to me why people book via hotels.com as, if you can’t beat their price and terms even including the subsequent ‘free’ night, you really aren’t trying hard enough.
It’s because you have a guarantee that they will accommodate you at a comparable or better property if the hotel won’t/can’t honour your reservation. Recently hotels.com covered the difference of nearly £1400 to put me in another hotel, when the hotel closed unexpectedly. You wouldn’t be able to do that directly and would have to rely on your insurance paying out later.
I have also been able to negotiate extras with the hotel even on hotels.com bookings. Of course if you just book a bog standard room, you won’t be able to. You just need to know how to play the game – sometimes it’s direct booking, sometimes it’s via reputable OTA. If you don’t know how to score a deal no matter how you book, you are not trying hard enough.
@meta I have to say that in booking direct, I have never had any issue about being accommodated in precisely the room or suite requested or better, but I am very diligent in checking that all is in order well before arrival. I did have an issue with a hotel in 1980 on a gap year as a tour guide in Greece at the ripe old age of 19, arriving in Delphi to be to be told the 30 rooms we had booked had been moved to another, much inferior, hotel. I made a big fuss, summoning up as much of my newly learned Greek as I could and the rooms were given to my clients such that another firm’s clients took the downgrade. It was a great life experience and no nonsense from hotels has ever been tolerated since.
At the old Hotel Xenia?
@zio no I don’t think it was the Xenia, it was a newer and unusually nice hotel connected with them. We did use Xenia hotels a lot for individuals and groups in various places, including on this tour in Olympia. It was my first trip with a bigger group, so quite nerve racking and the same evening I was tasked with taking half a dozen teenage daughters of the clients to a local disco frequented by the usual randy locals who were exceptionally interested! I was most relieved to return them to their parents intacta.
@zio no I don’t think it was the Xenia, it was a newer and unusually nice hotel connected with them. We did use Xenia hotels a lot for individuals and groups in various places, including on this tour in Olympia. It was my first trip with a bigger group, so quite nerve racking and the same evening I was tasked with taking half a dozen teenage daughters of the clients to a local disco frequented by the usual randy locals who were exceptionally interested! I was most relieved to return them to their parents intacta.
Sounds a memorable and character-building 24 hours!
On a school trip in the 80s (my first time on a plane) we reached Delphi to discover our hotel was double-booked, and full. The only nearby hotel with enough space was the Xenia, which was well worth getting back on the coach for. I remember the disappointment that we had only one night in Delphi before our accommodation reverted to its usual more basic standard in Olympia.
Perhaps you were in the (still extant) Amalia, part of Greece’s more privately funded post-war hotel building program.Had it recently with something booked via Amex Travel. Reception took a pre-auth whilst they called Amex Travel and sorted it out.
I called Amex and they flagged the auth for review so I wasn’t bothered about the outcome.
@meta I have to say that in booking direct, I have never had any issue about being accommodated in precisely the room or suite requested or better, but I am very diligent in checking that all is in order well before arrival. I did have an issue with a hotel in 1980 on a gap year as a tour guide in Greece at the ripe old age of 19, arriving in Delphi to be to be told the 30 rooms we had booked had been moved to another, much inferior, hotel. I made a big fuss, summoning up as much of my newly learned Greek as I could and the rooms were given to my clients such that another firm’s clients took the downgrade. It was a great life experience and no nonsense from hotels has ever been tolerated since.
Never happened to me either until last month and I handled it really, well got a far superior accommodation and hotels.com covered the bill without me ever swiping the credit card.
You can’t tell with 100% certainty that it won’t happen to you ever.
Sorry for the delayed reply. Actually what @meta described is exactly what happened to us. So to be fair to hotels.com and full credit to them, they paid up more than half of the 6k because the original hotel closed and was no longer available. This is what caused the greater panic as we thought that possibly they hadn’t actually paid the new hotel and we would be liable to make the payment to them.
We were very very grateful to Hotels.com for finding us superior accommodation without any cost to us. It was just the panic that kicked in when the hotel said we hadn’t paid and it was back and forth with the hotel and Hotels.com to ensure we didn’t actually end up paying a price we never would have.I’ve never found prepayment for hotels, other than via the property’s own website, to be reliable.
Works 100% of the time for me via booking.com.
Sorry for the delayed reply. Actually what @meta described is exactly what happened to us. So to be fair to hotels.com and full credit to them, they paid up more than half of the 6k because the original hotel closed and was no longer available. This is what caused the greater panic as we thought that possibly they hadn’t actually paid the new hotel and we would be liable to make the payment to them.
We were very very grateful to Hotels.com for finding us superior accommodation without any cost to us. It was just the panic that kicked in when the hotel said we hadn’t paid and it was back and forth with the hotel and Hotels.com to ensure we didn’t actually end up paying a price we never would have.Not the same. My hotel was closed on the day I arrived and I received a message from the hotels.com four hours before check-in that I need to call them.
I have just sent this post to a hotel after a rough morning checkout in Innsbruck, Austria. I have used hotels.com a lot over the years. Especially during the Capitalone 10x points days. I have redeemed 55 free nights so have well over 500 nights with them. I have 200 nights a year in hotels but across various programs. Anyway, I had never an issue unti this morning! I showed them the prepaid receipt (I had a 10% off coupon and had to prepay to use it). Evidently Expedia”s Mastercard virtual number wouldnt process last night. They did not care and only said no I may have a receipt but maybe payment was returned because I didnlt pay. I refused to give them a different card, they tried the number they had again and got it to go through. I wish I had understood Expedia.com’s virtual number as the conversation would have gone smoother. Of course this doesn’t happen until I am in a hurry to catch a train early on a rainy Sunday!
Thank you for the information. I will be better prepared next time!
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