Maximise your Avios, air miles and hotel points

Forums Hotel loyalty schemes Other hotel schemes Hotels.com loyalty transfer going to OneKey

  • marks7389 493 posts

    Do let me know if it works out for you @marks7389

    Had a long and, at points, painful call with one of their supervisors earlier today who eventually credited me (as a ‘goodwill gesture’) the difference between the value of the reward night stamps that I would have received and the Onekey credit awarded post-stay on the two non-refundable bookings I made back in February.

    I started off with an email to the supportUK@chat.hotels.com address, who promised to arrange a call back from a manager. Two timeslots arranged, both of which resulted in no call so in the end I called them.

    I think it helped that I’m Onekey Platinum, was Gold in old hotels.com rewards scheme and have spent a lot of money with hotels.com over the years. Even then, I had to email them screenshot evidence from the app that reward night credits were due on the bookings….

    In case it helps, the phone number is 0808 234 5370.

    One other gotcha to note is that, for anyone booking VIP Access properties, the enhanced earnings rate for Silver, Gold and Platinum status is based on status at the time of booking. It seems that whatever status you were on old scheme at the time of booking doesn’t count, though I didn’t explicitly challenge that. (@Rob, that may be worth a warning in a Bits article as it may be worth people cancelling refundable bookings and rebooking in some instances).

    Dom 16 posts

    My account still seems to be in a halfway limbo, it was converted to OneKey at the end of July. Fortunately my reward nights and stamps converted at the right value and I had no open bookings at the time so avoided issues people are reporting with those.
    I have booked and stayed 3 nights across 2 stays since the conversion in mid August and didn’t get any OneKeyCash credit or trip elements from them. I raised it via the web chat at the beginning of September, they escalated it and later that day I got an email saying everything was fine and they could see that I had earned stamps for those stays! I replied to the email pointing out that my account had been converted from the old scheme some weeks before the stays and therefore should not have earnt stamps but never got any response.
    I’ve just had another go with the webchat being very explicit about what the problem was, i.e. not missing rewards but that they gave me stamps when they should have given me OneKeyCash and it has been escalated again so I’ll see how that goes.

    Oddly if I look at my account on the desktop website under rewards I see my OneKey balance with a conversion date of July 23rd as expected but if click on “Past hotels.com activity” I see a section titled “5 stamps converted to OneKeyCash”, below that a section titled “8 reward nights converted to OneKeyCash” and then right at the bottom is a section titled “3 stamps collected” with my stays from mid August!
    I have no idea what would happen if I had another 7 nights booked, whether it would give me a reward night that I then wouldn’t be able to use due to being on OneKey but I’m not keen to try it and find out!

    Dom 16 posts

    A short followup to my above post, the two stays I had in August were for my wife so I had booked through my account but put her email address as a contact against them. She got an email yesterday (addressed to me) saying they had manually posted the missing OneKeyCash credit for these stays and sure enough it has appeared against her account not mine! Given she hasn’t used her account for about 7 years this means there is now a small amount of orphaned credit which we are unlikely to use.
    At this point I think I’ll just give up, it is only approximately 10GBP and I’ve spent far too much time on this already. Time to spend the ~£1k OneKeyCash credit I have from conversions and then walk away from hotels.com for good I think.

    Dom 16 posts

    Another step in my account limbo saga. I decided to persevere in getting my 10GBP of missing credit on a point of principle, it took two interactions with chat this morning but I finally got an email saying they were removing the credit from my wifes account and applying it to mine and they actually did do that correctly. This was after they had earlier sent me an email addressed to my wife, following on from sending her one addressed to me over the weekend, I’m sure there must be some GDPR issues with that!

    I’ve now found a bigger problem, I went to spend my credit on one big booking and found the limbo status also affects that! I see the credit all the way to the point where I get payment options of “Pay now” or “Pay later” with the Pay now option showing the credit applied. Clicking Pay now takes me to a final page to confirm details which has completely forgotten about OneKey, it shows me that I will earn stamps, the price has reverted to the full price with no credit applied and under the rewards section it says I have 0 nights to redeem. So I am currently unable to spend my credit at all.

    I’ve just spent 45 minutes on the phone to them including emailing screenshots of the problem, the person on the other end was very keen on suggesting it was a system glitch and it’ll sort itself out in a day or two. After being persistent that I’ve had problems with my account since it was converted in July they have now escalated it to the internal support team and I’m waiting for something back from them. Given how painful just getting the missing credit applied was and the fact they didn’t identify that there was an underlying issue a that point I’m not that hopeful of a quick resolution.

    Dom 16 posts

    Another quick update that might be useful to anyone else finding the same problem.

    All of this time I had been using the UK website as I always use the BA estore for hotels.com, I thought I would try the mobile app and see if that was the same. Amazingly the mobile app is fine and will quite happily let me book and use my onekeycash, I doubt the estore would payout when using onekeycash anyway so I went ahead and made the booking through the app which all worked fine.
    I guess app takes priority over websites these days for testing which is a shame for those of us who use portals like the estore.

    supergraeme 152 posts

    Like many I now haven’t booked with hotels.com for ages. I used them last night to make a booking at Sandals and asked them to match another site with the Price Guarantee – only I hadn’t realised that they got rid of that as well! So unless they’re cheaper than elsewhere (which they never seem to be for me), there is now absolutely no reason to use them. Cancelled my booking a couple of minutes after getting the e-mail.

    Can’t believe they’ve done away with that. Madness. But it makes sense that they’ve stopped further rollout.

    Scott350 4 posts

    Further quick PSA re Hotels.com changeover.

    Changeover converted reward stamps and nights to cash which is unobjectionable-to-helpful; the 2% rate on new bookings is obviously a blow compared to the old scheme but everyone can make their own decisions about stay whether to use it prospectively.

    My issue was re pending stamps. The official guidance was that these would be converted to cash (as with earned stamps) post stay (“…pending stamps will be converted to OneKeyCash after your stay…”). Interestingly this has been pulled from the website.

    I had nights booked (ie ‘pending stamps’) which simply disappeared and earned neither stamps or cash. It took five rounds of CS emails, being fed contrary misinformation and various nickel-and-dime ‘goodwill gestures’, before I eventually got the c. £50 to which I was entitled. Awful use of time but the responses were so bad it triggered my point-of-principle response. Masterclass in destroying goodwill and brand loyalty.

    Takeaway – if you’ve not already, do check for any missing stays which just disappeared due to Hotels.com stuffing up their transition.

    Scott350 4 posts

    FWIW I’ve also booked nine nights post-transition under the new regime.

    2 earned cash and ‘activity’. 7 earned stamps and no activity. All booked via the Estore portal (which has crediting the stays).

    God only knows what Hotels.com’s IT systems are doing. Will pursue getting this fixed once I have recovered from the prior CS ordeal but interested if anyone else also has this experience.

    Nomad312 33 posts

    I finally got an answer of sorts from Hotels.com customer service a few weeks ago about the unfairness of applying OneKey earning rates to a (non-refundable) booking made under the old reward stamp system before any mention of the OneKey rollout appeared on the UK site.
    Having been told my request for an uplift in the amount of OneKey cash to match the Reward stamp value I would have received had been escalated to a specialist team, I got no response for about month save for “we’re still working on your request” when I emailed for an update. In the end I received an email saying “we aren’t able to issue any OneKeyCash until after you complete this travel. we’ve created a follow-up request and you will be notified once the booking is complete.” So nothing concrete but they did make a distinction with another booking I had made after the rollout of the new system had been announced (which CS had included in my enquiry without my asking) saying that normal Onekey rates will apply to that one as it was made after April 8th. This does at least suggest that they now recognise that bookings made prior to that date should be treated differently to those made afterwards, so we’ll see.

    TS77 33 posts

    I did manage to get my nights converted to cash however I’m unsure how long there is to spend the credit?

    Like all others, since the move to OneKey I’ve stopped using Hotels.com, no value in using them any longer.

    ayearinmx 43 posts

    i use hotels.com still because i go through TCB and because 90% of my 100+ rooms per year are business, i am essentially getting cashback for business purchases… price doesn’t affect me too much as i am given freedom of choice and i stay in middle of nowhere locations so brand hotel rewards systems aren’t worth my time…

    if anyone has any better suggestions though, about how i can benefit more from the business booking personally, i’d definitely be interested…

  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.

The UK's biggest frequent flyer website uses cookies, which you can block via your browser settings. Continuing implies your consent to this policy. Our privacy policy is here.