I drove 7 hours to reach Santa Monica on my vacation with my daughter, just to find the motel was in the heart of the ghetto and a homeless encampment. I was surrounded by crack heads. There was nowhere to park. I was terrified to leave my corvette or step out, for fear of being mugged or my car being stolen or my child kidnapped or myself raped and killed. It was pure terror! I drove to the nearest bank to withdraw all my money and cancelled my card. I called the front desk of the Cadillac hotel. I told them I was cancelling and I was charged for one night. The website said it goes for $799.00 a night. That is a lie! I shouldn't have paid $131.00 for it although I paid more. I would like to be reimbursed for my fees for both nights, gas money, and my time I wasted. It was totally falsely advertised.
Consumer Complaints & Reviews
We booked a hotel in Venice (you know Gondolas) through the **** site. Only at the time, we accidentally booked the room for 1 person rather than 2. The price was the same for 2 people as 1 so we called up to make sure that the room was really going to have at least a double bed rather than a single. It was the same price, right? I'm not sure how these sites are related to each other but it turned out our booking was actually made through **** (Expedia) so we were routed to their customer service department. Since we weren't canceling the reservation or anything like that, the original conversation seemed like it went well and we were told our reservation had been updated to reflect two people in the room rather than one and we were told that we were going to receive an email confirmation of the change that had been made.
Several days later we had received no email, so we followed up. Eventually, they found our reservation and sent us the confirmation email. Unfortunately, the email we received was now for a completely different hotel than the one we had booked. We had booked a 4-star hotel but this was a 3-star hotel, with horrible reviews by the way, for the same price as the 4-star. When we called them back, each time speaking to a different person seemingly in a different part of the world, they claimed that they couldn't find our original reservation for the first hotel and said that since the reservation was non-refundable there was nothing they could/would do. We were told to fax the details of all of our correspondence to some number but that proved a complete waste of time. When we called to follow up on the faxed information, the people we could talk to were never where our faxed information was and even after talking to a manager' who didn't have access to the faxed information and said he'd check into it, we were told that their database reflected only the reservation at the 2nd hotel and nothing about the original hotel so we were out of luck.
Our point was simple. We had a correspondence from them to show that our original reservation was with a different hotel and it was their mistake not ours to change our reservation from the hotel that we had selected to one that they had selected for us. As such, we were not responsible for this 2nd hotel room. Their position was that they had already paid the 2nd hotel and since the 2nd hotel wouldn't refund them their payment, we couldn't change anything and they wouldn't refund us our payment. Eventually we just gave up and just booked the original hotel directly, paying more of course and then disputed the credit card charges with our credit card company that showed up for ****. This dispute is currently ongoing but hopefully we won't have to pay for the hotel we didn't use.
Finally, to add insult to the injury, after we had returned from our trip we received an email from **** offering us a discount on future bookings as result of our stay at the original hotel we had booked in our original reservation. Keep in mind the comments above: they had claimed that they had no record of our original reservation! Please be warned and be wary of these people. $500 is a non-refundable charge for a hotel that we didn't book and ultimately didn't use.
