
Barbara of Bakersfield, CA on Aug. 27, 2002
On July 30, 2002 I made a reservation for a room at the Clarion Ventura Beach hotel via the Internet and Travelnow.com.
I requested a room for 3 adults and the description of the room implied that it had two beds. After entering all of the required information including my credit card, and pressing the button to proceed with the reservation I was presented with a confirmation screen.
The confirmation screen came back showing a room with only 1 bed. I certainly was not going to jam 3 adults into 1 bed. After looking through all of the screens and printouts I discovered that Travelnow.com did not provide a phone number on any of them. I received an email confirmation immediately, but it only provided an email address and physical address.
An email address is not an acceptable way to resolve a problem. A business should always provide a phone number.
I called the Clarion and they couldn't help me because they didn't get the on-line reservation information for several hours.
I had no choice but to cancel that reservation, on-line, and book a room with another hotel. This time I used the phone and called a different hotel directly.
When I received my credit card statement the charge for the hotel had been cancelled but there was a $10 cancellation fee. My credit card statement also had a phone number for Travelnow.com. I called Travelnow.com and talked with a very nice girl named Rachael. She told me that I should have ignored the cofirmation screen because it was incorrect in showing that the room only had 1 bed. The fact that their website shows incorrect information should be enough to get the penalty waved, however, it was not. She talked with her manager and the manager said that the penalty would stand.
My feelings are that Travelnow.com or any business should be required to provide their phone number at the time of purchase. Also, if a business presents wrong information on the Internet or any where else, for that matter, they should not be allowed to charge you a penalty for cancelling a service or returning a product.
The consequences that resulted from this episode were only a $10 cancellation fee, 30 minutes to an hour of my time trying to resolve the issue, an enormouse amount of aggravation, and loss of revenue to the Clarion Hotel or any others that use Travelnow.com for on-line reservations.