I’ve had my share of bad experiences with .com businesses, but this takes the cake.
I’ve been using Hotels.com
for several years and until now my experience with them has been good, so I never imagined that they would outright lie to me. Perhaps this post belongs in a forum somewhere, but it’s my blog and I’ll cry if I want too.

The story begins back in July when I booked a Vacation Package for two people which included a hotel and airfare with American Airlines. A few weeks later I called up to cancel the package. Before canceling the package, I checked the link to the terms and conditions for my package. This is what it said: Most fares have a minimum airline-imposed penalty fee of $100 (plus applicable taxes) per passenger for changes, plus any applicable increase in the new fare. Some tickets are non-refundable, but in some instances may be applied toward future travel (subject to individual airline’s policy, time restrictions and any applicable penalties). Some tickets do not allow changes. Fees stated above are estimates. Our agents will calculate final charges.

I decided that If I could get credit for the flight I would go
ahead and cancel the package. I called up and I was assured by several
Hotels.com reps that even though they could not credit me back for the
airfare, I would receive a credit with American Airlines to use for any
future airfare I chose with them. That was fine with me and I agreed to
it. I was told that i would receive an email with details regarding the
cancellation and how to use the American Airlines credit in the future.
Several days passed and I didn’t receive the email, so I called up and
asked what was going on. After being thrown around from rep to rep, I
was told that the e-mail had indeed been sent to me and perhaps my spam
filters were blocking it. I said that that was strange because I had no
spam filters up, and also that that was very odd being that the initial
email that was sent to me to confirm the package had no problem coming
through. The rep said that he would resend the email to me but that it
would take about 24 hours. A few days passed and I still had not
received the email, so I called up again to ask what was going on. Once
again, I got thrown around from rep to rep, often getting disconnected.
Finally a very rude rep told me that the email had been sent to me
already. After some arguing he agreed to send it out to me again.
Some
time passed and I did not receive the email with the credit
information, but because of my previous good experiences with
Hotels.com, I figured that I didn’t have to worry and that it was
probably just that AOL had some spam filter that had bounced their
email.

Tonight I called up to finally take advantage of my promised
credit. Once again I got pushed from one rep to another. Each rep
sounded lost and confused and said they couldn’t find anything on my
account regarding the credit. The last rep I spoke to had me on hold
for a total of 111 minutes. He finally came back on to the phone and
said to me that there never had been a credit that existed for my
flight and that the flight had been a "use it or lose it flight." I was
pretty livid when I heard that. I demanded to talk to a supervisor,
once again I was put on hold. But after some time waiting, I just gave
up and hung up.

I am outraged and appalled by the dishonesty
Hotels.com has mistreated me with. Perhaps if the amount they thieved
me out of had been less, I would forget about it because it’s not worth
the aggravation. But  $1179.54 is not a small amount of money to be
robbed of… and if Hotels.com can do this to me, they can do it to you.
Has anyone else had a similar experience with Hotels.com? Please let me know.