Hotels.com cancelled my booking

[Vivkins3]

We were supposed to be going away this weekend for 3 nights to a Biker rally at Weston Super Mare. We booked our hotel on 24th April and having received confirmation of the booking we bought our event tickets and booked our cats into kennels. This evening at about 5pm we had an email from Hotels.com saying the hotel was "unable to accept our reservation" - even though we'd booked 10 days ago. I've sent an email to hotels,com and I'm pasting it below. My questions: Does anyboyd know where I can find the registered office of Hotels.com in case I have to sue them? Is my credit card company liable for my out of pocket expenses? Hotels.com have (without my consent) "forced" the cancellation of the reservation by refunding my fee. Email sent as follows:

I booked this hotel on 24th April and you took £180 from my credit card for the booking on the same day. This forms what is called a "Contract". This evening you sent me an email saying that you were unable to honour your part of the contract as the hotel was unable to accept the reservation and asking me to call you “urgently”. I did so and spoke first to Keannerea who offered us some alternative hotels and guest houses but these were unacceptable to us. We had already looked at those hotels whilst researching the trip and rejected them because their Trip Advisor reviews were so bad. She said that if none of the other accommodation was acceptable, she could cancel the reservation. I told her that we had incurred other costs in the booking of this trip, ie Event tickets costing £40 and £80 kennel fees for our animals. I asked if she would also refund those additional costs and she agreed to do so. I therefore asked her to confirm that in writing by email before I agreed to the cancellation of the reservation. An email arrived within a few minutes stating NOT that Hotels.com would reimburse my Event tickets and kennel fees but simply cancelling the transaction and refunding my £180. I immediately replied stating that I had NOT agreed to cancelling the transaction and that you may NOT unilaterally cancel it without my agreement. After further argument she transferred me to Natalie Hudson who was also unwilling to be of assistance and transferred me to Nancy Boyd. Nancy Boyd told me there was nothing she could do as the reservation had been cancelled. She put me through to Norman Novair in “Customer Care” who told me that the only person who WAS authorised to agree to reimburse us for our costs was Nancy Boyd but she couldn’t do it because the reservation had been cancelled.
I repeat yet again that I DID NOT agree to cancel the transaction. As far as I am concerned, the contract stands and Hotels.com are in breach of it.
You have taken upon yourselves to refund the £180 I paid to you for my 3 night stay at the Rosita Hotel, but as that was done without my consent, the contract was not cancelled. I therefore demand from you further reimbursement of my Event tickets in the cost of £40 and £80 kennelling fee; total £120 UK Sterling.
If it is necessary to take this further, in addition to the above £120 I shall also be claiming from you compensation for my disappointment at being unable to attend the event, loss of enjoyment, the 3 hours of my time spent on the telephone this evening, the cost of telephone calls to your London number (not Freephone), time spent in correspondence, plus all costs and expenses I shall inevitably incur in pursuing reimbursement.
I would remind you that your own conditions state that if WE had wished to cancel the contract at this late stage,(ie, less than 24 hours before we were due to check in) we would be liable for 100% of the cost of the booking.

[tonywiltshire]

It is irritating and frustrating when something like this occurs, unfortunately it is not unusual and I must agree that your chances of recovering your out of pocket expenses or consequential losses are virtually nil, in a perfect world you would but this is far from a perfect world. All you can ask for is a good will or ex gratia payment but I doubt even this will be forthcoming.

[donnaanna]

Question Author
Yes we DO have travel insurance as we travel quite a lot. I don't believe though that anybody is entitled to "force" the cancellation of a contract by dint of refunding the payment.
10:02 Fri 04th May 2012 Report

Vivkins3 Question Author
Doesn't our credit card company bear some responsibilty too?

ok, good about the insurance!
with regards to the hotels.com, yes, theoretically you right, you did not instruct them to cancel. but also you have refused all their options of replacement to which their only course of action was to refund you what you paid as they are not able to deliver. they are not liable for the rest as not booked through them.

with regards to the credit card company they are not liable as the cost of hotel booking was refunded and the other services are not affected although without accomodation are no longer needed. credit card woudl refund if services booked and paid were not delivered, which is not the case.

the only way is via travel insurance.

[joko]

am i missing something here?

they have already agreed to pay your out of pocket expenses!

so why are you asking who else should?

the person who agreed to this cannot just magic up the cash instantly to pay you there and then - it is all computerised and such a payment may have to be authorised and signed off - before being sent to you.
a refund was already in place for you.


i suggest you contact them again - reiterating the promise made and asking when that payment will be made - i assume you will have to provide them with receipts for the amounts and proof.

[twix123]

I don't know why everyone expects that their credit card company should reimburse them when the original contractors are willing to make a refund. It always leaves the credit card company in the invidious position of having to pay out for things that are not their fault, which eventually costs every tax payer money as most credit card companies are ultimately owned, through Government intervention, by you and I !!

[joko]

very true twix - what started out as a good gesture by the card companies is now viewed as they are 'liable' and 'responsible' for any losses.

they will cover it, but it is NEVER their fault or 'responsibilty' why would it be? they have not done anything wrong!

[Prudie]

Would insurance cover you anyway when you were offered alternative accommodation that you chose not to accept? Personally I'd have gone with all that pre-planning and the purpose being attending an event you wanted to go to. I wouldn't have made my decision based on tripadvisor reviews, although interesting to read most places get a range of awful to great anyway, plus peronally I've only bothered to write bad reviews, not fair but human nature nonetheless.

[Vivkins3]

Keanneara agreed to refund all our costs if we agreed to cancel the reservation but when we asked her to confirm that in writing all she did was to refund our £180 and no written promise to pay our other costs. The other people to whom we spoke said that they could offer no (what they called) "compensation" for our out of pocket expenses BECAUSE the reservation was now cancelled. But they FORCED the cancellation of the contract unilaterally by refunding the £180.

Yes, we WERE offered "alternative accommodation" but when we checked them out on Trip Advisor, none of them had good reviews. In fact one of them had six reviews - one "average", one "poor" and four "terrible". Why should we be expected to accept lower grade accommodation because they had messed up the booking?

Travel insurance a no-no - there is a £50 excess.

[joko]

the fact that one place only had 6 reviews implies that they have probably had thousands of happy customers ...i have only ever felt compelled to leave a review at all if i am angry - as prudie says - its human nature
if you have a good stay, its what you expect so you dont think to comment at all...

so chances are the place is fine, with only 6 unhappy people - which isnt many at all really compared to how many people must have stayed there as a whole...

for all you know, those 6 people could have been very fussy people with unreasonable demands

[bednobs]

they didn't just decide to unilaterally cancel though did they - what else could they do? you said no to all the alternatives, and the hotel couldn't honour the original booking so the choices were to refund your money or keep your money for no reservation!

[Vivkins3]

We said "no" to all the alternatives they offered because the hotels they offered were all lower rated and/or had poor reviews. Why should we accept lower grade accommodation just because they messed up the booking? They should have set their sights higher and offered us BETTER accommodation rather than poorer. That would have been acceptable.

With regards to Jokos suggestion that the hotel with 6 bad reviews and no good reviews could have had "thousands of happy customers" - I doubt that very much somehow.

[bednobs]

i honestly get that, but i still don't understand what else they could have done OTHER than cancel your booking - your original was unavailable and you turned down the alternatives offered. Did you want them to just keep your money? We seem to just be going round in circles and i have to say i would also be pissed off i guess if it happened to me. I thought you had said in another post that there were no hotels available now anyway, and if there are other more expensive alternatives available then why haven't you just paid however much extra it is to prevent the loss of your other tickets and enjoyment of the event?

[Vivkins3]

If there were better hotels available then hotels.com should have found them and offered it to us. Why should we have to do the legwork AND pay more? Wealready spent several hours researching and choosing the original hotel.

[whiskeryron]

All this correspondence with regard to your problem has not corrected your loss, it is now May 6th & you have apparently lost the week-end trip you were so looking forward to, I am so sorry but the onus was on you to accept alternative accommodation when it was offered.

Ron.

[bednobs]

well then it sounds like you are cutting off your nose to spite your face. If i'd have really wanted to go and didn't want to lose out on the tickets i would have juysst phone the tourist office and asked them to find me somewhere.

[Vivkins3]

The onus was NOT on us to accept something of a lesser quality than we paid for. And hotels.com had from 24th April until 3rd May to find out that the hotel was "unable to accept" our reservation. But they left it until the last minute to tell us and then tried to manouevre us into lower rated THEIR fault ... THEIR problem ... THEIR liability.

End of topic.

[boxtops]

Vivkins - hotels.com might not have known until the last minute - they're an agency with thousands of hotels on their books. Next time, book direct with a hotel, then you clearly know where your contract lies, there is no need to use any third party.

[joko]

i dont understand why you are still complaining - they agreed to cover your expenses over the phone

they have refnded the fee paid, not they have to organise the other payments

as i have already said - dd you expect them to just pay up instantly to your cc?
they would need proof of payment and it needs to authorised through proper channels...its not a case of them digging out the petty cash box
have you asked them about their promise?
have they actually reneged on it?
or are you just assuming that because they didnt just hand you money that they are refusing
i suggest you ring them and ask them what they need from you in order to raise the moner order.

[bednobs]

you have had the legal view of this already - NOT their fault, NOT their liability NOT their problem.

[Vivkins3]

An update on this - the people who said that hotels.com were not liable were correct. As they were acting as an agent for the hotel, the hotel was responsible. The hotel acknowledged the problem but said it was the fault of their software and the suppliers of the software confirmed that in writing. After that the hotel said they would "ignore any further communication" from us and indeed they did. We advised them not to do so and said that if necessary we would issue a summons in the County Court and that if it became necessary to do so we would also claim loss of enjoyment and all costs & expenses we would incur by so doing. The hotel defended the claim and we had to travel to Weston Super Mare for the hearing. In their defence the hotel was able to produce only a certificate from Trip Advisor saying that they made nice breakfasts. We won everything we asked for and the hotel had to pay us £527.00. The moral to this story is ... ignoring an angry customer doesn't make them go away.