Expedia / Hotels.com / Hotwire: The Big, Ugly Rip-Off

Filed in National by on December 25, 2012

How do you feel about a corporation that tries to destroy the small businesses that it is partnered with? Which lies and claims small hotels are completely booked in order to route customers to more expensive ones?

Expedia, which owns Hotels.com, Hotwire, and Venere, is a big, fat rip-off:

Expedia and its many affiliates, including Hotels.com and Venere.com, invite people to come to their sites to book our hotel, the Luna Blue Hotel. Yet when people get to these websites they are told that our hotel is completely occupied for all dates now and in the future. If someone calls on the telephone, they are told that our hotel is going out of business! They are then directed to book another more expensive hotel, which provides Expedia greater commission. It seems that Expedia and its affiliates use small hotels like ours to attract people to their sites so they can get those people to book with bigger resorts. It is the classic “bait and switch” scam.

Read the whole story linked above, it will convince you to never book through Expedia or its affiliates ever again. And this is not an isolated incident: Expedia was fined €427,000 in France for pulling the same sort of scams. “Buyers were given information that certain hotels were full and were directed towards other hotels with whom Expedia and Hotels.com had commercial links.”

And a quick search of the internet reveals countless horror stories from customers, including travellers abandoned overseas without the return tickets they had paid for, refused cancellations, and massive price inflation, all paired with abysmal and unresponsive customer service. Don’t get taken, and don’t support fraudulent business practices.

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X Stryker is also the proprietor of the currently-dormant poll analysis blog Election Inspection.

Comments (3)

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  1. reis says:

    Priceline; the ‘name your own price’, not the Expedia-like non-negotiable price. Works for everything except airplane tickets.

  2. cassandra_m says:

    I use Expedia as a negotiating tool — to see what prices are out there so that perhaps the hotel I really want might come down in price. It mostly works. But for airline tickets you can typically get a better deal directly from the airline. In my experience.