Complaint Review: HotelTravel.com

I would like to thank Ms. White for responding to my case. I would like to clarify that the case is now closed. I would like  to thank PAYPAL for resolving the issue, because without them I would still be hanging out for a response. If you are traveller be aware of some companies in Southeast Asia that can use practices abnormal sometimes to some of us. To be honest if you paid money you must be served or refunded. The practice we know that some hotel's do charge customer for 1 night if they don't show up, and that is fair. But still I disapprove that you lose your right for complete refund if you cancel your reservation before your departure.
Best Regards
Tarek Subedar

Dear Sir,

My name is Megan White, I work at HotelTravel.com as Customer Relations Manager. I saw your post yesterday morning and immediately took the initiative to personally investigate what had happened with your booking at the Helnan Chellah Hotel.

Your discontent is obvious and I understand it I would feel the same if this had happened to me too. Therefore, first and foremost and on behalf of HotelTravel.com, I would like to genuinely apologise for the serious, aggravation you experienced with our service.

At the same time, please do believe me where I say that this is completely atypical. In fact, since 1999 when HotelTravel.com started to operate, we have kept on successfully servicing thousands of loyal and repeat customers every day. In all fairness, the situation you found yourself in should never have happened. But it did, and I am sorry about that.

Therefore, I did my very best yesterday to find out what happened and how I could address this problem for you. So, please bear with me while I go through my feedback and the solution I put in place for you.

There are three different points, which I would like to share with you:

A Our Lack of Response to Your Emails:
I have to admit that this issue turned out to be a challenging one to address. All the evidence I gathered yesterday showed that it was a technical glitch in our email system, which prevented your messages from being delivered to us. This technical error is now being fixed by our IT department. In fact, I would like to thank you for your posting because without it, we would not have been aware of the problem, thus unable to bring a permanent fix to it and save other customers from facing the same issue. I am now in possession of all the emails you sent us, and I fully understand how anxious you were to get a reply from us. As HotelTravel.coms Customer Relations manager, I feel bad you had to face such a seemingly wall of silence caused by a technical issue, which is our responsibility. Please do accept our apologies for this. 

B - Hotel Had No Reservation:
I am not sure whether you are aware that hotels often receive their rooming lists (list of guests names) only 48 hrs, sometime the day before, guests arrivals. So, if you called earlier than 48 hrs, it is not surprising the property knew nothing about you coming, simply because it had not received your name yet. Thats also why no one at the hotel could help you too. When I looked at our (and that of our partner in London) reservation systems paper trail yesterday, your booking record appeared absolutely normal and confirmed all the way to the hotel, including your original reservation on the 5th April and your subsequent amendment on the 8th of April. So, having seen this happened before, I fear that, unaware of such an industry practice, you called the hotel a little too early (before 48 hrs of your arrival date). I trust I was able to clarify this particular point.

C Booking Cancellation:
On this matter, I traced back your reservation and the terms and conditions of the cancellation policy imposed by the hotel. For the benefit of all, I also need to clarify one point: hotel cancellation policies are never based on the guests date of departure as stated in your post. They are always based on the guests date of arrival. Thats an industry standard, worldwide. So, in your case, your date of arrival at the hotel was 13th April 2012. On the confirmation document we sent you (I have a copy with me), it states Cancellation Policy: If you cancel this reservation during 11th Apr. 2012 - 13th Apr. 2012 (GMT+07:00), it will result in a 100% cancellation fee of your full booking amount. This means that the deadline for cancelling your reservation without any penalty was the 10th April 2010. But your cancellation request came on the 12th April 2012, which was passed the due deadline. Not surprisingly, our system read this as defaulting from the cancellation policy and automatically applied the penalty as stated on your confirmation document. So, on this point, I am
afraid that HotelTravel.com was not at fault and enforced the cancellation policy dictated by the hotel for this specific booking. Bottom line is that the cancellation deadline was missed and therefore do not qualify for a refund.

However, since HotelTravel.com is definitely a genuine serious company, I took it upon myself to get back to the hotel on your behalf. I am pleased to inform you that:

1)   After several discussions, the hotel has agreed to exceptionally waive the cancellation fee for you;

2)   Consequently, I have also instructed our accounting department to initiate the refund of your booking for its full value.

(Please note that credit refunds normally take up to 10 working days before being available on the bank account you used to pay for the booking).

Furthermore, to make up for the inconvenience you experienced, and in a hope that you will give HotelTravel.com another try, I would also like to also offer you a US$25.00 credit on your HotelTravel.com account, which you can redeem on your next purchase with us. We will email you full details on how to use this voucher at the email address you used to make your booking.

At this juncture and in response to your statements questioning the legitimacy of HotelTravel.com, our companys head of public relations, asked me to insert the following section in my reply to you:

HOTELTRAVEL.COM LEGITIMACY
1 HotelTravel.com is a Genuine Business
Since 1999, HotelTravel.com has been operating as a legal business, as authorised by the several
governments-issued trade and business licenses it owns. We are incorporated in 14 countries; we employ hundreds of staff from 32 nationalities who speak 20 different languages. We have successfully served millions of customers in 10 languages, 24/7, worldwide. Finally, we have thousands of contracts with hotels and suppliers, which allow us to offer our customers extremely competitive hotel rates, at some 120,000 hotels around the world, year round, nonstop. Would it be correct to assume that on April 5 2012, you made your reservation request with us because you found a very attractive rate on our site?

2 HotelTravel.com and Its Customer Care
If you take the time to search for other complaints about HotelTravel.com, we know that you will not
find many. In fact, compared to the huge amount of complaints some of our competitors get, we believe it means that for the last 13 years, our company has actually been doing a great job. The reason why this is made possible is because HotelTravel.com is a medium size private company. We are not a faceless publically listed fully automated online travel agency. Our independence and
size allows us to put a real focus on our customer care instead of being solely driven by stock exchange quarterly results.

Customer care is core to our corporate culture. It is embedded in our brand statement Real People | Real Service | Real Choice unequivocally promoting our customers to be centre stage of all our operations. It is the keystone around how all my colleagues and I anticipate customer needs, deliver quality service and offer a freedom of choice to its clients. It is rooted in our daily work.

3 HotelTravel.com is an active member of several highly reputable worldwide travel industry
associations. We pay membership fees, we have membership IDs, we are invited to speak at their conferences and seminars, and the management of our company includes some of the most respected executives in our industry. When you have a minute, please have a search about our company and you will see hundreds of charity event sponsorships, and speaking event presentations by our executives and their teams.

Some of the travel industry
associations we belong to are (you can read many more on our site at: http://www.hoteltravel.com/network/aboutus.asp):

-         IATA: International Air Transport Association (membership ID: #96-6 2679 5)
-         PATA: Pacific Asia Travel Association (membership ID: #2123)
-         JATA: Japan Association of Travel Agents (membership ID: #42776)
-         HEDNA: Hotel Electronic Distribution Network Association (membership ID: #9630-0)
-         ASTA: American Society of Travel Agents (membership ID: #900148470)
-         TAT: Tourism Authority of Thailand (membership ID: #34/00278)

Again, we trust that you will be able to acknowledge that, if indeed HotelTravel.com was a rogue
business, it would be literally impossible for it to maintain such a reputable international exposure.

4 Finally, HotelTravel.com is a VeriSign Secured and Trustwave certified approved business, which allows us to use the most advanced online encryption technology available today. This means that HotelTravel.com offers and guarantees all its customers, the safest and most secure transactional environment current technology permits today, while ensuring the highest level of customers data protection when purchasing hotel products online with us. If you go on our home
page (http://www.hoteltravel.com/) and scroll right down to the bottom of that page, you will see their respective logos, which you must have already seen on other merchants websites. If you then click on either of those two logos, a browser window should open and display our official certificates.

The fact that we own such certificates is significant. It is key to know that they can only be awarded to businesses that can prove their authenticity and legality. There is no other way. Therefore, the very fact that we are allowed to publically display them, is a guarantee that HotelTravel.com is a legitimate business.

To conclude, I sincerely hope that I managed to somehow change your perception about HotelTravel.com. Our silence to your emails was not acceptable and I have done what I could to mend this. At the same time, your feedback allowed us to fix a technical error, which if not for you, may have gone undetected for an indefinite period. Your feedback definitely holds great value for HotelTravel.com, as we are always looking for ways to improve our service and enhance the overall customer experience. 

Finally if I may, I would like to invite you to take a little moment when making your next hotel reservation, and go over the terms and conditions of the cancellation policies, to ensure that for your own piece of mind, such a situation does not occur anymore.

I thank you for your patience. My reply might seem a little lengthy, but I felt you deserved a full and comprehensive explanation on what happened. You are welcome to write to me directly at the following email address:

megan.w AT hoteltravel DOT com
(Please replace the AT and the DOT by their respective obvious characters. This is avoid my email
address being picked-up and spammed by crawlers)

Yours sincerely,
Megan White
Customer Relations Manager
HotelTravel.com

Hi, I don't see what the problem is here and it doesn't look like this company is wrong. You just said that you cancelled 48 hours before, but your booking policy said you needed to give 72 hours notice. You were too late to cancelled, right? Just when you buy anything, anywhere, you always need to read the terms and conditions, right? Well, that's what I think.