Hotwire Low Price Hotel Guarantee is a Phony Ripoff!!! They advertise "peace of mind" but will instead find every possible excuse to NOT honor their own guarantee!!
First off, I've never ever filed a complaint on the internet and have actually been a happy hotwire "hot rate" hotel customer for years.
That said, I felt compelled to share my recent experience with hotwire as it relates to their Low Price Guarantee for standard rate hotels.
I booked 1 night at a hotel for an upcoming trip and shortly after my booking realized that if I had gone directly to the hotel, I would have been able to book for approx. $20 less.
While not a huge deal, in principle I decided to call hotwire to invoke their guarantee since I assumed that their prices would not be beat and that I would indeed have "peace of mind".
This is where the (mis)adventures began...
1) first off, I went through 3+ hours of conversations with multiple agents and numerous calls
2) each of the agents were relatively incompetent as a whole and frankly several were difficult to understand given their accents
3) each one to a tee (seems to be company policy), would find ways to invoke some sort of "fine print" not obvious to the consumer to invalidate the claim. Often this ended in some rote recitation of the policy which I can plainly read myself and an inaccurate attempt to apply their arbitrary rule to my case
4) bottom line - I was told everything from "this policy only applies to hotwire guaranteeing price protection against their own price dropping post facto" to we're not going to honor this b/c it only applies to "pay now" vs. "pay later" standard bookings - a point that is moot given that I booked 1 night and the deposit is for 1 night.
5) I will specifically call out a manager "Raven" who kept reassuring me during the call that we will take care of/resolve thsi problem, only to follow that statement with "I'm sorry but we will not issue you a $20 credit". REALLY? That's resolving the issue??
At the end of the day, they can keep my $20, but the goodwill they lost from a long time customer and the negative word of mouth they've generated through this mishandling/false advertising of a guarantee will cost them far more!!