Complaint Review: Priceline.com

Here's the BOTTOM line about Priceline.com...
Don't use them if your life depends on it!

A friend of mine recommended Priceline.com to me, and I'd thought that I would give it a try. What the heck? I could get a hotel room for any price that I wanted. So I bid for a Hotel Room in New Orleans for $89. 30 minutes later I checked back to see if the offer was refused or accepted. My offer was REFUSED. I made two more offers (one @ $99 per night and another at $119 per night) which in turn, were both refused.
Sad that my offers didn't get accepted, I went to Expedia.com (EXPEDIA is an excellent travel web site) and book a room there with no hassles.

At the end of the month, I get my credit card bill from MasterCard and find a charge of $400.56 for my hotel rooms from PRICELINE. This puzzled me, so I went online and checked any e-mails that I may have received since I "booked" these rooms. No e-mails from Priceline. This perplexed me further because how was I to know which hotel that they had booked me for? No confirmation numbers, no hotel names, no nothing. All I had were expired pages from Priceline that said "Your offer has been rejected." I put in my Priceline Hotel Confirmation Number that I had recevied from one the pages I printed out earlier that month that were still sitting at my computer. They had a Priceline Reference Number, so I typed it in into their web site ONLY TO FIND OUT THAT MY OFFER(S) HAD BEEN REJECTED.

So I thought, no big deal. I will contact their customer service department and they will fix all my problems. WRONG! Their customer service "people" are computerized machines who send automated messages to you and supposedly help you. They have not helped me at all. I have sent 5 e-mails back and forth back and forth. They have not credited my MasterCard. Instead, they insist that I am legally bound to their stupid, legal, mumbo-jumbo terms of service. THIS WAS A MISTAKE ON THEIR COMPUTER SYSTEM! IT WAS NOT MY FAULT! They insist that their computers don't make mistakes, but as I am very knowledgeable about computers (a little common sense doesn't hurt either) I knew that their was no computer capable of being perfect. I'm sorry, only God's perfect. ARGH! Hitting the phone lines with any 800 numbers that I could dig out, all I got were automated menus. NO REAL PERSON ON THE PHONE! Finally I get through to a real person thanks to this person who posted a thread on a message board at this link: http://forums.baddealings.com/t587.html
I was able to contact a real person, (a high ranking officer) but they refused to credit my MasterCard the charge. I yelled and screamed at them for having such a lousy company, but I knew that I wouldn't get anywhere at all. He hung up on me, and I was in the doghouse.

I called MasterCard, and now they are investigating this matter. I am going to present three items:
1. A summary of everything that has happened.
2. All papers that I printed out that day in early February.
3. 11 pages of online complaints that the good folks at MasterCard can read to see what jerks the people at Priceline.com are.
4. Any other suggestions?

Thanks,
-Ann
Salado Texas

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