Only one word needed "SCAM".

In June, 2015, I purchased a gift card for hotelandresorts.com from restaurant.com to save money on a trip that I was taking 8 of my family on over Christmas. I found that you had to book your hotel room through the hotelandresorts.com website to get a small per night discount at a Hilton property. I booked 2 rooms for 7 nights at the Embassy Suites in Milpitas, California. While the discount was small, because I booked 2 rooms for 7 nights, I did save close to $150 using the gift card that cost me less than $20a good deal, or so I thought!

The process was Hotelandresortcard.com charged my credit card and then they in turn booked the hotel rooms using their American Express card. I got my room confirmation from them and double checked with Embassy Suites to make sure I indeed had confirmed room reservations (I had to have them link those rooms to my Hilton account number, though). After spending one night in the hotel, I was alerted that Embassy Suites was charging both rooms to my card that I had given the hotel for incidentals. I went to the front desk and they told me that they had run hotelandresortscard. Coms American Express card 10 times and it was declined each time----so they were charging me for the rooms that I had already paid hotelandresortcard.com for.

Hotelandresortcard.com has NO customer service telephone number so the only way I had of contacting them was to go to their website and fill out a form explaining the problem and ask them to contact me ASAP. To this date, THEY NEVER HAVE CONTACTED ME. I went to the hotel manager to see if they had a way to contact hotelandresortcard.com since they claim to be a Hilton business partner. The manager had no idea who they were. I called Hiltons customer service and got transferred three times to different departments and no one at Hilton could give me any contact information either. Finally, I called restaurant. Coms customer service department to see if they could help me since they were the ones who sold me the gift certificate (which they are still selling on their site.) I finally talked to a rep who said she would put in an urgent request to fix this problem.
On day five at the hotel (after being charged the entire hotel bill on MY credit card), I went to the front desk to see if they could send me an email documenting that hotelandresortscard. Coms credit card had been declined several times so I could dispute the charges on my credit card. For some reason, I asked them to rerun their credit card----and this time it went through---a miracle.

Bottom line, THE HASSLE IN USING HOTELANDRESORTCARD.COM IS DEFINITELY NOT WORTH WHAT LITTLE I SAVED AND WOULD NEVER USE THEM AGAIN.

UPDATE: a month after this occurred I got an email from the hotel saying that the American Express card given to them by hotelsandresorts.com was fraudulent and asked me to provide additional information. As luck would have it, I just so happened to get an "customer satisfaction survey" email from hotelandresorts.com that week (the first I had heard from anyone at that company). I shared this horror story in my survey response and sent the email contact to the hotel. I was then copied on several emails back and forth between the hotel and them and had to ask to take me off the CC list since this was no longer my concern. I eventually got a $100 restaurant. Com gift card for my "trouble".

I saw their sds about savings - how much you can save, but they really arent true. This isnt a dollar for dollar card where if your stay costs $300 you csn use $300 of your card to pay for it. Nope, its just thst you get around an 8 or 9 percent discount on published rates. Say the rate is $200, they`ll give you a discount of $19 per night - and charge your hotelresort card for that discount of $19. So when you buy one of these cards, first you're limiting yourself to Hilton owned hotels - in smaller towns, that's a Hampton Inn, no other hotels qualify. Second, you're actually paying for a discount, a limited one.

Actually, you would do better by buying a AAA or AARP membership for a lot less money and get a bigger discount. I did some checking, comparing savings by going to the hotel`s website first, getting the rates for my stay with AAA discount, and then going thru the hotelresortscard website to see their discount. IN ALL cases, the triple A rate was less money - hotel after hotel. With AAA you get 10% discount, with hrcard, you may only get 9%., plus theyll limit it the discount to $25 per night. They have reservstion room limits in some properties where they tell you "their" rooms are fully booked, and extra fees for this and that.

I'm so glad i did all this research before buying one of their cards. My first warning/red flag was when they said everything had to be done through their own website. When a company says that, it means they control everything - it's the biggest warning sign you'll ever come across. If you want a better hotel travel card, get a triple AAA membership. You'll get hotel discounts from just about any hotel, you can get travel guides, help with reservations, passport photos - an entire range of benefits. Ive belonged to them since i began driving. But non drivers can belong too. As for the hotelandreseorts card, stay away from them; it's a SCAM