bette s.

I work aboard vessels and get deployed for months at a time. I own a car that is not in use during my deployments. I have suspended normal auto coverage with multiple previous car insurance companies, most of which just give a refund on any current premium paid. A refund of the difference between the normal driving insurance and the cost to put the vehicle in storage and only have bare minimum coverage because the vehicle will not be getting driven during that time.

This company told me they refund the difference at the end of the storage time period and that I had to pay full premiums throughout the storage time frame. Okay, that is a different way of doing it but I was at the time fine with it. I was gone May-October and am owed a 70% refund of premiums paid during that time. I contacted Geico in October when I returned to restore the full policy and request the refund. Now they are saying the type of storage plan my policy was coded (by them!) is for military only. Nothing was said about that at the time. But hey, I happen to be military. So now they pretend it is back under review. This has been going on over 6 weeks. Today I filed a complaint with my state agency that oversees auto insurance. I encourage anyone getting jerked around by this company to file a complaint with the agency in your state that oversees insurance companies. If you can't find that office, file a complaint with your state Attorney General's office. This company is moving the goal posts after the fact and changing the rules after they collected a full premium. They lied to my face at the time I made the request to suspend coverage and continue to lie to me every time I call to find out the status of my refund. I am sick of this. I've never made a claim, had a speeding ticket, they already get a healthy premium from me and I've never made a claim. That is not enough for this greedy company. If they had been honest at the time I contacted them prior to my deployment, I would have just cancelled their insurance for the time period I was gone. Other companies do this the right way but Geico is just out to gouge as much money as possible out of you without offering basic value or customer service in return.

This is a horrible outfit that gives spammers the ability to text the living sh** out of you even when you are on the DO NOT CALL list like I am. They pretend they have ethical standards on their website and slop the responsibility for contacts on to their end user, but the reality is they are just a scumbucket operation giving scammers the ability to create any fake 'local' number they want, any fake header they want, and then text people who never agreed to be bombarded this way. It is so bad I have filed a complaint with a Florida police department over one spammer I tracked down using this program. I am filing a complaint with the Secretary of State also. This company has no ethics and needs to be shut down,

This company is owned by TripAdvisor, so you will see them on the TripAdvisor site. I booked a skip the line' ticket for an attraction in Paris. Not only was my skip the line ticket totally ignored by the venue, I paid double the face value for a ticket that I could have had for a lot less and been in the venue faster. The tour company that Viator claimed managed this attraction ("My Genie in Paris") was a no show, didn't return calls, was impossible to reach. Viator is also impossible to reach, no phone number, no info. I had to contest the charge with my credit card company. Go to the reviews for this company on Yelp-- almost 100% negative experiences. Don't believe what you read on the TripAdvisor site about this company because it is owned by TripAdvisor.

I have used this site about 2 years. I received my first cash fairly fast. Once you get your first cash out, you will notice that it is much harder to earn going forward. Recently they have capped how much you can earn daily for activities like the games section, giving you an 'aw, snap!" blocker telling you that you maxed out after earning a whopping 15 cents. The also started something new of requiring your phone number in order to request a cash out. I had to do this and now I am getting flooded with robo calls to my phone that is registered with the Do Not Call list. Their site claims they only need your number to 'verify' your account but of course they do not need a phone number to mail you a check. They claim your info is confidential but that is just a bald faced lie. Everything about that site is about selling your info, opening you to bogus surveys that ask for things like your Facebook log in, etc-- that is just a poor attempt at identity theft. Oh, and while we are on the subject of surveys, I used to work in the survey industry. Once a survey asks for your demographic information, it is finished enough for that survey to use to get paid from their client. However, the surveys on the Inbox Dollars site will have you complete the whole survey, then ask for the demographics, then you get a message saying you didn't qualify. YOU HAVE ALREADY COMPLETED THE SURVEY. It is completely wrong and fraudulent to collect the survey and then claim the person doing the survey didn't qualify. Inbox Dollars is getting paid for a completed survey, they just aren't paying the user for it. It is a tedious waste of time and recently I am seeing a lot of complaints from people who have earned enough to finally cash out and when they go to cash out they are told that their account is not valid and Inbox Dollars won't pay them. Go to their Facebook page and read all the negative comments posted daily. It is not worth your time and they will waste your time and keep changing the requirements so you will never cash out.

I have used this company very casually for the last couple of years to make a handful of bookings. I also read their reviews posted by other guests, as that gives me insight into places I might be staying.

Recently I booked a hostel through their site in Barcelona. The booking as marked as 'non refundable'. Long story short, the hostel could not find my booking, said I wasn't showing up in their system. This was the day before I was to stay there, so I had to book elsewhere. Then I got an email from that hostel saying 'no refunds'. So, apparently they had now found my booking and were letting me know they'd charge me in full despite telling me on the phone they couldn't find it and hostelworld would refund my money.

Going back and forth with Hostelworld, they said the hostel would bill me, not them, so I needed to take it up with them. Actually, when I talked to my credit card company, there were 2 charges, one from Hostelworld for a deposit and one from the hostel for the full amount. Hostelworld has a statement on their website to the effect that if a hostel can't find your booking, they will refund the full amount plus give you $50 toward a future booking. Well, they have absolutely zero intention of honoring that promise. I got a series of half literate emails from Hostelworld, the last one full of idiotic yellow hightlighting like they have a 7th grader in charge of customer relations. The names on these emails were equally juvenile, names like 'Ooomph'. Really? Is that made up or is the website outsourced to India?

In any event, I challenged these charges on my credit card despite Hostelworld claiming these were 'non-refundable' deposits. My credit card reversed the charges. I encourage anyone getting the same line of garbage about a booking being 'non-refundable' to challenge the charge with their credit card company. I really don't see how on one hand you can claim it is 'non-refundable' when I am also told my booking can't be found. Then, after I book and pay somewhere else, I am billed and told there are no refunds. There was no apologies for any of these screw ups or the stress caused by having to find another place on short notice.

Also after talking to the arrogant pr*ck at the hostel, I don't believe all the 5 star reviews for that hostel. Now I suspect the reviews I have always relied on are also fake or greatly embellished or maybe just the more negative ones get weeded out. There is no way every guest who stayed at that place posted such an out of this world glowing recommendation and then I encounter what I encountered on the phone. It sounded like some mediocre place out in the boondocks run by a jerk who relied on the 'no refunds' policy to cover any lapse in actual customer service.

Well, I'm not playing the 'gotcha!' game with these fools. They don't honor their own website statements, they cut and paste the same response over and over when you contact them, and they don't guarantee your booking even though they say they do. Do yourself a favor and book direct with hostels or go with the Hosteling International site which is a network of 'real' hostels, not a bunch of dumps and commercial enterprises and chain hostels that call themselves hostels but probably wouldn't ever be listed on the Hosteling International site because they don't live up to the requirements of that organizations standard of measure for what can be called a hostel.