Gary B.

My wife booked a reservation for a Hampton Inn in northern California while driving north on California's Interstate 5. She thought she was talking to the Hampton's reservation line, but she was talking to someone at reservations.com. The person at reservations.com took her request and our credit card info without mentioning that there is a $14.99 fee for booking through them. When we got to the Hampton, they did not have our reservation. My wife redialed the phone number she'd used and realized she was talking to reservations.com. It was then that she learned they had booked us into a Super 8 motel in upper New York State, roughly 3,000 miles from the California Hampton Inn she had asked for.

It has taken several long phone calls and much arguing to get these bozos to take the charges off of our card. They now say the charges will be removed within 10-15 days. Before I lobbied them into refunding the room charge in New York -- and their $14.99 service charge -- they told me several times they would not do a refund; the motel would not do a refund; and no one at the Super 8 motel was answering their phone.

Funny thing is that I had no trouble getting Carlos, the night manager at the the New York Super 8, on the line. Carlos, who is friendly and helpful, told me that he had zero control over the charges. That was up to reservations.com. Carlos did, however, quickly make sure our incorrect reservation was cancelled at his end. That was all he could do to help clean up reservation.com's error.

Seldom have I dealt with a company that is so quick to blow off a customer when the error is clearly theirs. Even the confirming email they sent, which did not arrive in my wife's phone until the next day, says the reservation is for the New York Super 8 in Middletown, but the address is that of the California Hampton Inn. It was a mistake. Everyone makes them, but not everyone lies to customers and makes them jump through hoops to correct an error made by their employee, a faceless person sitting next to a phone somewhere in India.