When hotel sites don’t click

While checking the Web for a Miami hotel last April, David Manero, of Hyattsville, Md., found an irresistible deal: a $100 room at the Breakwater in South Beach offered by the Hotel Distribution Network (HDN), a discount reservations agency. That was $42 off the usual starting rate.
Manero reserved four nights and prepaid with a credit card. But when he and his family arrived in August, the property had no vacant rooms and was no longer affiliated with HDN, which is based in Sanford, Fla. Manero couldn’t reach an HDN operator, either, leaving him on his own to find another hotel. Two months, a dozen calls and countless e-mails later, he’s still waiting for an explanation.
For frequent patrons of online hotel-booking services, Manero’s saga may have a familiar ring. In recent weeks, the Washington Post has received correspondence from disgruntled customers of many major Internet hotel and travel booking sites (Hotels.com, Expedia.com, Travelocity.com, Quikbook.com, Orbitz.com, etc.); the sites of chains such as Days Inn and Starwood Hotels and Resorts; and some of the smaller agencies such as HDN. The complaints range from misplaced reservations to finding out they could have gotten a cheaper rate for the same hotel elsewhere.
“More and more you can get some fantastic deals for rooms on the Web,” said Bob Jones, a consumer advocate featured on OneTravel.com, a discount Web site. “But you have to be careful or else you could find yourself out of a lot of money with little recourse.”
Attempts to reach customer service personnel–if you can even find the phone number in the online maze–often lead to a labyrinth of recorded greetings, unhelpful form letters and ill-informed agents. When I called HDN to ask about Manero’s case, I was put on hold. “Your call is important to us,” a voice said at two-minute intervals. “There are four calls ahead of you.” After 40 minutes, I gave up.
Frequently offering discounts of 50 percent or more off regular rates, Internet hotel agencies can be a boon for travelers. And their popularity is growing: Forrester Research, a Cambridge, Mass., consulting firm, predicts that U.S. hotels will get roughly 15 percent of their revenue from online bookings in 2004, up from about 8 percent this year.