I wish that I had read the original comments before using hotel.com for a recent reservation I made for a one-day stay to move my daughter into her dorm for college. I had to change the reservation (move it up by one day) and they wanted to first charge me a cancellation fee. When I explained that I didn't want to cancel my stay but needed to change the day to one day later, the representative told me that that could not be done because it was a nonrefundable reservation. The first customer representative was very rude, saying "well YOU made the reservation." I asked to speak to another representative. By the way, I don't understand why folks that get paid to provide customer service can't provide it in a competent, professional, and friendly manner. Why is it necessary to have an attitude with customers? After all, doesn't the customer indirectly pay their salaries? With so many unemployed folks out there, I am sure that there are plenty of educated and experienced customer service professionals that would be glad to have a job.
Anyway, after having to go through another set of the same phone prompts, I spoke to a gentleman, who was a bit more professional, but had the same attitude that somehow he was doing me a favor.
I will NEVER utilize hotels.com again and will tell all my colleagues and friends to search elsewhere.
I had a similar experience recently with their customer service and will never ever use them again. I really do think that hotels.com should review their policies and procedures and take a serious look at how they train (or don't train) their workers. It's fine for a business to run its operation in a way that gives a price break to customers, but with a steady reputation of bad service, eventually, the cost factor doesn't matter as much.
Are they encouraged to just pass the customer off to another representative but not before making them go through the same set of tedious prompts, perhaps hoping that they will just give up?
