I booked a very expensive hotel room in NYC through all-hotels.com. The payment for the one night stay was pomptly taken from my debit account the day after I booked. I thought that everything was fine, until I arrived at the hotel. The hotel concierge had no record of my booking. They searched through all their back records, and still nothing. The woman that I dealt with said that she had never heard of the company before, but tried calling their customer service line anyway. The person that she talked to basically said that they could not do anything at that time, and I would have to contact them directly. I ended up having to pay the hotel directly at that time in order to even get a room.
When I returned home from my trip I emailed customer service of the all-hotels company. They do not have a toll free number, and I had no way of calling their out of country number. I received a response asking me to fax them a copy of my hotel receipt. I tried faxing to the number that they provided (from kinko's) at least 5 times on 2 separate days. The fax number would never connect.
I finally got so frustrated that I scanned the receipt and attached it to the emails that I was now exchanging almost daily with the company. Twice I sent them an email, with the attachment in all sorts of different formats, and they kept telling me that there was no attachment. At this point I called my credit card company to have them help me deal with the situation. It just seemed very fishy to me that their fax machine was not working, and they seemed to have some sort of archaic email system that did not accept attachments.
Finally I spent $50 to have the receipt sent via fedEx to their office in Scotland. I followed the tracking of the envelope daily. When I saw that it had finally arrived I emailed them immediately to inform them that they had received my receipt and to ask what they were going to do with it. They told me that they had not received it! I sent back a very frustrated email with the tracking number, the date and time the envelope was signed for, and even WHO in their own office signed for it! At this point they acknowledged receiving the envelope, and assured me that they would look into my case. Now, finally, a month later, my money has been refunded to me. I will however, never see the $50 wasted on FedEx, or regain the time and frustration I wasted on simply trying to get a refund for a mistake that they made.
I definitely do not recommend that anyone use this company to book anything, especially if you live in the US. While I did eventually get my money back, their operations were shady. No working fax? no email attachments? suspciously unable to find my fedEx shipment until I gave them the name of their own employee who signed for it? no toll free number? I even gave them my phone number and asked them to call me so that I could actually talk to someone. They never did call.
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