In which I inform you of the con artists known as Planigo.com

The BBQ Pit
1

Grrrrrr. I’ve had a bad afternoon.

The wife and I are going to the Champagne region in France for a few days in early June, and I still had to book a hotel. After all the usual websites (Expedia, Hotels.com, Kayak, etc) hadn’t given me any good results, I just googled “hotel deals in Reims” or something, and found a website called www.francehotelreservation.com, which gave me a nice selection of hotels. I found a nice three star one I liked, checked the availability, and wahey! They had a room for about EUR 79 a night. Fair enough, whip out the credit card, clickety click.

Five minutes later, the “confirmation” e-mail came in. I’ll abbreviate the e-mail convos as I have not the energy right now.

Planigo.com: “Hi, you booked through francehotelreservation.com, which is ours. Thanks for your confidence. Your hotel is unfortunately full. We will find you comparable accomodation within 24 hours.”

Me (smelling a rat): “Errr, no. Your website said the hotel had availability. This was 5 minutes ago. Your methods don’t inspire confidence. Cease any bookings on my behalf, and don’t you dare charge my CC.”

Planigo.com: “Hi! You’ll be happy to know we found you a comparable hotel! It’s a two star, at EUR 89 a night!”

Me: “I SAID NO BOOKINGS, COCK GOBBLERS. I REFUSE THIS RESERVATION. DO NOT CHARGE MY CC OR ELSE.”

Planigo.com: “Hi! Your reservation at Hotel de la Merde has been made. Should you wish to cancel, our usual cancellation policy applies.”

Of course, I hadn’t read that entire 20 pager I OK’d when I clicked “Confirm”. :rolleyes:

Sure enough, there it was: any cancellation resulted in a fine worth 15% of the original booking amount. All right, that only amounts to about EUR 25, but I’ll be damned if I let these cunts take my money, right?

I called the hotel itself. The one Planigo.com said was fully booked, yeah?

“Oh no monsieur, no problem, plenty of rooms available! Also, we have not been contacted today by Planigo…”

If I had any doubts left about this being a scam, they had been evaporated now. I’d been had, dammit.

All right, one last e-mail to the offenders:

Me: “LISTEN UP, YOU SHIT LICKERS. THE HOTEL WASN’T FULLY BOOKED. YOU LIED. DON’T CHARGE MY CARD OR I’LL GO MEDIEVAL ON YOUR ASS.”

Silence on the other end, for a good two hours.

So, I got on the phone with MasterCard. They’d already charged my card for EUR 1, surely just to see if it wouldn’t bounce. The helpdesk guy was sympathetic to my plight, and issued a new CC free of charge, immediately blocking my current one. As a result, I can’t use my CC for a week, but that’s better than letting these thieving bastards take any more of my money.

Further Google searches revealed pages and pages of similar complaints. That’ll teach me to be careless about an online company I don’t know already. But what unbelievable SHITS. Turns out they’re French, but operate out of a PO Box in Monaco, for some reason under Swiss law, with a helpdesk in Romania. Yeah.

(All right, I made the e-mails a tad more colourful, but fun would a polite exchange have been. In a fucking pit thread.)

So, in short: avoid Planigo.com and its affiliates like the fucking plague, for they suck major ass.

Thanks for letting me vent. :slight_smile:

2

Oh, and to add: the direct price at the hotel was EUR 4 a night LESS than what Planigo.com had originally tried to charge me.

3

Who are you pitting, again?

ETA: I agree with the shittiness of them lying about the hotel being full and not even contacting them. That’s scammage, right there. But you’ve been on the internet long enough to know that you should do even the slightest bit of research on a company you’ve never heard of before before you cheerfully hit the “OK, Confirm payment!” button.

4

Well, I’ll be damned. An e-mail just came in.

Yeah, right. After they tried for 6 hours to charge a blocked credit card, no doubt.

5

Oh, I fully agree. I should have been a lot more careful. It just irks me that the ONE time I’m careless, wham, there you go, scam city.

6

At least they ponied up and resolved it to your satisfaction. If there wasn’t compelling evidence to suggest that they’re scamming you out the ass, I could see how it could be chalked up to a technical glitch, though. Their software, for instance, may not be able to complete the transaction with said hotel’s software, and interprets it to mean that it’s full. They try to find you something similar, and there ya go.

I’d blame the first few emails on a poor customer service drone who can’t read.

Not that I’ll ever do business with these people, though. :wink:

7

A glitch? Theoretically possible, sure.

But three years and nine pages of complaints can’t be wrong…

8

If it makes you feel any better I had a similar experience with a company/product called Orasure. The craptastic thing was that I had used their service/product twice before so I had thought it would be a legit transaction!

Orasure is an oral swab that checks for the HIV virus. It is a legitimate product that I had made use of twice when I was in college because the orasure company sent doctors to the campus and provided the service free of charge. I have a tremendous fear of needles so the idea of a test that didn’t require them made me really happy. I would gladly pay the $29 to avoid being stuck with a needle once every 6 months so I ordered 2 of them from their website and paid via paypal. Two weeks go by and I receive nothing, so I emailed them to see if they at least had a tracking number or something. They didn’t respond so I contacted paypal and went through their complaint process that eventually refunded me all of my money. The company never once responded to me or to paypal. Obviously they were hoping I’d pay for it and forget about it until after the 30 day time limit you have to file a claim with paypal. :mad:

9

There’s your compelling evidence to suggest true scamming at work. :slight_smile:

10

I work with Hotel reservation software for a living. Many of these resellers are set up with an allotment of rooms. Once those rooms are sold it appears to the reseller that the hotel has no availability. An example, a hotel might have 20 king units. They usually run at 15 sold for a certain time period. They have 3 resellers. The hotel allows overselling by one room. So they give each reseller 2 king units to sell. If all the resellers sell out, they are -1 for the unit type but they expect that. Once the reseller sells the units that they have allocated, it appears to the reseller that the hotel has no inventory to sell even though there are units still available at the hotel. So it is possible that the reseller thought the hotel had no availability while the hotel does actually have availability.

'Course, they could also just suck.

Slee

11

Does this mean that by placing a reservation through one of these sites you haven’t yet actually reserved a room at the hotel? Only the reseller has a record of the reservation? Because I have always just assumed that a reservation was exactly that, a reservation.

It sounds like you’d always be better off researching the hotels on these sites but contacting the hotel directly when you are ready to book. I always do that anyway since it has always been cheaper and with less cancellation restrictions, but I had no idea that there was additional risk involved regarding a reservation not actually being a reservation.

12

Do you know that the product really is legit? Sounds to me like they set up the booth, giving free tests to lure in potential customers. But the tests are fake, always giving a negative reading. (Who would take an HIV test if they knew they had it?) Then the typical poor, stupid, college student (not you, obviously) sends them money, and gets scammed. TPSCS doesn’t want to admit to being scammed, so they don’t do anything about it.

Come to think of it, I would make a great scammer!