You didn’t ask whose fault it was; if you had, I’d have said it was the fault of the hotel, or of Orbitz. Instead, you asked what you could do to get back at them. I told you: Report them to Orbitz. Because I’m such a nice guy, I threw in some extra information: that if you had called Orbitz first, they might have been able to make it right for you, and that although they may still be able to, it’s less likely now.
If you’re always this nice to people trying to help you, I don’t blame the hotel managers for not going to any extra trouble to get you another room, and I hope they don’t lose too much business because of this. Fortunately, if you call Orbitz now, they’ll probably realize that it’s too late to do anything and that anyone too stupid to call the booking agency in that situation can’t be relied upon to offer any sort of evaluation of a hotel’s service.
That leaves with the second best option for getting back at them, which is probably Cat Fight’s suggestion of TripAdvisor. I don’t know the site, so I don’t know if people who use it will also be able to tell from it that they should ignore your reviews. I can’t imagine it will be too hard for them to figure out, though. Just tell your story like you did here.
I work in a reservations office for a resort, and we get online bookings through a couple of the companies. On the one hand, this is good, people come and they get a lower rate and the rooms get sold and all and everybody’s happy.
BUT…if there’s a problem, I can’t do anything! You have to go through them. This is…not fun.
I strongly recommend making bookings directly; I can do a hell of a lot more for you a hell of a lot faster than they can if there’s a problem. And if we have a really good package going I promise you can get a better overall rate (that being room plus passes, usually) through me or my coworkers, assuming availability is there.
Actually, I had no idea Orbitz was even involved until the hotel brought it up. I made the reservation through the airline I traveled on, so my first call was to them. Predictably, they take no responsibility for this either, so I’ll be slinging poo at them also.
It seems the whole system is designed such that all parties involved can plausibly deny responsibility. The suggestion of booking directly with hotels may be a good one.
But…
The hotel didn’t say they lost the reservation or didn’t receive it from Orbitz or the airline or whomever. They said (perhaps in a moment of accidental honesty) that they overbooked. So I hold them, and the practice of overbooking in general, primarily responsible in this instance.
I booked a room and paid for it three weeks in advance. I don’t think it’s asking too much that they should maybe, perhaps have kept it for me.
People don’t call ahead and confirm their reservations anymore? Serious question; I don’t know, because the only time I travel is on the USPS’s dime and I stay in the USPS’s housing. I do call ahead to confirm, though.
Former desk clerk here. While it’s fun to lash out at individuals, the ma and pa owners are probably the least culpable here, and chances are that you are going to make a couple of honest people’s lives hell for something they had almost no control over.
Orbitz is a shitty company. It is actually more of a racket than anything else. They own almost all of the online booking companies, and charge hefty fees (at least ten bucks, on a fifty buck hotel room) to anyone using their service. Anyway, what they do is cut deals forking over cash to the franchise headquarters in exchange for listing their hotels. Individual hotels owners- who are basically small independent business people renting the franchise name- see none of this cash. Since Orbitz owns everything, the franchises have no real choice but to go along anyway. While an individual hotel can afford to lose the few reservations that Orbitz brings in a night, the company as a whole cannot.
But the hotel owners are the ones that get stuck being required to deal with Orbitz’s system, no matter how shitty it is. Orbitz overbooks, overcharges, randomly makes and loses reservations, communicates using obscure technology, and generally just does what it wants and leaves the franchise owners barely informed and completely out of control of what it has done. It’s not unusual to even lose money on Orbitz rooms.
So the hotel owners end up stuck with messes that are not their fault, they probably didn’t even know about, and have no capacity to fix. And yes, the really do live at the hotels. Behind the front desk of small hotels is usually a little apartment where they raise their kids, eat their meals, sleep, and rush out constantly to deal with guests. Odd hours are part of the life, but it does get wearing when you are being hounded about stuff you genuinely cannot do anything about.
They could have provided you better service- we always made a point to go above and beyond to make any overbooked guests happy, even though basically nothing can ever really make them happy- but really you weren’t their guest, they probably had nothing to do with booking or overbooking you, and they know they will probably never make money off you. It’d be human kindness for them to be nice to you anyway, but if you were getting irate I think you can see how they’d say “I just don’t have the energy for this.”
Whether Orbitz or through an airline as a package deal, your point of blame should rest on the agency through which you booked. If you had booked directly with the hotel, then I’d say be angry at them. It sounds like one of many instances, though, where a third party has made an error. even sven’s post has some more details.
This is always best practice; even moreso for airlines. If you find a great deal, it’s always in your best interest to book directly with the hotel or airline.
You can blame the practice of overbooking, but by doing so, you’re severely limiting your future travel options. As another poster pointed out, in this day and age, it’s rare to find a hotel that doesn’t overbook as standard practice.
no, no one does anymore. For one, Airlines specifically tell you not to and that it is unnecessary.
Regardless, this wasn’t a failed reservation situation. They had his reservation. They had his money. They didn’t have a room for him. No amount of confirmation would’ve changed that fact if he’s pulling into the hotel once everyone else has taken rooms for the night.
so the fact that they may not make money off the transaction is license for them to not care about it?
so the fact that they willingly became franchisees of a chain which willingly entered into a booking contract with Orbitz absolves them of their own responsibility to take 10 fucking minutes and count up the number of guests they are booked for a in a given night with the number of rooms they have?
Perhaps you should read the clickwrap terms you agreed to with Orbitz, which guarantee you that they’ll find another hotel room for you (among other things) if your reservation isn’t honored.
If you’d like to pursue an action against the hotel, you should of course feel free to do so. However, you might find, back in the real world, that the people you’ve given money to are much more inclined to help you than the people that aren’t.
No, it’s the fact that they were (probably) not the ones who overbooked you and there is a good chance that Orbitz’s arcane system probably never even bothered to tell them that they decided to overbook the “Orbitz” block of rooms. As mentioned, Orbitz runs by it’s own rules and just kind of sends people and their problems randomly over to your hotel. From their point of view, since Orbitz decided to book you for a room that didn’t exist, you are Orbitz’s problem and are not and never were their customer. You’re just some guy who Orbitz for whatever reason decided to claim had made a reservation for. It’s like if I walked around telling everyone that Starbucks was giving away free cups of coffee- they are not going to be impressed when you are mad at them because* I *promised you cofee.
Hotel owners only accept Orbitz because it’s a near-monopoly that they are strong-armed protection-racket style to pay into. But it’s a shitty paracidic company that offers shitty customer service (because they know the customers will blame the hotels) and screws both of you out of about ten bucks a night.
I took a trip in '08 that involved rooms booked through Orbitz at several different hotels. In every case, I was treated exactly as I would have expected to be treated if I had booked direct, and I got a better price than direct booking would have given me at the time I was making the plans. Was I really just lucky that these hotels all had rooms ready for me when I showed up?
Here is the website for a personal injury attorney from Dallas who is “investigating” (i.e., considering filing lawsuits against) various hotel chains for overbooking. He was mentioned in this New York Times article on overbooking.
I had something sort of similar happen to me once. In my case, I’m fairly convinced that it was the hotel that was running a bait and switch through Orbitz. Story in parenthesis if anyone cares to read it.
From that point on, I find the hotel on Expedia or some other site, then go onto the hotel’s own web site to book the room. I’m not a huge world traveler who stays in hotels all the time, but in each case the rates were identical. The other pluses for booking directly with the hotel is that the credit card isn’t charged until you actually stay and you can cancel/change plans much more easily.
{Long story: I was going to Orlando and found a very nice sounding hotel for a low price with a name something like Rolling Lakes Suites on Orbitz. On Orbitz there were pictures of large rooms, swimming pools with a hot tub, and other pretty pictures. When I got to Orlando, we drove up to Rolling Lakes Suites, up their long winding drive, and to the gate house where we were told that we had to check in across the street. Across the street was Rolling Lakes Inn - which was an extremely seedy dive. Seems we were actually booked there.
There we talked to the manager through bullet-proof glass and got our room key. The room was filthy and the bed sagged noticibly to one side. It was in walking distance to both a pawn shop and a liquor store, but other than that had nothing to recommend it. So we went back to the front desk and handed back the key - since even if we didn’t end up at Rolling Lakes Suites there was no way we were going to stay there. Drove back to Rolling Lakes Suites and was told that they had nothing to do with it, they had no control of the pictures Orbitz posted on their site. They had no control of the address Orbitz had listed on their site. Etc. Etc.
So I happily called Orbitz in the front lobby - and was placed on hold for a long time. During which time, I struck up a conversation with every person who walked into the lobby. “You go ahead, I’m on hold. I’m talking to Orbitz because they aren’t honoring my reservation here. They say my reservation is with the hotel across the street, but they listed this address and posted pictures of this hotel.” Then Orbitz was going to fax something to the hotel. As we waited I again told anyone who walked up to the desk to go ahead of me and explained the mix-up- loudly. We were finally given a room. I’m sure it was more to shut me up than because they had straightened it out with Orbitz. They told me that the same company owned both Rolling Lakes Suites and Rolling Lakes Inn, so it’s not like RLI was poaching on their Orbitz site. More likely an “honest” mistake by the home office.}