Complaint about Expedia

DO NOT BELIEVE HOTEL RATINGS AND TRAVELER REVIEWS POSTED IN EXPEDIA!

For 6 month my husband and I were preparing for a vacation in Europe, a trip

of a lifetime. We booked all the details of our trip (hotels, plane tickets,

etc) via a travel agency based in US and everything was organized perfect by

my agent. However, our last stop of the Eurotrip was Vienna, Austria, and

as our agent told us she did not work with hotels in Austria, I decided to

choose a hotel via Expedia. It was my first and last time to have business

with them! I picked hotel Ambassador in Vienna that was listed as a 4 star

hotel, and had a very high rating based on the published customer reviews in

the Expedia website.

My experience in the hotel was horrible and after I came back in US (Aug 5,

2007) I wrote my customer review about the hotel. I have sent them several

reviews and they refuse to publish them on the web, I talked several times

to their customer service. Their response was that Expedia has the final

decision which customer reviews to publish and which to reject. They did not

want to explain the reason for rejecting my review. I guess they did not

want to publish the review because it was totally negative.

The hotel review I sent to Expedia is attached below:

Hotel Ambassador, Vienna

This hotel is hardly even a 3 star!

Expedia refers this hotel as a 4 star, others refer it as a five star.

However, the only high star thing in this hotel is its price! Once we

entered the room it had a bad smell that made us immediately open the window

to just hear the noise of the construction going on across the street. There

was an ashtray on the table but the staff confirmed this was a non-smoking

room. The room looked exactly like the single room of the Expedia virtual

tour. We have paid for a double room. The DOUBLE bed consisted of two single

mattresses put next to each other; so do not plan a honeymoon in this hotel!

The carpet looked old and not that clean, same for the bathrobes. The

bathroom was very small, and we had doubts if the fan was working. It had a

shower cabin only, a curtain around the shower actually. The curtain was

couple of inches shorter than it was supposed to be, so while my husband was

taking a 5 min shower the whole bathroom floor was getting wet. Not to

mention that when my husband tried to take shower for the first time the

drain was clogged and we had to call for a technician. Also, the shower gel

bottle was not renewed like it is done in the other hotels, the

\"Ambassador\" staff apparently thought that a single 1 oz bottle is enough

for 2 people for 3 days. The breakfast was not included in the price like in

the most of the other hotels. Also, it did not have a concierge desk and the

receptionist was having these functions as well. I definitely do not

recommend this hotel!

Damage Resulting = Consequences:

I do feel discriminated when my review was being rejected multiple times. If

you look on the Expedia web page and the traveler reviews about hotel

Ambassador in Vienna, you will see 14 out 15 positive reviews.

It seems to me that in order to sell a hotel better Expedia publishes the

positive reviews, and rejects the reviews of the unhappy customers.

The damage was:

I paid a 4/5 star price for a hotel that could hardly be rated 3 and the

last 3 days of my \"Dream Vacation in Europe\" left me with a bad taste in

my mouth for the whole trip, as Vienna was supposed to be \"The Grand

Finale\"...It was...in a way... but not the way we thought!

Damage for the other potential Expedia customers:

By carefully picking which review to be published Expedia creates false

image of the travel destinations and misleads customers!

I also feel very much hurt from their customer service attitude. I was told

Expedia decides which reviews to publish and which to delete even without

informing the customer who wrote the review.