Hotels.com - process allowed selection of airport and hotel which were over 500km distance apart in Punta Cana, DR with no support - upset with inflexible customer service

# 19 for August 26, 2003

Complaints.com received the following consumer message on August 25, 2003:

From:

RE: Hotels.com - process allowed selection of airport and hotel which were over 500km distance apart in Punta Cana, DR with no support - upset with inflexible customer service

Dear Hotels.com, I would just like to let the board, your customer service, marketing and PR departments know that I will be taking my business elsewhere in the future and encouraging others to do the same. Your system at Hotels.com allowed me to select a final airport and hotel destination that were over 500km apart in a foreign country with a foreign language. This happened even with my attempt at contacting customer service and reviewing maps of the Island. Since the system allowed me to select the hotel and was able to select an airline for Punta Cana I believed the two were connected.

Further more since this was a vacation selection I expected transportation to be provided to the Hotel like any other travel agency would provide. I was not aware of this until we arrived in the Country that the distance was over 500km since at no time did any system or agent notify us of the distance between the two like they did between flight legs. How should I know an Island the size of Maryland would have over 5 international airports. I flew into Punta Cana, DR with my wife and two daughters. Upon my arrival was when I was notified that there was over a 500km distance between the airport and the hotel I reserved. No number for Hotels.com was provided on my internary or through follow up e-mails. The number on the Intinerary provided was for the booking agent/company. (No support there). When I finally reached Hotels.com they did not provide any support, service or assistance either. I ended up renting a car and driving the distance. To my dismay the roads were in pretty bad conditions and driving conditions in general were pretty bad.

On top of that at night the locals attempted to break into our car while waiting at a stop light. Needless to say this was a very traumatic experience which I do not ever intend to repeat. Luckily I was able to arrange a local charter to fly my family back to Punta Cana to avoid this experience on our return trip home. This whole experience cost me an additional $1,000.00 and potentialy something even worse. I understood your policies and will not deny I accepted your terms. I expect since you were providing the service to look out for my families wellfare as a customer. My only argument at this point is that your customer service is non existant, and you don't seem to care about your reputation nor your customers very much. For the sake of your investors and company as a whole, I would suggest that you take a good look at your systems, fail safes that provide safety for your customers, and consider more deeply how you present the hotels and airports in foriegn countries. I hope that your company learns something from this and don't forget that customer service after the sale is a very important part of building a succesful long-term business. Sincerely, Doug Hansen