I've seen a lot of 3rd party hotel booking sites screw up what sorts of room types or amenities a hotel has (all of them have done it at some point or another). But this is the first time I've seen one screw up this badly.
A certain third party site (who shall remain nameless but I'm sure other CSers in the industry can take a pretty damn good guess) is advertising super ridiculously-low rates for our hotel. And a guest booked through them for our hotel. And she got a shiny little confirmation number and everything.
Except there was a problem. Her reservation didn't show up in our system. Because we don't have a contract with this company. At all. We don't want one. And we are certainly not booking rooms that cheaply.
We went to their website and sure enough, I can book a room at my hotel for nearly half what I should be able to. It will allow me to do it. Except I really can't, because the reservation will never show up in our system because we don't work with the company in question.
The website says "3 others just booked this hotel!". I always suspected those numbers to be inflated, and I seriously hope they are now.
Fortunately for the guest, we had a room for her. (If she had come in yesterday, she probably would have been screwed!) At least the company did not take any money directly from her, just made her a completely bogus booking. Otherwise she'd have to fight to get her money back from them.
All calls to said company have so far been fruitless. They just keep shuffling us around to various general customer service agents and don't send us to anyone who has the authority to fix things. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few days.
A certain third party site (who shall remain nameless but I'm sure other CSers in the industry can take a pretty damn good guess) is advertising super ridiculously-low rates for our hotel. And a guest booked through them for our hotel. And she got a shiny little confirmation number and everything.
Except there was a problem. Her reservation didn't show up in our system. Because we don't have a contract with this company. At all. We don't want one. And we are certainly not booking rooms that cheaply.
We went to their website and sure enough, I can book a room at my hotel for nearly half what I should be able to. It will allow me to do it. Except I really can't, because the reservation will never show up in our system because we don't work with the company in question.
The website says "3 others just booked this hotel!". I always suspected those numbers to be inflated, and I seriously hope they are now.
Fortunately for the guest, we had a room for her. (If she had come in yesterday, she probably would have been screwed!) At least the company did not take any money directly from her, just made her a completely bogus booking. Otherwise she'd have to fight to get her money back from them.
All calls to said company have so far been fruitless. They just keep shuffling us around to various general customer service agents and don't send us to anyone who has the authority to fix things. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few days.
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