Expedia / Hotels.com / Hotwire: The Big, Ugly Rip-Off

How do you feel about a corporation that tries to destroy the small businesses that it is partnered with? Which lies and claims small hotels are completely booked in order to route customers to more expensive ones?

Expedia, which owns Hotels.com, Hotwire, and Venere, is a big, fat rip-off:

Expedia and its many affiliates, including Hotels.com and Venere.com, invite people to come to their sites to book our hotel, the Luna Blue Hotel. Yet when people get to these websites they are told that our hotel is completely occupied for all dates now and in the future. If someone calls on the telephone, they are told that our hotel is going out of business! They are then directed to book another more expensive hotel, which provides Expedia greater commission. It seems that Expedia and its affiliates use small hotels like ours to attract people to their sites so they can get those people to book with bigger resorts. It is the classic “bait and switch” scam.

Read the whole story linked above, it will convince you to never book through Expedia or its affiliates ever again. And this is not an isolated incident: Expedia was fined €427,000 in France for pulling the same sort of scams. “Buyers were given information that certain hotels were full and were directed towards other hotels with whom Expedia and Hotels.com had commercial links.”

And a quick search of the internet reveals countless horror stories from customers, including travellers abandoned overseas without the return tickets they had paid for, refused cancellations, and massive price inflation, all paired with abysmal and unresponsive customer service. Don’t get taken, and don’t support fraudulent business practices.