Wednesday, September 14, 2011

booking.com warning.


Pending review for TripAdvisor:

“Macdonald Rusacks Hotel is greedy, unfriendly and terrible customer service”.  booking.com is a risk to use and zero support for the customer.

My personal experience with Macdonald Rusack House and booking.com was horrendous. Neither support their customers and booking.com has technology flaws in their system that created a potential $2400 charge to me for non-cancellation of a booking that I did not know existed. Even though the hotel resold my rooms, they were going to charge me, Maconald's Rusack House in St. Andrews, Scotland. And the hotel was going to charge me and also charge my family again ( and at 100UK more per night) to take the rooms for 3 nights of the original 5 nights (2 rooms).

booking.com would not help and basically told me "this conversation is over". I strongly recommend to any consumer to never use booking.com as a hotel booking site. I pleaded for assistance and asked them to have the Account Manager for the Macdonald Rusack House for booking.com intervene and speak to the hotel on my behalf, and they refused to do this. They did not care. Period. I will never use them again and I will promote my experience on TripAdvisor and every other social media and hotel review site possible.

The hotel as well. As kind and gracious as most are in St. Andrews, the MacDonald's Rusack House is not. If they treat someone like this who is already upset because I could not take my daughter to Scotland and get her moved in and settled at the University of St. Andrews due to an accident which caused me to have surgery on 9/8 with a 9/9 departure from US to UK, clearly a legitimate concern. I cancelled my other booking.com hotels from my profile hours before surgery at the hospital. I did not cancel the Rusack House because it was not connected to my booking.com profile since it was my 1st booking.com reservation, made before a created a profile, but never attached to profile, even though I created that profile minutes or hours after making the reservation at the suggestion of booking.com while on line. Same email. Same credit card. Yes, I got an email from the hotel, but in my pain physically and emotionally, I did not think to check and see if there was an "unattached" reservation that was made prior to setting up a profile. I actually thought I had cancelled it long ago and would have, had it been attached to my profile on booking.com

booking.com both US and UK offices had absolutely no interest in helping me.
The hotel reservations manager, Jennifer, had tried to charge my credit card $2400US and it was not authorized by bank fortunately.

To the contrary, I cancelled 2 Hilton Hotel bookings as well. 1 was a late cancellation (within penalty). The difference in how I was handled is incredible. While I was charge a no-show, I called Hilton; a case was created and emailed to the hotel in Leeds. I got an email from Hilton in minutes. The next morning, I got an email from the Hotel in Leeds, from a person, not a generic email box, with details of how they would investigate and resolve. And a comment that with the medical situation that I could support with documentation from ER in Charleston, SC and Greenwich CT hospital, there should be no problem.

United Airlines was even excellent handling changes and waiving additional fees for my family to change their air tickets since I would not be able to travel.

Lesson here: book directly with the brands. And if you must use a 3rd party, do not use booking.com. Heed my warning! Stay away from this hotel and booking.com

This is a legitimate posting. My email address is xxx@xx.com if you want to contact me. This is real. And it is my first negative review on TripAdvisor and hopefully my last.



2 comments:

  1. That is awful. I used to use booking.com all the time but no worries, I will never use them again. xxoo

    ReplyDelete
  2. This experience is not easy. But i think booking.com or some other OTAs they have to take care too much hotels, that is the reason why their support services are not good enough.

    If you know want hotel you will stay, you should book directly to hotel.

    ReplyDelete