Premier Inn admits to overcharging

Wacky_Jacky

I received an email from Travelodge to say that Premier Inn has been overcharging customers. Premier Inn has an offer of rooms for £29 a night, however, if you only click on their 'Quick Booking' you will never be offered this price. You need to book by clicking on the picture of Lenny and then you will have the chance of a £29 a night booking. I have just cancelled and rebooked a room for two ngihts in Feb and saved £42!

Jacky

badger247

Thanks for this. Just a word of caution but if you book the cheaper room you cannot cancel the room under any circumstances.

Badger

jebervic

Wacky_Jacky wrote: »

I received an email from Travelodge to say that Premier Inn has been overcharging customers. Premier Inn has an offer of rooms for £29 a night, however, if you only click on their 'Quick Booking' you will never be offered this price. You need to book by clicking on the picture of Lenny and then you will have the chance of a £29 a night booking. I have just cancelled and rebooked a room for two ngihts in Feb and saved £42!

Jacky

Personally I wasn't impressed by Travelodge sending out this email, much better to promote their good points, rather than slate the compeition.

zenmaster

Wacky_Jacky wrote: »

You need to book by clicking on the picture of Lenny and then you will have the chance of a £29 a night booking.

Er ... would that be the picture of Lenny that says "£29 - Click on Lenny to book"?

facingthefuture

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Premier Inn admits to website anomaly which may be overcharging thousands since June 2009

[/FONT] [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] Dear xxxxx

We know that Travelodge customers also use other hotel brands, so we were keen to let you know about some news which might affect you.

On Tuesday 24th November 09, following a complaint by Travelodge to the ASA, The Times reported that budget hotel operator Premier Inn has potentially been overcharging thousands of customers trying to book a Premier Offer £29 room since June 2009. Their television and newspaper advertising, featuring Lenny Henry, proudly claimed that the chain were offering 1,000,000 rooms for £29, but The Times reported that when customers arrived at the Premier Inn website those using the Quick Book on the homepage were not being offered £29 rooms when they were still available. Instead customers would only be able to find these advertised rooms by clicking on a different part of the website.

Independent price checking revealed that customers had a less then 1% chance of finding a £29 room if they used Quick Book compared with a 24% chance for those clicking on a Premier Offer banner.* This means thousands of customers may have been charged as much as double the price they should have paid. At no time did Premier Inn advise customers that lower prices were available in other parts of their website and encourage them to check for £29 rooms. There could be thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of customers affected.

Incredibly after being challenged by The Times, Premier Inn stated that "the anomaly of higher prices being offered through the quick bookings facility would disappear next week (1st December 2009)" but so far have not offered ANY refund to Premier Inn customers who were overcharged by this problem.

The purpose of this email is to build an online petition to encourage Premier Inn to offer a full refund to any customer who has booked a more expensive room when the same room was available on another part of their website for £29.

Think you might have been affected? [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Learn more about what action you can take or simply sign the petition here.[/FONT]

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] Why not forward this email to a friend.[/FONT]

Regards

Travelodge [/FONT]

Jack_Frost_2

Sour grapes for travelodge! I was rather shocked to receive their email about Premier Inn. The website is very clear with huge banners of Lenny and the £29 room offer. I would sooner pay £29 or even full price for a Premier Inn than the unpleasant experiences I've had at travelodge with their lumpy beds and tatty decor.

shiningdove

I thought the offer was pretty obvious.

andyrules

shiningdove wrote: »

I thought the offer was pretty obvious.

Yes, it is very clear. I, too, am unimpressed with the spiteful email from TL.

However, when i looked for the deal - and was very flexible with dates and 3 locations - I could find nothing. I rang and the CA also failed. I suspect they are few and far between - if there were more perhaps PTI would have a more transparent menu.

MarkyMarkD

It is a matter of opinion as to whether it's unfair to charge different prices depending how you search.

For a very long time it was similar to this on Travelodge's website, if I recall - you had to search for standard rooms, or saver rooms, or supersaver rooms (or something like that) separately.

So, definitely sour grapes.

boonkoh

I think this is poor taste from Travelodge to start petty accusations and mud slinging like this.

However, I do agree that Premier Inn has made its offer tricky. The first time I came across it, I used their normal booking function thinking I could find the cheapest rates. Was about to give up when I thought about clicking through the banner, and voila, found the rates. But I can imagine many customers going through the normal booking engine and thinking that those are the cheapest rates as part of the Lenny £29 promotion.

snapping_crocodile

I also got this email and thought it was a bit off of travelodge. I have successfully booked a premier inn £29 room for next week and i had no problems. When i read the email (no offence to anyone here) but i thought if people read the website properly, and clicked on Lenny as it says, then there would be no issue :rolleyes: