How to get refund from hotels.com

Exodi

Reubiedoo said:

Yeah…chargebacks aren’t worth the paper they are printed on in my experience. I had one where it was clear the bank hadn’t even read what I had submitted and just reversed it. And wouldn’t respond further. 

But it would be worth a try as last resort, for sure: better than nothing.

Thanks.

I'm confused, by 'reversed it' do you mean gave you the money back? Or were you the on the receiving end of a chargeback request that claim they took without looking into it properly?

I've only ever done one chargeback for non-receipt of an item and subsequent radio silence and it was successful pretty quickly (it was actually against Facebook interestingly enough!).

So in my small pool of evidence, chargebacks have a 100% success rate!

YMMV

Reubiedoo

Exodi,

I made a chargeback against a product I was returning because it wasn’t as described - it was garden furniture advertised as ‘ready for assembly’ but when it came I had to drill around 150 holes in it. Measure, mark and drill. This wasn’t mentioned on the website anywhere. I returned it but the selling company refused to compensate the return fee (£100 - their company truck) because they said the item was as described. I contacted Lloyds for the chargeback, with screenshots of the website and the email conversation with the company. I got the chargeback. Then the company responded to Lloyds and said ‘we always sell our furniture like that, we get no complaints’ and Lloyds then reversed the chargeback - taking the money back out of my account and debiting it to the company. When I asked if they had read anything I sent etc they just said the matter was closed.

Reubiedoo

Just to follow this up; my wife made a public appeal to Hilton over social media and has written confirmation from them of a full refund, and that they have been in contact with hotels.com to confirm this. Hotels.com informed them it could take up to 14 days to process. 

So I’m hopeful that is a positive resolution and if anyone is like me and finds themself in the position I did looking for answers, they can try it too. I will say I have seen other people saying their hotel has sent the refund and hotels.com still aren’t playing ball but with written confirmation from Hilton I should be able to see it through one way or another.

DullGreyGuy

Exodi said:

Reubiedoo said:

Yeah…chargebacks aren’t worth the paper they are printed on in my experience. I had one where it was clear the bank hadn’t even read what I had submitted and just reversed it. And wouldn’t respond further. 

But it would be worth a try as last resort, for sure: better than nothing.

Thanks.

I'm confused, by 'reversed it' do you mean gave you the money back? Or were you the on the receiving end of a chargeback request that claim they took without looking into it properly?

Most banks will instantly reimburse the monies when you lodge a chargeback but warn you that the charge will be reapplied if the merchant contests the chargeback and they are successful. 

So you do a chargeback saying you didnt receive your widget, the merchant shows the courier tracking showing it was delivered and so the bank side with the merchant and reinstate the charge. 

Reubiedoo

Well, Hilton weren’t full of it; they did process a full refund and hotels.com AGAIN pretended like they couldn’t find anything or help at all. The chat guys are based in India and clearly hold to their assigned spiel and have no accountability. Subsequently my wife posted on their official Facebook and surprise: they COULD find the correspondence and confirm the refund had been processed. 

So if you have found this looking for help, I would recommend 1. Contacting the hotel directly and 2. Make a big noise publicly. Sad that this is necessary but at least we seem to have the result we wanted.