• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Hotel booking scam - Guestreservations.com - scammers

RogerS

RogerS

Moderator
Staff member
Joined
Jul 21, 2014
Messages
15,218
Reaction score
966
Location
And off to pastures new
Be very, very careful when booking a hotel. Guestreservations finesse their website into you thinking that you are booking directly with the hotel and therefore under the hotel's T's & C's. You are NOT. You are under guestreservations.com T's & C's. Such as sandbagging the price with their 'service' charge...not shown until after you have paid. Oh yes, they take the money straightaway.

And when you come to cancel, they charge you a cancellation charge equal to the amount that they have taken from your card. A polite request for the refund results in the brush off. DAMHIKT.

Caveat...I see that currently they are bigging up 'Free cancellation' on some of their hotels. I may have had something to do with this. Read on.

Yup...I got suckered and up until this morning was out £160. Credit card company (Lloyds) - fraud dept - not interested. Suggested I spoke to Disputes. Again - not interested. So Plan B.

I blitzed them with very, very sweary block capital comments on all their Facebook pages. I saw that I was not alone. I did it each day. Every day. I DM'd them daily on Facebook with block capital posts containing very sweary words. I emailed them daily with font size 48pts, bold. Sweary. Then signed up with several accounts on X and posted about them there. I went back to Facebook and DM'd them pointing out that I was retired, had all the time in the world and was enjoying harassing them. That gmail had an infinite number of email addresses and that I could carry on doing this for ever.

Five days later, they capitulated. My refund came through in full today.

Please feel free to copy and paste this all over the web.
 
Roger, nice one - it may be worth flipping your correspondence on to Martin Lewis. He’s bound to be turning his attention to shady practices to avoid when booking holidays soon.
 
I think you'll find that they are a USA aggregation website. They are best avoided as they have some pretty convoluted T's and C's, not intended to help the customer and presumably built around USA law rather than UK.
Basically, an extra middleman, skimming their bit off the top.
They do say that their fees will be added before the purchase goes through, so seems a bit odd that they didn't do so in your case.

Oddly enough, I came across them a couple of days ago when considering booking a night in Colchester. Didn't like their website, so if I go ahead I'll do it direct with the hotel.

.....and well done on your campaign, Roger
 
Gud n'Rog! My missus always does hotel bookings for holidays through Booking.com and thus far hasn't come across any 'issues' - Rob

Edit - could you elaborate on these 'sweary' words? :ROFLMAO: Having been brought up in a very genteel household and then finishing my work life with the Army, my lexicon is somewhat limited......
 
Woodbloke said:
then finishing my work life with the Army, my lexicon is somewhat limited......
Click to expand...
Oi! Yew! Stoakley! C'mere! Wot are you doing using an oxymoron sentence yew 'orrible little man?! Us squaddies is usin' simple words...lexicon? lexicon? Wot's wun of 'em then? Eh? Can you clean your breech parts wiv wun o' them then? Narr! Now, go 'way an' make some sawdust! Leave speakin' till usuns wot have the stripes on our sleeves to say they can. Aaaabaht tun! Quuuicck match! Lef' ri' lef' ri' left...
 
AJB Temple said:
We find trustpilot quite useful for this kind of thing. They get quite poor reviews by and large and lots of people feel misled. https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/guestreservations.com

Glad you got refunded. Maybe leave a trustpilot review as they are clearly monitoring that as they respond quite a lot.
Click to expand...
There are some very weird reviews there. Text tells the problems yet they give 5*. As a rule, I always ignore 5* reviews.
 
Cabinetman said:
Well just in case I ever thought about upsetting you Roger, I bleep bleeping well won’t !
Well done.
Click to expand...
Reminds me of the joke...

Two men - a city gent, a vicar and a lady sitting in the same carriage. The men are doing The Times crossword. After an hour or so (a tough one clearly) the city gent sighs and says "I just can't get this last one. Definitely female - four letters - ending in 'unt'" The lady pipes up 'Aunt" and the vicar mutters 'Damn' as he rubs his answer out. :)
 
RogerS said:
There are some very weird reviews there. Text tells the problems yet they give 5*. As a rule, I always ignore 5* reviews.
Click to expand...
Yes, I think there is clear evidence that they buy review upgrades when they make refunds.
 
Blackswanwood said:
Roger, nice one - it may be worth flipping your correspondence on to Martin Lewis. He’s bound to be turning his attention to shady practices to avoid when booking holidays soon.
Click to expand...
I tried, the post was deleted and I got this prissy little reply from a Mod - the prissiest reply that I have ever received.

Our rules say: "We appreciate emotions can run high should you experience poor service from companies, but we cannot accept active calls to boycott organisations as we are unable to verify the service you received."

Our rules also say: "...if you are thinking of posting about taking advantage of something that is dubious, or that exploits a 'grey area' of the law, err on the side of caution and do not share information about it".

Sweary posts wouldn't be permitted on this forum, and we wouldn't encourage anyone to communicate in that way with any business, no matter how frustrating the situation.

Pretty pointless forum if you can't alert people to scams IMO.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top