I am a business traveller and normally stay at chain hotels. For this case, I was asked to stay at a hotel affiliated with the University I was visiting for convenience of the team. I believed I was booking through the hotel website because they used the hotel name in the web address. I book the room for a reasonable rate. It never occurred to me that I did not recieve a booking confirmation. I got to the hotel where I was notified that I booked through booking.com and prepaid. Now that I am preparing my expense report, I realize that I still do not have a confimration email or receipt for my payment. I call and they automated message recoginizes my number and offers to send me a receipt. It comes in. on a $500 hotel bill for 2 nights, they charge $200 in "fees". This is above and beyond the hotel taxes and fees. Obviously, by not sending a confirmation email, they do not alert the customer that they have mistakenly booked through their website-which is their intention. This is completely fraudulent practice. I wish I could feel bad about being scammed, but there were no signs. The website looked like the hotel website. The address looked like the hotel web address. According to other reviews, even if you notice it was not the right site, they still screw you over with trying to cancel. Scam. Scam. Scam.
