Scammed for Hotel Booking

I've never been to Zurich, but we are planning a trip now and so grateful you shared this information. I will consider it a warning. I'm so sorry that happened.

Let us know what happens! Was your CC charged? It would be pretty awful to get to a hotel expecting a reservation and finding you did not have one....yikes.

So… what happened? You booked or didn’t book? You paid or didn’t pay? Your reservation was cancelled or not made? You booked with the hotel or someone else?

I do not know how you got to “hotelvalues.com”. Are you sure you were using the official Hotel Adler website?

If you start on the Hotel Adler website and hit “book now” it takes you to their actual booking platform which is be.synxis.com, commonly used by many hotels in Switzerland, and very reliable.

https://hotel-adler.ch/en/

But if you email Hotel Adler directly they should be able to sort it out.

Would recommend staying in Zug on the lake ( beautiful hotel there if you are interested will send the name) as opposed to in downtown Zurich. There is a train or boat ride into Zurich.

Hotel Adler replied to me the booking was handled by Agoda, and not hotelvalues.com. They said I should contact them.
Hotel Adler has a prepayment from them. My e-mail confirmation came from hotelvalues.com

I just contacted Agoda and they show no sign of my booking. I'm unable to chat with their help menu as it says I need a different
e-mail address. Why would it not take the -email I used for the booking?

I booked this in January on my credit card. I paid the credit card bill the next month in February when I received my statement.
As Hotel Adler is telling, they have a prepayment.

I'm looking for better contact information for Agoda to solve the matter.

Tomorrow I have shoulder surgery and will be unable to deal with this for several days.

I'd like to check out Zug as I rebooked my tour for next summer.

I planned on having a couple of nights in Zurich before I joined the tour in Luzern

Diane; how did you make the booking? Did you go to the actual official website of Hotel Adler? Or did you do an internet search for Hotel Adler, clicked on the first link and ended up on the website of a 3rd party booking website? Who send you the confirmation of the booking? And who charged your credit card? What did it say on your credit card statement?

Diane, regarding a chargeback, it shouldn't matter that you've already paid your credit card bill.
It might require some extra steps to do a chargeback (instead of what you would do if it were on a current statement) but you still should be able to do it. Do a chat with your credit card customer service and ask about a chargeback for something charged several months ago.

Did you try emailing Agoda instead of chatting?

Did you tell Hotel Adler you need to cancel the booking? Maybe they will just do that directly instead of making you go through Agoda. But maybe not if a refund of a prepayment is involved.

Was this by any chance a prepaid non-refundable rate you booked?

There is an avalanche of on-line complaints from people who say they too were scammed by “hotelvalues.com.” Chances are very high that your bank already has heard of this sketchy company.
You still have recourse and it doesn’t matter that you paid for the questionable charge back in January. Consumers often don’t discover these things until months later.

Forget trying to resolve this with Agoda. You still must request a refund from Agoda , but my personal experience with Agoda is they are non-responsive in these situations, their platform will give you the run-around for hours on end chatting with their robots. You will only waste time trying to resolve this through Agoda. Just e-mail Agoda’s customer service address directly from your e-mail address and request a full refund. You should then have a written record of the request. As a back-up, take a screen shot of the request so you can show your bank that you have already requested a refund from the vendor ( Agoda) for what appears to be a fraudulent charge. Then call your bank that issued the credit card the room was charged to and contest the charge. Your bank will also want you to fill out and sign a form contesting the charge. Your bank will then either reverse the charge right away and request documentation—such as a dated reservation confirmation including the date it was sent to you— and your consent to the charges from the vendor, or they will give the vendor 30 days to produce the documentation and then issue the credit.

Either way, you should get a full refund credited to your credit card account within 30 days.

In what way was this a fraudulent transaction? She says above that Hotel Adler has her prepayment—- so Agoda or Hotelvalues or someone passed the money on to Hotel Adler. No fraud there.

The problem appears to be that she needs to cancel and get a refund, but she cannot do it through the booking agent. Since Hotel Adler has the money, they are the ones to give back the prepayment. But maybe the request for refund has to come from the booking agent under the terms of the booking.

I still wonder if this was a non-refundable booking she made, perhaps accidentally.

If she wants to pursue a chargeback, she need to have proof in writing that she tried to cancel, she cannot get satisfaction from Agoda, and that Hotel Adler has declined to refund the prepaid money. Without documentation that she tried to resolve it with both parties and they refused, the bank will not do a chargeback.

I hope her shoulder surgery was a success and she is not in much pain. We may not hear back from her for awhile.

If Diane never received a reservation confirmation from “hotelvalues.com,” or Agoda, then they must refund her money. There are scores of online complaints from people describing the same scenario Diane describes—saying they thought they were using
a hotel’s official website to book a room and suddenly SPOOF! hotelvalues.com intercepts the credit card information and fraudulently charges the card for a “Non-Refundable” reservation without authorization. The “non-refundable” condition is never disclosed prior to the reservation being made and is not disclosed in any reservation confirmation. It looks like this is the company’s M.O. This is clearly fraudulent. i personally had a very similar experience with another well-known hotel booking platform which said I made a 4-night reservation in France, yet they could never produce a dated, time-stamped Reservation Confirmation e-mail. They were forced by my bank to refund all charges. In this case, Agoda states they have no record of her reservation. Yet the Hotel Adler told her they received payment from Agoda. How are both things possible? Something is amiss.
For the Hotel Adler to acknowledge they received payment from Agoda ( BTW, Agoda is now owned by Booking Holdings- the parent company of Booking.com ) for the reservation, it would seem Agoda may have a contractual connection with hotelvalues.com. However, that may not be the case and somehow the pirates at hotelvalues.com are simply intercepting the reservation and credit card information and then levying unauthorized charges.
This also is fraudulent activity.
This can be resolved through your bank. Meanwhile, may you have a speedy recovery from shoulder surgery!

You seem to be re-writing her story. She DID get an email confirmation of the booking from hotel values.com. But that is not an email address or a website either. If I search for that same on Google all the results are scam reports like this one. No website with that name or anything close.

So some pieces of the puzzle are missing. But the fact that Hotel Adler has her payment contradicts any claim of fraud. She does have a communication problem with Agoda, and we don’t know what is going on there.

She could look on her credit card statement and it will show who actually made the charge. And contact them.

I hope Diane is recovering well, and maybe has succeeded with her refund quest. If not, and Hotel Adler says she need to deal with Agoda, she should contact them again and send them a copy of the original email confirmation she received, showing the reservation, her email address, etc.

If she cannot get through to them, it might be time to get the Elliott consumer advocacy group involved.

https://elliottadvocacy.org/

They will not necessarily intervene, but they will provide the proper contact information for “escalating” the complaint to the proper channels at Agoda. They did that for me when I was due a refund from British Airways. At their suggestion, I emailed the VP of Customer Relations for the USA, with an explanation of the problem and copies of the message string I had received from BA, repeatedly denying our claim for EC261 compensation under the wrong section. He did not respond personally, but sent it to someone on the Customer Care team and said “fix this”. Our claim was acknowledged and approved the following day.

Please whatever you all do, DO NOT REPORT TO CREDIT CARD BANK AS FRAUD!! This may be a scam but is NOT considered fraud. These are very different things. If you provide the card details and then reports as fraud that ties credit card companies hands. Remember, fraud is when you didn't provide the card info. It is a credit card dispute and should be disputed as such. Do yourselves a favor and report it correctly and you should get your money back. Take it from someone who has been down this road. Safe travels everyone! :)

Same thing happened to me. I thought I was booking directly on the hotel website. I had no idea I was not on the hotel site until a few days later when I arrived at the hotel.

Yes the money was paid to the hotel. Yes they booked a room for me, but not the right category. That was when we worked out something was wrong.

Yes, it is a scam despite having the room booked. Why? They charged me 150% of what then hotel was charging directly. It was in in the taxes and fees. And at no point through the booking process was I on a site with a title HOTEL VALUES at the top. So the were clearly making it look like you were on the hotel‘s own site.