Warning about hotel booking sites - HotelsOne

I accidentally got on the HotelsOne website when I thought I was booking on the official Accor website for the Ibis Styles in Edinburgh last year. I knew I’d booked refundable but saw a few days later I was billed for the full stay immediately plus a “fee” of 400£. I emailed the hotel to see what the fee was and they said “it’s your travel agent”. WTH? I then realized I’d gotten on the HotelsOne site. I canceled immediately, got a complete refund, then booked on the Accor app so there could be no mistake.

TBH, I wouldn’t have pushed it with them but it sounds like you have already completed your stay?

Many of the search sites like Google have blended official sites with non-official sites. Be careful which one you click. This is a new trick by non-official sites for many types of businesses and not just travel.

Another reason we always book directly with the hotel by email and / or phone. Perhaps it's not the most "modern" way to do things, but we've never had a problem dealing directly. Just our experience.

msprior01, good for you for fighting back for “truth in advertising” to get your refund. I never thought to screen print the room info. Thanks for the lesson.

One booking and purchasing hint I learned is never book through “sponsored” websites. Scrolling down through Google’s list will be the company’s website. I also only book in the business’ home currency.

I did book directly, and the following happened. I called a London hotel that my traveling friend wants to stay at. I made a singleroom reservation with the reservation agent and ended the call. A few minutes later I tried to call my friend to tell her I made the reservation. I couldn't get a dial tone. Instead, I got a series of clicks. I had to turn off the phone, then turn it back on, to get a dial tone. Weird, I thought. When I got my credit card bill, the charge for the hotel was fine, but another charge from HotelsOne for $1900 was in the list of charges. I read the reviews of HotelsOne online. They are NOT good! I firmly believe my call to the London hotel was vished by HotelsOne. That's why the clicking noises when I tried to get a dialtone. Never give out your credit card number when using your CELLPHONE and you'll avoid getting "vished". This includes not giving out your credit card number on a landline phone that has a separate headpiece! I thoroughly researched "vishing" scams online. You can do the same.

I did book directly, and the following happened. I called a London hotel that my traveling friend wants to stay at. I made a singleroom reservation with the reservation agent and ended the call. A few minutes later I tried to call my friend to tell her I made the reservation. I couldn't get a dial tone. Instead, I got a series of clicks. I had to turn off the phone, then turn it back on, to get a dial tone. Weird, I thought. When I got my credit card bill, the charge for the hotel was fine, but another charge from HotelsOne for $1900 was in the list of charges. I read the reviews of HotelsOne online. They are NOT good! I firmly believe my call to the London hotel was vished by HotelsOne. That's why the clicking noises when I tried to get a dialtone. Never give out your credit card number when using your CELLPHONE and you'll avoid getting "vished". This includes not giving out your credit card number on a landline phone that has a separate headpiece! I thoroughly researched "vishing" scams online. You can do the same.

I don't usually respond, but I have some insight on this given my experience as a Webmaster for this forum. I think it is less likely to be vishing than another possibility. I think HotelsOne did something to get their phone number listed in a place that you trusted - in place of the phone number of the actual hotel.

With regard to the clicking, it means something different with modern smartphones vs what you might recall with landlines. With landlines, it was conceivable that someone could be listening in and many of us are old enough to remember what that sounds like (clicking, sometimes hearing faint voices that weren't coming from your house, etc). The clicking and failure to call your friend likely came from a failure with the phone app. Data issues are abound with smartphone apps and sometimes they need a restart to get them to work again. Yes, that can even affect the phone app.

We've also seen that our forum gets targeted by spammers using fake phone numbers for things like airline customer service, etc etc. It's not that they're trying to get you to call from this forum (though they don't mind). It's that they're trying to get that phone number indexed by the big tech companies that offer profile pages for every business on their websites and services. They get most of that contact info data by scraping the internet. Current spammer techniques take advantage of that to get their phone numbers scraped and placed into "trustworthy" places. I am not implying that HotelsOne used spam as a technique as that would be illegal, but it's possible that they use a similar method to get their phone number out there to get a booking for a given property.

Given how tech works today, I think it's much more likely that the takeaway from Lynn's story is that if you're going to call direct, it's best to verify the phone number directly from that company's website. While Google, for example, invests a ton of money to prevent these sorts of issues in their systems and have all sorts of controls plus they have business profiles so that business owners can control these listings, other systems aren't as thorough.

Same thing happened to me I thought I was on the website of a resort that I was trying to book directly with. The HotelOne site was so similar I didn't notice my mistake until after I went make to add a meal plan. I am still in the process of trying to get a refund. I have filed a complaint with the BBB and Internet Crime Complaint Center. Hoping they will require a change to the website to make it obvious that you are on a third party site.

Thank you all for sharing. We can learn from your experiences!