Priceline.com automatically changed our hotel search by defaulting to "resorts" from "luxury", without ever notifying us of the change.
Misrepresented itself by making claims that it was the hotels that were selling rooms and when we called the hotel because of the problem they notified us that Priceline buys blocks of rooms to resell and they had nothing to do with the transaction.
Priceline.com changed the price we were willing to pay without any notification, meaning the winning bid was not a bid that we typed in, and just simply switched to a new screen with a congratulations with your winning bid.
When we called them to immediately notify them of the problem, they did not want to listen and denied the facts. We went back and went through the entire process to document the default from "luxury" to "Resort" along with everything proving that it was their problem, not ours, they still did not refund our rate.
To make matters worse we got stuck with a hotel room that we were charged $10.00-$15.00 more per night than if we were to buy directly from the hotel. This is not an error on our part this was clearly an error on Pricelines part and when we tried to get our credit card company to deny the charge priceline just throws the binding contract in our face and we get stuck paying for a hotel that we never used.
I cannot find anywhere in the contract that says that we agreed to any errors or release priceline.com from any wrong doing, when they make a mistake or have problems with their site.
The thing that really drives me crazy is that when I went back to document the changes that they made, (not us) I could have sworn that they had screens that did not pop up the second time around.
I am talking about new user pop-up screens, that encourage you to bid just a little higher, and that the hotel rate is much higher per night and that the bid needs to come up much more in order for the hotel company to even consider the bid.
Now I am telling you that we were switched without notice to a cheap hotel that I would never even consider going to and were told it was a luxury hotel all the way up to the point of sale. When I researched the hotel via their own website they don't consider themselves to be a luxury hotel and clearly stated on the website that they were a resort as well. If anyone has ever had this happen or knows about this practice I would love to hear from them.
Please don't let this happen to you. Help us get the word out and maybe just maybe we can get a class action suit together to teach this company a lesson about ripping off customers.
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