Description

Agoda portrays themselves as a booking agency, similar to Priceline or Booking.com. I reserved a room on Nov 24. They sent me a confirmation for the hotel I selected, and I paid the full price for the room at that time. When I arrived at the hotel on Jan 18, the hotel had no reservation for me, nor had they every heard of Agoda. That's when the red flags really started to show up. 1. None of the confirmation emails from Agoda provided a phone number for Agoda, only the phone number for the hotel. 2. Agoda's "self service" website was not functioning to file an issue. 3. After googling their phone number and getting someone on the line, I had to sit on hold twice while they researched. Then they said that the reason there was no reservation in my name was because the hotel was overbooked. I had been standing in the lobby for 90 minutes by this point, and I asked the desk staff if they had rooms. They said they had plenty of rooms available, and that no one had contacted them requesting a room for me in the last hour. 4. When I told Agoda that they, or their "booking partner" were lying about the hotel being overbooked, they offered me the option to take a refund, or to book a different hotel room through them. Both of those options would have costed me more money than I initially planned on spending, so I told them those were unsatisfactory solutions to a problem that I didn't create. At that point, I was told that I would get a call from their "Escalation Team" within 30 minutes to resolve the issue. Neither my wife nor I received a single phone call for the rest of the night. 5. Minutes after I hung up with the initial customer service rep, I received an email stating that Agoda had tried to contact me "multiple times", but was unable to reach me - yet another lie. All in all, a terrible experience. They had use of my money for 6 weeks without providing a single service, and then said it would take 30 days to issue a refund. I don't believe that they ever intended to provide a service.