Worst Hotel Experience of My Life:…read more
I was on the BART airport train, within minutes of the SFO airport to fly to Wichita. Then I got a call from the hotel. They said the main water pipe had broken and that there was no water in the hotel, so anyone coming to the hotel would have no water for showers, baths, toilets, sinks, coffee-makers, etc.
The problem was that I'd gotten an amazing deal on that room that can't be replicated. Also, the rooms downtown are usually more expensive than the hotels at the perimeter of the city. Downtown is the only walkable part. The reason being downtown mattered so much to me is that I'm unable to drive due to being on too many medications, so it was downtown or bust for me. The Wichita transit system is so primitive that it doesn't even run at night; so if I'd gone out to dinner downtown, there would be no way back.
The bottom line was that anyplace but downtown would have meant I'd have had to spend another fortune on Uber to get anywhere. Of course, other people know all this, so the downtown rooms tend to sell out quickly, leaving only the most frightening hotels to rent from. So now I was being told, as my train rushed to the airport (in fact I was still on the phone with the hotel as I entered the airport) that not only was I losing my place downtown, but the nearest decent rooms still available with no notice were clear on the far eastern side of town where most transit doesn't even reach and where, again, it would be all Ubers to get home at night.
Neither the hotel nor Uber did anything to try to get me a similar deal, but both said that I'd have to cancel the first deal, hope a refund would eventually be issued, on faith; and then pay the completely unreserved, new rates, for a good downtown hotel while arriving at midnight; and that would have been an additional thousands of dollars I didn't have. So the whole vacation was lost as there was no way I could show up at the Wichita airport at midnight with no way of knowing where I would stay, especially since I didn't have a car. And I can't imagine what it would cost to have Uber driving me around as I frantically got on the booking app or called hotels asking for a miracle deal without any notice.
My airline was a non-cancel flight; so although I eventually got my money back for the room, I'm paying $430 for a flight I never got to take. Again, I would have went through with the trip if the hotel or Expedia had guaranteed me a similar price for a similar room in a similar location. But they just insisted that I go onto the app and shop around as if the old deal had never existed. So they wouldn't do anything for me, and, furthermore, in the middle of the night I was expected to go hotel shopping with no car, or by paying private cars with no way of knowing where the total costs would have ended up.
So, other than a refund of what would prove to be a fraction of the amount I'd need to cold-book a same-night reservation at the most expensive part of the city on a crowded night where things were selling out - - they just offered no help. So I was dumped with no recourse available to save my trip. So weeks later I'm still paying, and will be paying, for this $430 in airlines I never got to take, not because of the airlines, but because of the hotel and Expedia not being able to come up with a way to save my trip. So I lost the trip I'd been dreaming of and was left with a $430 bill to pay. I have never been through such a thing in any of my travels.