I recently booked a stay at a motel through hotels.com. The night I checked in, hotels.com sent me email asking me to rate my check-in (literally, the subject line said, “How was your check-in, Jonathan K?” and the body of the email said “How’s your trip going, Jonathan Kamens? Rate your check-in experience.”). Thinking that’s what I was doing, i.e., rating just the check-in, I clicked the link in the email.
However, the page I landed on wasn’t for rating just the check-in, it was for rating my entire stay, which wasn’t even over. I closed the page at that point, thinking I’d return to it after my stay was complete when I could give an honest, complete review.
Things went rather badly during my stay. Of course, I wanted my review on hotels.com to reflect that. Therefore, when they sent me a second email after I had checked out asking me to review my stay, I clicked the link, hoping to provide a complete review. Instead, the link took me to a page where I was informed, “Oops! You’ve already reviewed this property for your stay.”
Most people would give up here, but I contacted hotels.com customer service and asked how to remove or edit my review. They sent me a link to a web form I could fill out to request that my review be removed. I filled out and submitted the form.
A week later, they responded. Nope! “Once a guest has submitted a review, it cannot be edited,” they said.
In short, hotels.com asked me to submit a review the day before I was scheduled to check out; they treated the review as submitted even though I never finished filling it out; and then they wouldn’t let me change or remove it.
If this happened to me, then it happens to a lot of people. The customer ratings on hotels.com are therefore completely useless.
Happened to me as well. Review on my behalf, but I don’t do reviews without comments, not it couldn’t been done intentionally.