

Ask HN: How Do You Deal With Companies That Balk On Guarantees? - unclebucknasty

Recently booked a trip on Expedia when my wife discovered a lower price on Priceline. She then discovered that Expedia had a "Best Price Guarantee". Supposedly, with this "guarantee" you get the difference back, plus a $50 travel voucher.<p>After submitting the claim form, we quickly received a canned response from Expedia that stated we'd used a guest checkout to make the purchase, instead of being signed-on to an Expedia account. Supposedly, per their terms, only the latter qualified for the guarantee.<p>I first pointed out that I actually have an Expedia account under the same e-mail address with which we booked, but just didn't happen to be signed in. No dice.<p>Then we noticed the real problem: This supposed restriction is actually <i>nowhere</i> to be found on their site, including the very specific Terms &#38; Conditions of the guarantee:<p>http://www.expedia.com/p/info-other/guarantees.htm (click Terms &#38; Conditions link on that page)<p>When we pointed this out over a couple subsequent e-mail exchanges, some guy named "Luther" just kept copying and pasting the same reply:<p><i>"We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause you. We are unable to process your Best Price Guarantee request, since we are only allowed to process Best Price Guarantee claims for reservations that was booked under regular Expedia.com account. We do sympathize with your situation and wish we were in a position to do more; however, we need to comply with the rules and restrictions of the Best Price Guarantee program."</i><p>It seems that this program and their handling of it is specifically designed to enrage customers by offering something then reneging, with exclusions and undefined "gotchas", then repetitive responses, clearly intended to frustrate.<p>Has anyone else encountered this with Expedia or similar with other companies' "guarantees"? How did you deal with it?
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kohanz
If you deem it worth your while and are confident you are in the right, I
think the best attempt at getting a response here is to voice your concerns
more publicly. Be this through twitter or a blog (they need decent
visibility), Expedia is more likely to act if they are risking bad pub.

~~~
unclebucknasty
Good point. Especially Twitter, which also made me think of FB.

Funny part is that I expected this (i.e. that it would be somewhat scammy and
fraught with loopholes) and didn't deem it worth my while. But, now that I've
filed (at my wife's request), I'm more determined. This is especially so,
since they are deliberately trying to frustrate me so I won't deem it worth my
while.

Even funnier is that I run a consumer-facing online business and am well aware
of the pub issues from their side. We set out to treat our customers right,
however, and don't have to deal with this kind of thing from earnest,
reasonable customers.

Anyway, thanks again for the feedback.

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pasbesoin
I guess some may take this as MS bashing, but I've had a bad feeling about
Expedia from its start. That being:

 _Expedia was started by Microsoft and later spun off as a multi-billion
dollar company because it was "no longer about software intensive technology"
and they were "concerned that they would not do their best at this."_

per

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expedia>

Whenever MS ventures away from OS, tools, and Office -- and, I guess for some
people, games and, oddly enough, accessory hardware -- it's a bad bet.

In short, don't do business with them, again.

