My wife and I stayed at Crowne Plaza Kitchener recently on May 31,2024 for 1 night.
We were a walk-in customer on the evening of May 31 at approximately 8:30pm.
My wife and I used Booking.com platform to check hotel rates in the area and found Crowne Plaza was close bye and with reasonable rates for a last minute booking. However we did not book online, preferring to drive over to the hotel and see if we good request a better rate directly from the staff.
Upon requesting room rates for the evening, the Receptionist informed us Crowne Plaza could not offer a better rate than the CDN260.00 we found on Booking.com
At this point, Receptionist asked if we use Traveluro to book hotels, as they tend to have the best rates - even for Crowne Plaza. We were not familiar with the platform but he Googled the website to show us. At this point, we could not access the site, so we continued on his Hotel computer. He assisted us with imputing the dates, etc and came up with what appeared to be a much better rate for the night of CDN232.00 (including taxes)!
We were quite happy to proceed, and he assisted us by imputing all the info on Crowne computer, including paying with our credit card. We got the wifi working on our phone, and received email confirmation from Traveluro of our booking and gave Receptionist the booking number which he retrieved from his system, and proceeded to book our room for the night.
The problem for us occurred when we returned to our home in Singapore the following week. We were checking our credit card transactions from our trip and noticed we had been charged SGD324.00 for our booking at Crowne Plaza instead of the CDN232.00 we were supposed to pay (note the exchange rate between Canadian and Singapore dollars is almost 1:1, so we knew the higher charge was not due to currency exchange)...
We immediately thought the Traveluro had overcharged us,and contacted them. They responded quickly to inform us that the room rate we were quoted was in US Dollars, and the amount of USD$232.00 is the indeed correct, and the amount charged to our credit card.
So now, instead of us saving almost $30.00 by using Traveluro recommended by Crowne Plaza staff member, we end up paying CDN72.00 MORE than what we were going to book the room for, on the Booking.com platform...
We tried contacting Crowne Plaza to ask them to fix the problem for us, since it was their staff member who helped us complete the room booking. They refused, saying the problem is with Traveluro. Traveluro responded to our request by saying it is not their problem because their site quoted correctly based on the currency button set to USD and not CDN.
Just another example of no one wanting to take responsibility for a problem, and the customer left paying for it...