Guest User
February 9, 2023
In August, we booked and paid for a room at the BLVD Hotel through Priceline, which Priceline confirmed for the night of Friday, October 7. We arrived at 3:30 pm on October 7 and provided our Priceline reservation with the confirmation number. The clerk said we had no reservation and the hotel was fully booked. We called Priceline and they confirmed that they had our reservation that was confirmed in their system. We waited nearly two hours for Priceline and the hotel to not resolve the issue. Nearly 45 minutes of that time was spent on the phone with Priceline while they tried to call the BLVD Hotel and the clerk ignored their call. Both the hotel and Priceline kept blaming each other for the issue, and neither gave us a solution. I would have been happy had they transferred us to a hotel within walking distance, since the whole reason we were staying at the BLVD was to be within walking distance of the Hollywood Bowl. I also found it hard to believe there were absolutely no rooms available for a reservation we had made in August. Priceline kept pushing us to cancel the reservation, and finally that seemed to be our only option. They said they could give us an extra $40 in compensation in addition to a refund of the room rate we had prepaid, although we then had no place to stay, which meant we had a two-hour drive back to our home after the late-night concert at the Hollywood Bowl, and we missed out on a planned weekend getaway to LA. The clerk at the BLVD Hotel did not take any kind of ownership or responsibility for resolving the issue, and when I suggested that at the very least he should tell his manager to investigate what went wrong so it didn’t happen again, he just shrugged. Honestly, whether this was Priceline’s fault or the BLVD Hotel’s fault, both parties should have been deeply concerned with the failure of their systems and processes, and the impact to their customers (especially since we had been regular customers of both). It was the lack of concern and carelessness that totally floored me. There are so many things that could have been offered as remedies, and it would have made me feel at least a little better if the clerk had been at all alarmed or insisted that he would follow up with the owner to get to the bottom of the issue to prevent it in the future. But none of that happened. It was absolutely terrible customer service from both Priceline and the BLVD Hotel, neither of which we will ever trust or use again.