‘My $60 hotel booking doubled in price when I received the confirmation email’

A few days before the recent Old Trafford cricket match against Sri Lanka, I received an invitation. My friend Ed Atkinson, the father of England’s new opening bowler Gus, had spare friends-and-family tickets. Would I like to go?

I immediately accepted and began an online trawl for a hotel. It was easy on paper, or should I say online, as Manchester city centre is heaving with affordable, comfortable, convenient hotels.

I settled on the Moxy Manchester, an inexpensive Marriott hotel located in the middle of the city, and saw an offer of a single room with a king bed for “$GBP 60”. The ambiguity of currency should have been a warning, but believing I was on the official Moxy Manchester website, I paid up.

Only when I received a confirmation email did alarm bells start to ring. It was headed “ReservationsCenter” and stated: “Your reservation is confirmed and paid in full. Total charge $121.66.” So, not £60 or even $60 but twice that. This was made up of $77.62 for the room, then $44.04 “tax recovery charges and service fees”. Later, a further £9.69 appeared on my Barclaycard statement for an unspecified “ReservationsCenter fee”. That translated to a grand total of £107.02. Added to which, ReservationsCenter declared that if I wished to cancel there was a fee of $94. Why $94? It seemed very random.

So what had happened? Returning to Google I realised I hadn’t been on the official Moxy website at all, but on ReservationsCenter.com. I called the Moxy and the duty manager expressed surprise at the mark-up and confirmed that the reservation had been made – via, he said, Booking.com. The hotel also had registered, through this booking, my home address as somewhere in Texas. I live in Blackheath.

I contacted Booking.com to ask whether ReservationsCenter.com was a subsidiary operation and spent several days engaged in a fruitless email exchange with a Booking.com representative, who repeatedly assured me that “the Booking.com team” was looking into this.

Finally, I received an answer. Booking.com confirmed that it does provide its inventory to other hotel reservation platforms, but “does not have control over how [those websites] provide pricing information to their customers”.

I looked on Trustpilot to see how other punters had apparently fared with ReservationsCenter.com and found detailed examples of alleged overcharging that made my Manchester experience seem like a bargain. One angry customer said that he had received “a price of £606 for a three-night stay at a Radisson hotel in Glasgow but found that £940.01 was removed from my bank account with additional charges made up of US taxes and service charges”. The same thing as me, basically. I have attempted multiple times to contact ReservationCenter.com, which appears to be based in the US, but have been ignored.

While I do adhere to the mantra of caveat emptor, I also feel the customer should be better protected against these online practitioners. I may not be as digitally alert as my daughters think I should be: “Daaaad, you really should be more careful online,” they tell me. But I am not an idiot, and when I made that reservation on what I thought was the Moxy Manchester website I was convinced I was booking a room at “$GBP 60”, whatever that meant. And this company added a whole lot of extra charges and I feel thoroughly ripped off.

What our consumer expert says:

It seems that Graham Boynton may have been confused because the URL created by this booking agency includes the name of the hotel as well as that of the agency (reservationscenter.com/hotel/moxy-manchester-city-8-atkinson-street-manchester). Such sites often use landing pages that can also be mistaken for the home page of the hotel.

A spokesperson for Booking.com told The Telegraph: “Booking.com’s inventory is provided to ReservationsCenter.com by Priceline’s travel partner programme through access to their API [Application Programming Interface], which connects multiple product sources and rates directly onto ReservationsCenter’s platform. While ReservationsCenter is independent, it is our understanding that travellers opting to use this site can find additional fees disclosed in advance of booking.”

Having explored its website, I can certainly understand why people might be surprised at the added charges. When I looked for a hotel in Manchester for the night of Oct 8-9, a rate of “$GBP 193.00” was shown for the Radisson Blu Edwardian. Click “book” and a new window opens containing a box for your “guest information” and credit card details. Only in a separate, smaller “booking summary” box are the extra charges revealed: £106.53 for taxes and service charges and a £9.17 “service fee”, for a grand total of £308.86.

In the end, the only reliable way to book a hotel is either directly with an agent such as Expedia or Booking.com, or on the hotel’s own website.

So be doubly careful if you are Googling a specific hotel – there is no guarantee that the first one listed in your search results is actually its home page and not that of an agent. And, if you are in any doubt, once you land on the page, spend a few moments exploring the site to ensure it does not contain some unwelcome extras.

Telegraph Travel has approached ReservationsCenter.com for a comment.

Nick Trend