Agoda partners with SCAM HOTEL
Agoda partners with SCAM HOTEL and has lost my trust UPDATE: Thank you Rosie for your heartfelt response. After multiple declines of a 50% AgodaCash back compensation I have now been refunded 100% of my booking value in AgodaCash with 6 months expiry. Had to persist for the bare minimum. Agoda really needs to review its partner hotels for trustworthiness and blacklist scammy ones instead of promoting them! Shame on Agoda for promoting J Link Hotel Hong Kong on its platform and ignoring or omitting the many negative reviews it has received, either it is negligent in ensuring its partner hotels are trustworthy or worse! I booked J-Link Hotel for a 3-night stay in Hong Kong through Agoda as a top promoted hotel, and showed up on the evening of checking in with my PAID AND CONFIRMED booking. They denied me entry because of a technicality in my passport versus my Agoda account name (by convention with certain countries, the “Surname/ Family name” and “Last name” do not mean the same thing and are positioned differently in the passport). The hotel staff refused to negotiate on this matter. When I kept insisting, she left and was replaced by a more aggressive staff who kept falling back on the T&C’s of my booking being non-refundable and there is no resolution for this, except for me to contact Agoda. After that, they completely ignored me and I am left stranded in a foreign city I have never been to before, on a new year’s day, and left to fend for myself. Hideous and heartless people. Agoda Customer Care initially offered compensation of 50% of the original booking value in AgodaCash. Not good enough - not for all the trauma I went through thanks to using their booking platform! Agoda Customer Care also says they can initiate a full refund provided the hotel agrees to it. UPDATE: Agoda has reviewed my case and has responded with a full refund. I failed to do my own due diligence in double checking that this particular hotel actually has many reviews of them pulling off this scam, including reviews from other websites and especially on Google reviews. Implicit in using the Agoda platform for booking meant that I trust it and took it for granted that its partner hotels are reliable and trustworthy. It needs to improve on its own vetting process for partner hotels!