When You Make A Hotel Reservation Do They Charge Your Credit Card

[Rafael Nowning]

Just today, I booked a hotel in Hong Kong through Booking.com using a prepaid debit card which has zero balance. My reservation was confirmed; however, I changed my mind as I found a cheaper place to stay.

What should I do now? Should I consider the booking cancelled already, just like the email they sent me, and not think about the charge anymore? Or do I have to put money in the card to cover the fee which, honestly, I find outrageous?

I don't quite understand why you're "shocked" at the cancellation fee or why you find it "outrageous"? When you reserve a hotel, you make a promise to show up, and the hotel promises to give you a rate that's cheaper than usual. If you cancel, the hotel gets no money from you and is left scrambling to fill that room, which is why cancellation fees are used to mitigate the damage. If anything, it's not unusual to have fully prepaid rates, meaning that once you've booked, you're charged the entire fee, even if you cancel within 5 minutes.

But in any case, as Burhan says in his answer, since you have no balance on the card, what happens next is mostly up to your bank and you may well get away without paying a cent. But if the bank does decide to charge you, I don't see what grounds you would have to contest the charge, you were almost certainly notified about it (albeit in small print) when you made the original booking: Booking.com promises "no cancellation fee" on "most", but not all, rooms.

Either way, what happens depends on what kind of card it is and what kind of agreement you have with your bank. You can contact the hotel to contest the charge (although, I am not sure how far that would go to be honest - I have not had much success in this department).

Always read the fine print. People rush into making a room reservation based solely on the rate or the pictures. When you reserve that room, you are entering into a legally binding contract. You are agreeing to the terms and conditions on that site and for the hotel.

Try contesting the charges in court or with the bank and good luck to you. Whether you think it's fair or not, or whether you like the terms and conditions is irrelevant after the fact. Once you've "confirmed" that you agree by hitting the reserve button And sending the merchant your order you are required to uphold your end of the contract.

Saying you didn't see the information on the website or vendors advertising pages is not a good argument either. The burden of proof is on the accuser. Be prepared to provide proof that the information was not provided BEFORE the purchase was made. Usually the information on reservation pages is right next to the reserve button. Sometimes it is before the checkout page.

My advice is to just stay away from the prepaid reservations since the savings are not nearly all that much lower. 3 party websites like Expedia, booking.com etc, are travel agencies. They will get a fee for sending your reservation to the hotel. If you have an issue at the hotel, you will need to go back to the 3rd party to resolve the billing issue.

Call hotels in the morning hours and ask for a manager (GM) to get answers to your booking questions. Also ask for discounts from the manager rather than the desk staff. Ask about the policy for refunds and anything else you think you should know. Last, take names of the person you spoke to, their positions and get confirmation or cancellation numbers. I can't count how many people don't do this and find out that they've been charged as a no show for a reservation they cancelled, but can't provide a cancellation number or name of the person they spoke to. Other show up with no reservation at a sold out hotel and having no confirmation number means you have no grounds for recovery.

Now i am not sure about Hong Kong law but in some countries exist an international archive that states if you are a bad user of credit/debit instruments (Europe, Asia, North and Central America, and Oceania).

Now if the Hotellier find out that you have tried to contest the payment he got 3 options: 1st loose the credit, 2nd contact the bank (for free) and give explanations (takes a lot of time), 3rd contacting the national archive and paying a fee for official comunications to the autorities and even showing the "contract"(this is the evil path and is even the less known).

You have "signed" a contract with booking.com and they did with the hotellier, the hotellier has the right, in case you use an instrument like the debit card without the plafond, to ask this international archives to place your name on them, and now the bad news, what does imply? The Bank is obliged to prevent you from using any of those instruments from 6 months up to 5 yrs.
At this point I'll say I will be happy to pay the fee needed.

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Marriott sent me a confirmation that I had booked a room at the property and that I had paid for it. However, when we checked out, my husband paid for the room again -- not realizing I had already paid for the hotel through Booking.com.

Booking.com should have charged you once, and Marriott shouldn't have charged you at all. I know, thank you, Captain Obvious. But it merits repeating. I've reviewed your paperwork, and you shouldn't have paid twice for your hotel.

Marriott believed you hadn't prepaid your room. You might have been able to clear up the matter while you were at the property, but it looks like your husband didn't get the memo, either. (Next time, please tell him you've prepaid.)

Make your reservation with a well-known booking platform like Expedia, Booking.com, or Hotels.com. These sites have robust security measures in place to prevent fraudulent activity. That's not to say they're problem-free, but they usually fix anything that goes wrong.

Bottom line: Pay attention and be proactive if you see something out of the ordinary. No one expects you to pay twice for the same room, but the sooner you address the problem, the likelier you are to fix it.

As I review the correspondence between you, Booking.com and Marriott, I see a lot of issues. There's Booking.com referring you to Marriott, even though this was a Booking.com reservation. And there's Marriott sending you what appears to be a form letter saying you can't get loyalty points for your stay in Boston.

After receiving these disappointing responses, there's only one thing left to do. You have to appeal your case to a higher level. I list the names, numbers and email addresses of the executives at Marriott and at Booking.com on this site.

This is not the first time Booking.com has billed one of its customers twice -- I had a similar case a few months ago -- and I'm sure it won't be the last. You have to watch your final bill carefully. When you give a hotel your credit card for "incidental" expenses, make sure it doesn't charge you for the room again. It's happened to me, and let me tell you, it is no fun to resolve it.

But there is a resolution to your case. You reached out to my advocacy team. I contacted Booking.com. It asked for proof of payment, which you furnished. Within a week, you had a full refund of the amount you'd overpaid.

Christopher Elliott is the founder of Elliott Advocacy, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that empowers consumers to solve their problems and helps those who can't. He's the author of numerous books on consumer advocacy and writes three nationally syndicated columns. He also publishes the Elliott Report, a news site for consumers, and Elliott Confidential, a critically acclaimed newsletter about customer service. If you have a consumer problem you can't solve, contact him directly through his advocacy website. You can also follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, or sign up for his daily newsletter. He is based in Santiago, Chile.

I cancelled a hotel reservation in Concur days in advanced, but at the end of the month the charge was on my credit card / expense report. I did call the hotel and they told me there is not a record of my reservation or stay with them. They recommended me to contact my travel reservation provider to address the issue. How can I contact a Concur desk agent? Any help to fix this issue?

@Gil your travel reservation provider would be your company's travel agency. Concur Travel is the tool to make your travel selections, but the travel agency does the actual fulfillment of those selections. Just a little helpful tip.

Look at your reservation and check if it was a non-refundable booking that was pre-paid. Usually these are charged on the morning of your check-in. While you may have cancelled the hotel booking, if the rate was non-refundable and to a 3rd party in your travel booking tool, there is no refund and you have to pay despite not staying there. You would have to select a "pay at hotel" reservation for the hotel to be the vender of record and have the ability to refund the charge. It is important that travelers look at the type of reservation they are making before they accept the booking since you will be responsible for the charge if you miss the cancellation period or select a non-refundable/non-cancellable reservation.

The card issuer is basically redundant since from the number you can get the issuer. So basically, with two basic pieces of information (credit card number and expiry date) anyone can pull money from my account.

Booking.com doesn't take a deposit or any payment from you; what you're filling in is a reservation form. The card details are used as a form of payment identity in case (a) you don't turn up and they need proof you intended to stay, or (b) you stay and run off without paying when checking out. They hotel still requires a present card for payment, or the CVV to do a card-not-present transaction, or cash if you choose to pay that way instead.

The bigger question of "is this secure" is more complicated. The simplest way to think about it is that there are a number of security controls in place to help prevent fraud, at various stages in the process (website, payment processor, bank), but even if these all fail the bank is insured against fraud, so you will get your money back if you use an appropriate card type. In general, credit cards offer superior and faster fraud protection in comparison to debit/bank cards.