Travel season is back, and the June holidays are here.
For those who cannot wait to hop on a plane out of Singapore and to your next travel destination, do not do so with reckless abandon.
At the very least, you should do some research to check out the hotel that you booked.
If not, you may be in for a disgusting surprise or a heavy penalty.
Here is what happened to one woman who did not do her research before booking a hotel for her Bangkok trip.
Woman Booked Hotel in Bangkok Thinking That She Got a Good Deal
Some of us get ahead of ourselves the moment we see a good deal. This is most likely what happened to Stomper Jocelyn, who submitted via a web contribution form how greed became her downfall.
Stomp shares that the woman initially booked a three-night stay at Arnoma Grand Bangkok for her upcoming trip to the capital of Thailand.
She had used the third-party platform, Agoda, to make the booking earlier this month.
Jocelyn shared that the price for a “deluxe room with breakfast” cost a reasonable “$100 a night”, which was a “good” price, so she “went ahead” with the booking.
But alas, this was done without first doing research about the hotel.
The Hotel Reviews Turned Out to Be Terrible
When Jocelyn did get around to doing her research, what she found out shocked her to her core.
There were multiple complaints from tourists who stayed at the hotel. Some of their complaints included an old and dirty hotel, rude staff, mouldy smells in the room, dirty bedsheets with stains, yellow water in the bathtub, stains on the cups, cockroaches, cloudy water from the basin, and even rotten egg served for breakfast.
This hotel was supposed to be a four-star hotel.
Understandably, the woman no longer wanted to stay at the hotel and tried to cancel the booking and get her money back.
She had paid $295.40 for the room.
However, she found out that there was a cancellation fee of $100.44 if she decided to proceed with the cancellation. This meant that she would only recover $194.96, about 66 per cent of what she paid.
Jocelyn told Stomp that she had initially requested to cancel her booking through the Agoda app, though it was not approved by the company. She persisted and called both Agoda and the hotel but received a “not very polite” response from the staff that there the hotel did “not allow a waiver of the cancellation fee”.
In the end, the happy traveller decided to cancel the booking in search of a better hotel.
Her parting advice for other travellers? Learn from her mistake and do your research before you book, lest you find yourself in a similar situation.
We can’t agree more.