Just wanteded to give a warning to anyone planning to book rooms/beds through Hostelsclub.com.
I presumably "booked" two hostel beds with them on March 10. On March 11th, I received a personal notification from the Hostel, telling me that Hostelsclub.com had placed my reservation with them, although they don't even have availabilities for the reservation period. Apart from the inconvenience of not getting the beds I booked, for which I had already received confirmation (isn't that what a reservation system is for?!), Hostelsclub.com took 10 bucks from me for this "reservation", and I have been chasing down my money ever since.
Timeline...
March 11: Reported above issue to Hostelsclub.com - never received a reply.
March 17: Sent a reminder to Hostelsclub.com
March 21: Someone from Hostelsclub.com gets back to me in Swedish (which I don't understand).
March 21: Finally a reply in English. Hostelsclub.com tells me that they are waiting for a reply from the Hostel.
March 24: Sent a follow-up to Hostelsclub.com, asking what came of their inquiry. No reply.
Then I was on vacation. When I came back, I discovered that Hostelsclub.com hat done NOTHING in my absense.
April 15: I'm sending them another email - this time less courteous.
April 18: Someone finally gets back to me. They tell me that "as far as they can see", the refund was authorized weeks ago. They will double-check with the administration office.
Two weeks later, I received my credit card statement - no refund from Hostelsclub.com whatsoever, at least not between the beginning of time and April 26.
So to sum it up: Hostelsclub.com is either a scam, or a bunch of imbeciles. To me, that pretty much makes no difference, actually. All I can say is, stay away from these people. You may be able to afford the money, but hardly the time to deal with this sort of ****.
13 years
To be honest, that sounds more like a problem with the hostel than with hostelsclub.com - the hostels themselves are responsible for updating availability so if they overbooked, thats the hostels problem.
strange that the reply was in swedish though - the site is very popular with the spanish and italians and the 'back office' requires you to set your prices in $USD and then they change the price to local currency through their own exchange rate. weird.
13 years
How is it a problem with the hostel, when hostelsclub.com takes my money for something that doesn't exist, and although they are told four or five times, simply don't give a **** and just keep the money?
(And yes, the part about the hostel's responsibility I understand. For what it's worth, after the experience I've had with hostelsclub.com I'm not convinced that this was the hostel's fault. In other booking systems, the availabilities were reflected properly, and that somehow suggests that hostelsclub.com may just have a more general information processing problem.)
13 years
How is it a problem with the hostel, when hostelsclub.com takes my money for something that doesn't exist, and although they are told four or five times, simply don't give a **** and just keep the money?
(And yes, the part about the hostel's responsibility I understand. For what it's worth, after the experience I've had with hostelsclub.com I'm not convinced that this was the hostel's fault. In other booking systems, the availabilities were reflected properly, and that somehow suggests that hostelsclub.com may just have a more general information processing problem.)
From our experiences with the various booking portals (Hostelsclub, Hostelbookers, HW etc.) they pass the onus on reimbursing a guest on to the hostel itself, if the hostel did not meet the terms and conditions by having availabilty for a guest wehn the booking was made.
So it could be the case that HC are trying to force the hostel itself to refund your deposit and the hostel is not complying?
13 years
I think that if the booking engine doesn't refund in these cases they are not helping themselves. Whatever their terms and conditions say a customer would be entitled to expect a refund if the have booked with hostelsclub and the booking hasn't been fulfilled. As far as whether the fault is the hostels or the booking engine, the customer isn't going to be concerned about that - they'll just try and get a refund from who they paid - i.e. the booking engine. Things like this lead to unhappy customers, who - like in this case, post online for the whole world to read. My attitude at the hostel level is that for a charge like $10 I'd rather refund a customer than have an unhappy customer.
13 years
The problem appears to be that HClub showed certain vacancies, which the hostel did not have.
There are 2 possible reasons for this: 1) The hostel had forgotten to update their vacancies on HClub; 2) HClub had done something wrong.
One needs to determine which it is.
In the first case, the hostel should make amends in some way, at least by refunding the 10% deposit (even though this never reached them).
In the second case, HClub should refund the deposit which they obtained wrongly.
(This was written before seeing Scotch Argus' comment)
13 years
hostelsclub... The amount of bookings I get from them is Maybe 3-5 a year. Once I figured out they don't supply many I reduced my # of beds to 10 on their site. I did that because It was not really productive to update the availability there.
Before I did that, We were full one new years and some smarty found I had beds available on that site and booked it(realizing It was my fault) I managed to make them happy. ( sent an appology explaing what had happen, and put them up in another place on arrival.) I remember it well as it has been my only double booking in 5+ yrs.
I tell this story as I think it may be what happen to you. The Hostel was not updating the availability on their hostel on HC. The Hostel should of compensated or at least satisfied you.
13 years
hostelsclub... The amount of bookings I get from them is Maybe 3-5 a year. Once I figured out they don't supply many I reduced my # of beds to 10 on their site. I did that because It was not really productive to update the availability there.
Before I did that, We were full one new years and some smarty found I had beds available on that site and booked it(realizing It was my fault) I managed to make them happy. ( sent an appology explaing what had happen, and put them up in another place on arrival.) I remember it well as it has been my only double booking in 5+ yrs.
I tell this story as I think it may be what happen to you. The Hostel was not updating the availability on their hostel on HC. The Hostel should of compensated or at least satisfied you.
Thanks for the insight - helps me understand how these systems work and what probably happened in the background.
But like Scotch Argus already indicated, this shouldn't be my problem. Hostelsclub.com are my business partner in this case, they received the money from me, and they are the ones who need to refund it - the exact money trail isn't my concern.
And as so often, when things go totally wrong, all of this boils down to an utter communication failure. Ignoring the customer is simply the cardinal sin in this.
13 years
Do you have the phone number for hostelsclub.com that I can use? I am experiencing a similar problem now and can't find anything besides an email address. Thank you!
13 years
This brings up a good point, in that if you are accepting multiple bookings from a bunch of booking sites, you have to be on guard for double booking, i use hostelworld primarily and dont bother to put our limited number of private rooms there for that reason.
13 years
Hi,
As Hostel Hassles has pointed out, we have already told him at the time he decided to publish this post that we had processed his refund, as it happens, there was an overbooking due to the property in question not maintaining it's availability. Our process is very simple in these situations.
1. We contact the property to get their side of the story.
2. If we confirm their was a problem, we refund the guest.
3. We then get the the refunded deposit from the property, as it is their responsibility to provide rooms that they list on our site.
Obviously Stefan has had a bad experience and we apologize for what must have been an extremely stressful situation.
Dominic | Hostelsclub.com
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