Originally Posted by
L_D_M
Well, they always offered it directly, but that was a pretty unsatisfactory process. You needed to send in a list of hotels you were looking at, dates, and other details, and they'd get back to you with quotes. I never actually left it up to them to recommend hotels - I've heard that people who did didn't exactly get the best results. Also, they never ever came back with refundable rates. On the Visa Promotions page, you could easily find refundable rates for pretty much every hotel you were looking at.
I always thought that it was manually pulled from hotels.com... till they built the landing page with Visa. Either ways it was a horrible process where they take 2-3 days to give you a list of 3-4 hotels that you don't want. And yes almost all are non-refundable.
I've taken quotes from them a few times but never booked through them. It's a painful service.