Originally Posted by mikeFT

Speaking of Pay Later hotels, I have an odd one - a stay I booked for August, in Brazil, using the AAdvantage Hotels portal like normal; it shows as a booking in the hotels portal, but unlike the other bookings I have in the future, there is no option for viewing the receipt (surely because there's been no payment yet). However, the booking also appears in Booking.com. I never visited Booking.com in regards to making this reservation, but it's there. I know the companies are under the same umbrella so that's not too odd but I had never seen it before.

The odd part is that I was contacted by the hotel, through the Booking.com email system, asking me for a deposit of one night's rate, paid via Brazilian bank transfer - which are common there, but not for us from here. My wife is Brazilian and called the hotel directly to ask directly about that because it felt very scammy, especially since the reservation was already guaranteed through Booking.com with my card info there.

They convinced her that the deposit was the necessary step to actually reserving the room, which is a PITA but since she still has a Brazilian bank account, it wasn't hard to do, and there is a transaction history. But that transaction does not show up on the Booking.com reservation. Now the question is, if we have to cancel, which is allowed up until the week of the stay, but we have paid the deposit not through Booking, but directly to the hotel, how does that get unwound? She's going to call today and ask those specifics and argue the point that it all feels very unnecessary when they've chosen to manage bookings through a portal such as Booking.com who guarantees it themselves.

Just a rambling DP on the most convoluted booking I've ever made through the AAdvantage Hotels portal.

Edit: I suppose all of this is simply because we didn't actually book the room on AAdvantage Hotels, we only reserved it; so the payment happens elsewhere; it's just a much more complicated scenario than any others I've done on the portal before.