FlyerTalk Forums - Hotels.com frustrations

I have been using Hotels.com for at least 5 or 6 years faithfully and am noticing that their system, services and policies have totally gone down hill. I've switched to using other on-line hotel services since their prices are the same/better (trivago, orbitz, expedia,etc), but hope I can help others avoid the frustration I have had with hotels.com.

1. I've noticed that whenever you do a search which include filtering by distance it doesn't work. This used to be one of their best features. Recently I filtered by proximity to JFK and I got the following results:
- Hotel 1 - 14 miles
- Hotel 2 - .02 miles
- Hotel 3 - 1.06 miles
- Hotel 4 - 16 miles
- Hotel 5 - 3.1 miles

2. Their customer service has gone down hill recently. It took two calls to find out why 2 days of hotel stays weren't shown on my activity. The second call took over an hour and finally the woman said "those days were counted towards one of your reward days". I gave up since they could not send me a statement showing what i had accumulated and used.

3. The most frustrating to me is their strictly adherence to policy on rewards. I recently had a $5.00 coupon pop up while I was making reservations. I went ahead and used it on a $500(+) stay. Since I had used the coupon, I got NO reward credit for the four day stay and they could not do any exception to the policy. If I had a coupon for even $25.00/$50.00 on that stay or had the stay been only $100, I could understand that, but really $5.00 coupon on $500(+) stay. Even the customer service person said it was really unfair, but there was no exception to policy.

Thanks for listening to my frustrations with them.