Alex71

For our four night stay in Singapore, I booked a Hotwire Hotrate hotel for our family of four (two adults and two children) and received the Ramada at Zhongshan Park. At check in, we were told that the room had only one bed and that there was an extra charge of about 71 SGD / 52 USD per night (including service charge and tax) to have a roll-away bed added. We tried to argue with the check-in guy, but he claimed this was customary in Singapore and we should have booked a room for four adults if we had wanted two queen beds.

I then called Hotwire. The agent was very sympathetic, called the hotel on our behalf with no success and then suggested that Hotwire would move us to a different hotel the next morning. When calling back in the morning, the agent first wanted to check again with the hotel and called again and then told us we needed to call back in another 30 minutes as she hadn't reached the right person at the hotel yet.

When calling back, I spoke to yet another agent, who apparently had only poor notes from the previous ones and who again needed to call the hotel to confirm the situation. After spending another 30 minutes with her on the phone, she agreed to move us to a different hotel, but in the end did not get this approved by her supervisor, as the rate difference was higher than what they were willing allocate to our case.

All Hotwire was able to do was to give us 25 USD in "Hot Money", which of course only covered a small portion of the additional cost.

I'm wondering if I have any recourse or if I simply need to move on, write this off as a learning experience and for the future stay away from Hotwire for countries where the standards are so different.