Q: I booked a prepaid, nonrefundable rental car through Hotwire. A few days later, I booked another car for the same dates by mistake. I tried to cancel one of the bookings and request a refund. Hotwire refuses.
Obviously, I can't drive two cars at the same time. Their system shouldn't allow someone to double-book. I have used Hotwire for many years. Before this, I was a satisfied customer. Can you help me get my $178 back?
A: As a regular user of Hotwire, you should have paid closer attention to your reservation and its strict terms. But just how nonrefundable is nonrefundable?
Here's what insiders tell me: If you make an honest mistake and call right away, they can work with you to cancel the overlapping reservation. But the longer you wait, the harder it gets.
Still, I think Hotwire should at least warn you that you're about to make a double booking. And it looks like Hotwire didn't send you a confirmation for your first reservation. If it had, this would be a borderline case that I couldn't have advocated. But it looks like a few things went wrong on Hotwire's side, too.
Look, plans change. It would be nice to see the travel industry adopt a 24-hour rule so that customers could fix problems like these. If everyone treated each other like travel companies treated you after a nonrefundable purchase, imagine what the buying experience would be like. No returns on anything, ever. Buyer's remorse would become a national pastime.
I reviewed the correspondence between you and Hotwire. Everything looked promising. A representative told you not to worry, agreeing that your second booking was a "mistake." He added that Hotwire just needed to "verify" the refund through your car rental company.
Then you received bad news: "We can only process a refund for the other reservation if one of them was processed within an hour. But it shows here that the second reservation was booked after a few days." If Hotwire had been upfront about that, then you wouldn't have gotten your hopes up.
