It was a deal for a last-minute car rental that caught Henry Thomas’ eye.
“I went through the screen and found a Hot Deal,” he said. “I was extremely careful about making sure my times and my dates were correct because they were non-refundable, non-transferable.”
But Henry said when he clicked to pay on Hotwire.com, an error screen popped up.
“There was a little icon on the screen with construction that said, ‘Oops, sorry. Something went wrong,” he said. “And prompted me to refresh the page.”
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So Henry said he did and received a confirmation.
“But my itinerary popped up on my screen and it was for the wrong date,” he said.
Henry was scheduled to arrive in Atlanta on Wednesday, June 16, and leave the following day. The confirmation he got was off by a day, he said, so he reached out to Hotwire right away.
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“I stated that I had just booked a car through their website and experienced an issue that now the date was incorrect,” he said. “I thought it was an easy fix.”
But it wasn’t.
“The response that I got was ‘Sorry, there’s nothing we’re going to do because it’s non-transferable, non-refundable,'” he said.
Henry went on his trip and said he paid for another rental. But he didn’t give up on trying to get a refund from Hotwire, eventually contacting NBC 6 Responds.
In a statement, a Hotwire spokesperson told NBC 6 Responds their teams “…always strive to provide a seamless customer experience.” The statement went on to say, “For these kinds of requests we can often identify the root cause of a customer report from our records, but in this case, we were unable to make a definitive determination as to the cause of the issue (i.e. whether this was a site error or a customer error).”
Still, the company decided to give Henry a full refund, it said, “…to ensure that we delivered a positive outcome for our customer.”
Henry, meanwhile, said he got a refund of the $150 he had paid for the initial online booking. He was glad he didn't give up.
“I was very grateful to get a hold of you guys because without you guys, I don’t think this would have been resolved,” he said.
