Hotel pricing error – should the hotel honour the price?

By Darren Cronian on Saturday, October 13th, 2007

I won’t name the companies involved as I cannot backup this claim, but yesterday I received an email from a travel consumer who searched for a hotel in Windsor online and was surprised to find that one hotel was charging only £15 a night for the period he wanted to book.

Normally the hotel charges over £100 a night. Thinking it was odd; he still went ahead and booked the hotel, paid for the hotel and then received email confirmation confirming the rate of £15 a night.

Ten minutes later the hotel called and said that they couldn’t honour the rate of £15, were very rude and blamed the hotel booking site. The consumer called the holiday booking site and was told that the fault was with the actual hotel as they provide them with the hotel information.

Surely, the email is a legal binding document which means the hotel has no choice but to charge the consumer the rate it has advertised on the website. I’d be interested to hear if anyone has had similar problems or from any legal experts who could shed some light on this issue.

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4 responses to “Hotel pricing error – should the hotel honour the price?”

Alex | 13 October, 2007 at 6:47 pm

Firstly I am not a lawyer…. If I was, I wouldn’t be looking for business by posting comments to a blog

Secondly it depends what the terms of the website are. Some travel websites are (in the T&Cs) an “offer” – meaning the travel website can decide whether to accept or decline the customer’s offer of a purchase.

Therefore if a pricing error has taking place, the website can decline the offer without legal issues.

What you need to see is the wording of the confirmation page / confirmation email…. if it is “your booking has been received and will be processed in the next 24 hours” that is normally lingo for “an offer”. If it is – “we look forward to seeing you on the 21st of Oct” – then that is acceptance of an offer.

Then you have to look at the T&Cs between the hotel and the travel website. For example one hotel came unstuck on Opodo because the hotel had misloaded the prices themselves (rather than it being something the travel website had done)

http://www.out-law.com/page-7553

One thing for sure, no excuse for a rude phone call.

I have written some thoughts on this
http://www.tourcms.com/blog/2007/09/05/time-for-a-pep-talk-pricing-error-protection-on-travel-websites/

Again, just to repeat, I am not a lawyer.

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