Hotels.com is one of our favorite sites to use to book hotel stays if we’re not booking direct or staying in a hostel or Airbnb. (*You can actually book some hostels on the site, too.)

We find Hotels.com to offer competitive prices while also offering a pretty solid rewards program. For every 10 stays you complete, a free night is earned valued at the average of the 10 nights you booked during this time. (Look at the reward as a 10% rebate.)

While booking a room over the weekend, I tried applying a reward to a booking. I headed over the the Hotels.com app and encountered some issues. (Find out why it pays to book your reward stay through the app here.)

I saw the reward credit applied towards the cost of our room but when I tried using Apple Pay to complete the booking, it would not work. Instead, I put the numbers of an American Express card in and then completed the booking.

A moment later, I got an alert from American Express about the charge but it showed as the full price of the room. My reward night credit was not applied! It turns out that somehow I was logged out of the Hotels.com app.

I went on multiple live chats and could not resolve the issue. I was about to give up before giving it a fourth and final try.

I explained the problem and the customer service rep offered to cancel the stay and rebook it. The issue with this was that the room we wanted to book would not be available. As I wrote to forget it and that I would use the reward another time, I got a very nice offer from.

The rep said that as a one time courtesy, he could remove the award night from my account and refund it back to my credit card. This sounded like a great deal so I accepted.

So why do I find this offer so good as opposed to just applying the credit to a future booking?

When you book using a reward night credit, your stay does not earn stamps towards future rewards. From what I can tell, since I was credited for the amount of the reward, our stay is still considered fully paid for without a promo.

In the end, it looks like I’ll pay the lower price on my credit card bill while still earning the stamp towards an additional reward night.

Final Thoughts:

Overall, what should’ve been a two minute booking became a bit of a pain but Hotels.com made it right. I can’t say anything bad here and would even say thank you for treating loyal customers the right way!