Love your customer and stick it to the repeat buyers, thanks hotels.com

Something that I came across today, that for lack of a better description, just flat out pissed me off. I was booking a hotel room on hotels.com, and found some interesting pricing disparaty when I logged into my hotels.com account on another computer.

Initially I had searched for available hotels, and found one for $145. I logged into my account in a separate browser, and low and behold, the price went up to $220. Tried from another computer and same result. I could add the hotel to my cart and then login and the price would remain the same.

So basically Hotels.com sticks it to their repeat customers and deliberately delivers them a higher price than someone that just happens to browse their site. I suppose an argument could be made from a pure profit perspective that their customers aren’t going to question the price that they’re shown once they’ve made purchases from them in the past. However, this sort of greedy, and in my opinion deliberately deceiving behavior, is just not acceptable. If I repeat a business, I don’t necessarily expect to be given a better deal, although marketing statistics would support this, but I damn well expect not to be deliberately ripped off.