I was visiting Berlin for a few days, and planned to stay with friends, but the night before I was…read moreto arrive I wasn't able to get in touch with them. So I decided to play it safe and book a hotel. I found Lindemann's on hotels.com, and made a booking for the first night. Right afterward, literally within one or two minutes, my friends called me up, and I no longer needed the hotel room.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the cancellation policy was such that none of my reservation could be refunded, since it was within 24 hours, even though I had just booked it. So immediately I called up hotels.com, and they said that usually in cases like this the hotel would be reasonable and refund the money, that I should just go ahead and cancel the booking, and that they would get in touch with the hotel.
This I did, and later I heard back from hotels.com that the manager at the hotel refused to refund the booking.
I have to say that I find this pretty unreasonable: it's not like the hotel lost an opportunity to give that room to someone else during the 20 minutes it took for me to cancel the reservation. Obviously I cannot speak to the quality of the stay, but this interaction makes me seriously doubt the way this hotel treats its customers. I wonder what other ways the management finagles money out of people who choose to stay at this "cheap" hotel.