How Otel.com Scammed Hundreds of Travelers during COVID19, and brought a FB Community Together

Photo by Neil Martin on Unsplash

In early March, my good friend Irene made the hard decision to cancel her bachelorette in Cancun; we were to stay at Live Aqua Beach Resort Cancun, an adult-only inclusive resort and I booked on behalf of my group.

At that time, cases of COVID-19 were increasing and she was worried we all could potentially be stranded in Mexico as the current travel climate was unclear. I had booked through Otel.com, a third party provider that offered “cheap hotel bookings with low rate guarantee.”

When I sent Otel.com a cancelation request, the customer service rep replied with, “We have contacted our hotel supplier as per your cancellation request and we will be updating you as soon as we get their response. Please note that we can not guarantee the refund, however, we will do our best.”

As back-up, I also contacted Live Aqua Beach Resort directly via the chat function and spoke to a CS rep Rocio. She said Otel holds my funds and they are the ones to refund me; on her end, she did the hotel cancellation for free and explicitly told me so. I email Otel again, and told them of my conversation. If this was fine, Otel could give me my full refund. But I had a bad feeling that wouldn’t go away and I began to dig into Otel and saw the thousands of negative reviews online. You can see the complaints on Twitter — I guarantee you will not find one tweet with positive sentiment. Things went sour, and I went down a rabbit hole that helped me find a community that was dealing with the same issues.

TLDR: I got my refund with the help from my credit card company. Here is advice on what you can do.

1. Screenshot everything Otel.com— its policies, the emails between you and Otel’s Customer Service, and all the timestamps. Save everything that can help you build a case against them. I recommend you build a folder of screenshots on your desktop and prepare for battle.
2. Call your credit card company or debit card issuer. Be prepared to thoroughly discuss the case, and explain what happened. Tell them there is a growing Facebook group of people dealing with the same situation, and some have successfully gotten their refund back from their credit card company — this is important; as cc competitors, they will likely match what their competitor do. DO. NOT. GIVE. UP. I waited a while to speak to a Chase representative, but after speaking to two, I found one who was kind enough and helped me with a chargeback.
3. If successful, the credit card company can do a chargeback to your credit card, essentially getting your funds back. To my knowledge, the cc company will end up paying for it first and then charge Otel a hefty fee; the cc company will go into this case and dispute this with Otel directly. This will come back as a negative balance to your credit card, meaning the issuer owes you funds. If you don’t want it to exist on your credit card statement as an amount, you can request that they mail you a check and you can deposit it as cash.
4. Create havoc and make noise— leave bad reviews and tell your story. Otel is a scamming company; they could prey on your friends or grandparents next. We need to make sure others don’t use their services ever again.

Okay, back to the juicy details of what happened. Here is a clear timeline of everything.

March 20: I reach out to Otel requesting a refund for my booking.

March 21: Mehmet, CS rep from Otel, tells me I can get a free refund and that my booking is canceled for free. I thank Mehmet.

April 1: I email Mehmet since I have not heard anything from him. I ask him when I will be receiving my funds.

April 2: I receive an email. The unprecedented impact of COVID-19 has resulted in an overwhelming delays in refund processes, refunds may take up to more than 60 days. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

I was livid. Refunds may take up to more than 60 days could mean my refund could take a year. Other third party vendors were already issuing out refunds and I had been very patient with Otel. I email back saying that wasn’t fair — no response.

April 10 and 12: I email Otel again on both days — no response.

April 16: I receive an email from Mehmet. Thank you for your email and we are sorry for the late response due to the high volume of requests we are receiving regarding the coronavirus situation. Please kindly be informed that we have contacted our payment team as per your request and we will inform you accordingly once we get their response.

April 25: I email Otel again to tell them the hotel has already told me the reservation was cancelled free of charge and that Otel holds the funds. My anger starts showing in the emails — not proud of it.

Mehmet responds back. Instead of giving me my full refund, he’s decided to issue me a voucher that can be used within a year for any hotel or date. Lucky me. Also, this is in the midst of COVD-19; no one knows when travel will normalize or when travel bans are lifted. Reading his email elevates my blood pressure and my response begins to be in all caps for emphasis.

At this point, my blood is boiling. I start leaving negative reviews everywhere I can scatter them — on Otel’s Facebook page, their Twitter, travel review pages, their Instagram, and my own Instagram. I then found a Facebook group called scammed by Otel and join the other 90 folks. They are cool people from all around the world and helpful in sharing information; I could tell a few had initially accepted defeat and were willing to let it go, but with the energy of the group, we are rejuvenated with the energy of being in this together. On Twitter, I find otelcom tagged tweets and start tweeting the users to join our FB group — some ladies from the group do the same and our group exploded into 230 members. People are still joining every day.

I send this message probably 50 times to Twitter users complaining to Otel. Strength in numbers.

Turns out, many us were getting ghosted by Otel and some were being issued 1-year vouchers that didn’t even work. You can see the below image of one of our group members sharing screenshots of her attempting to use the code.

I blocked out the voucher code for her own privacy, but it says “invalid user.”

Otel has continued to ghost its customers, delete tickets, and send invalid vouchers to those trying to get their money back from the COVID-19 crisis. They drag on each case and come up with excuse after excuse. Their CEO leads these practices, and blocks anyone who tries to reach out to him.

See below image.

I know — there’s a lot of caps for angry emphasis.

Ways you can help us:

1. Help us amplify this. If we can share this with travel & tourism media, this can spread faster and Otel’s actions will be held accountable.
2. If you work in law or jurisdiction and have an idea on how to handle this mess of a show, let me know.
3. Reach out to Otel.com and Metglobal (parent company) to push them to do better. The voices of a thousand more could get them to do the right thing.
4. If you find another way to get your refund back, let me know. We can also share this information and story with our group.

Emily is an US expat currently living in Singapore to learn about the tech hubs growing in Asia. She has worked 4+ years in developer relations, community management, and event marketing within the startup tech space and travel industry. Her time at OmniSci, Google and Booking.com gave her cross-functional expertise. In her free time, she runs the volunteer community initiatives for TEDxSanFrancisco, as well as promote and blog on the importance of financial literacy and education. You can follow her on Twitter @emilyifang.