We arrived at the London Marriott Hotel Maida Vale in Kilburn before midnight on Friday, July 3, after a long day of sightseeing. I had booked the room through hotels dot com about an hour earlier due to another unforeseen error on another accommodations app, and had received confirmations by email and in the app. A junior front desk employee couldn’t locate my reservation and asked his manager for assistance.

The staff questioned whether my booking was valid and repeatedly suggested I cancel my reservation, request a refund, and book directly with the hotel instead. During this time, my girlfriend began to think my reservation had failed, my ability to make simple plans was suddenly in question, and that the birthday trip I had planned for her was falling apart. And the staff was suddenly and yet clearly antagonistic towards my efforts to try and salvage the situation.

After about 25 minutes of unnecessary explanation, how I should go about making reservations and how their systems work and don’t work, all while I was also chatting with hotels dot com support ready to cancel my reservation, the hotel staff finally managed to locate my reservation in the Expedia system, the parent company of hotels dot com, and without explaining what had changed. The room itself was fine, but the check in experience was unnecessarily stressful. I would have appreciated an apology or acknowledgment of the inconvenience rather than simply being told to “call us directly next time.”