Hotels.com and a filthy room
We booked a Hilton hotel through hotels.com, and it was the most disgusting room I'd ever stayed in. I travel a lot and have stayed in many, many hotels — for work and for leisure. I've never had an experience like this.
The mattress on the pullout sofa had a large mysterious brown stain all over it. One of the pillows had a huge (bright) red stain all over it.
We found some nasty looking stains and food from previous guests all over the floor — pizza crusts, chips, crumbs, whole ass gummy bears and other candy.
We complained multiple times while there, they showed us other rooms that were equally filthy (one even smelled like moldy socks), but they said they couldn't refund us if we left early because we'd booked through hotels.com (even though they seemed open to it).
But when we called hotels.com's customer service they said they would just look into it. Hilton then straight up lied and said we'd never let the front desk know about it.
We provided photos of the room and names of staff we'd spoken to in our complaint. They still sided with Hilton. So I'm out hundreds of dollars.
Never booking a hotel through a third party site again. Such a fucking nightmare.
EDIT: I am posting this as a heads up/reminder of why booking third party can be a terrible idea. I've never dealt with the drawbacks until now or even been aware of them.