If everything works, you might get a good deal.

So our week-long road trip is quickly approaching, and I’ve been slacking on making plans and hotel reservations so I decided that I needed to dedicate my afternoon to getting to arrangements made. I’ve never actually booked a hotel online and I’ve never had to pay the full price for my hotel room when I reserved it, so this was all a brand new experience for me.

I needed to get 2 hotel rooms reserved, one in Las Vegas, Nevada, and the other in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After reading Shoemoney’s review of the Stratosphere in Las Vegas I decided that it was definitely the place we needed to stay during our visit to Nevada. I found that Vegas.com offered some pretty awesome discounts for the different hotels in Vegas, a basic room at the Stratosphere being only $44.00 a night with their 50% off promotion, I jumped on it immediately. I had some troubles with the Vegas.com website and my credit card. The website kept telling me that my billing address was incorrect. I have 2 addresses registered with my bank so I tried the secondary mailing address, still wrong, so I try them both again with no avail. The website finally gives me a message that says I need to call their customer service, so I give the 800 number a call and I get a representative that takes all of my information. She tries to book my reservation with my primary address and again it doesn’t go through, so she tries one more time with my mailing address and BAM, it works. After I received my confirmation email a couple minutes later I go ahead with my next hotel reservation on Hotwire.com.

I did some comparison shopping and Hotwire.com did find the best hotel prices in Albuquerque, a 3 star hotel no less. 3 nights at a 3 star hotel for $230.00 is a decent price, the only weird part about booking a hotel with Hotwire.com is they don’t disclose the name or location of the hotel until it’s all said and done. It’s almost a gamble because in reality 3 stars could mean anything. I mean who gave the hotel 3 stars? Did they give themselves the 3 star rating? But once again I went for the deal, this time I had no problem booking my reservation online. The mystery hotel? The Radisson Albuquerque. Nice.

Here I’m thinking mission is a success, I got both hotels booked and I saved about $30 from my rough estimate. A few minutes pass by and my cell phone rings –

Me: “Hello?”

Representative: “Good Afternoon Mr. Langenfeld. This is Wells Fargo Fraud Prevention, I’m showing a number of charges on your Visa debit card from a Vegas.com and Hotwire.com and we are just confirming that you made these transactions?”

Me: “Well, yeah, you just see the one charge from Vegas.com right? I had some troubles with their website…”

Representative: “I’m showing a total of six charges from Vegas.com, totaling in $561.24, I’m also showing a charge from a Hotwire.com. Your account has overdrafted, overdraft protection from your Savings account has..”

Me: “Wait, what? Six charges? I had some problems with their website, it must have..”

Representative: “Sir, I think you need to call them back and let them know they overcharged, we can dispute the pending charges but as of right now they are legitimate.”

That conversation was the beginning of the hell that is my afternoon. Now I’m no stranger to this kind of problem, I’m surprised how common it is because I’ve had stuff like this happen before. But six charges totaling in almost $600 is a lot different than Domino’s Pizza accidentally charging me twice. Something like this could cause major unrecoverable damage, just in the overdraft fees alone.

I frantically made the phone calls to Vegas.com and my bank, its unbelievable how fast they can take the money and how long it takes to get it back. The additional charges should fall off in a few days, or a week, or two. I guess I’m supposed to stop living life with no money in my checking account until then. Luckily I actually have money in savings, and a credit card, I couldn’t imagine if I didn’t. I’ve been waiting for a refund from ANTOnline.com for over a month, so we will see how this all pans out.

UPDATE: So Vegas.com did eventually work with my bank to credit the original charges back onto my account. The overdrafts from the $700.00+ worth of unplanned spending in under an hour are still very real but they assure me it will all be taken care of.