I have a few scenarios that could have occured: 1) Yahoo mail, and perhaps other services, have had many bugs with their search feature. If you were searching for a specific e-mail, it might not come up in the filter. Are you able to search for other e-mails? 2) Hotwire swears up and down that you weren't charged to begin with. What refund do you think you are entitled to? If so, the burden of proof is on YOU, not them. You need to come up with a bank receipt or credit card statement which you can fax to hotwire and help them in their investigation of your missing hotel. 3) You said you saw another person's name on the e-mail, but thought nothing of it at the time. Were you intoxicated? I mean, sorry, were you using a public computer, that may have had someone else's log-in, someone who may or may not have cancelled your room depending on whether they have notice that a hotel had been booked on their account? 4) The delete button on an email in microsoft applications like outlook and hotmail and msn mail is an "X" that looks like close but it is really a delete button. You could have also inadvertantly deleted your emails, or they could be in your spam or delete folder. Any chance at all that you could contact your internet service provider to locate an email? (This would be easier if a work computer, but also I believe yahoo mail and some others used to have a rollback option that you could use by request.) It will be interesting to see what scenario turns out to be your case, not likely any of the above 3 but just ponderings on my part. You could have any number of answers for this, and if you research a little more, let us know what comes out of it. Did you check your credit card statements for the time the purchase was made? Hotwire charges you the same day but it might post the next business day, as well. Don't rely on customer service on the phone to track your reservation down, when it could be subject to their error in defining the search as well as your entering the dates and names at the time of reservation. Incidently, Hotwire once gave me $25 back because a hotel double billed me, even though this was not hotwire's fault nor could they have prevented it, really. They also gave me $100 once when a hotel was sold out but had not notified hotwire in time (or else perhaps there was an error in hotwire's inventory system). So your suspicions of hotwire doing shady things are not necessary.