Hotwire Hotel: 3* Vancouver (Burnaby-Coquitlam) Holiday Inn Express Vancouver

[bjcinbc]

hi all,

can someone help me sort out which hotel this is? hotwire has it offered at $66 a night...amenites are business center and fitness center. it says that one of their suppliers for 3* incude the Holiday Inn....could it be the Holiday Inn Express? i need to be close to MetroTown and Burnaby General Hospital which is why i'm hoping it's the Holiday Inn.

Just planning to stay for 1 night...Nov. 24th.

Thanks. hope you can help me out soon since my stay is coming up fast!

~thanks, bjc

[thereuare]

Start HERE

Please use these PRICELINE and HOTWIRE links to begin your travel purchases.

[bjcinbc]

okay. i replied to that email. any info please? hoping to book today...thanks, bjc

[thereuare]

A property in this zone with only these two amenities has not yet been reported to the board.

However, if you change your search to 2adults/2children a different 3* property is offered (Shuttle, Breakfast, Fitness, Internet, Business, Laundry) for just about the same price... this property has not yet been reported to the board, but a guess would be the Holiday Inn Express, if that happens to work well for your needs. Not 100% confident in this guess since the Holiday Inn Expresss has been reproted to the board before with different amenities than this offering, but it has only been reported once before and that was back in 2005, so it's entirely possible that the amenities have changed since them.

Please use these PRICELINE and HOTWIRE links to begin your travel purchases.

Let us know whatever you decide to do for this stay or if we can be of further help.

[bjcinbc]

Help! Help!

As you can see from the thread, i was hoping for a hotel near Metrotown and hoped for the Holiday Inn Express. I got the right hotel alright..., but the wrong area! Do you think I can make the case that the hotel i won was not in Burnaby/Coquitlam, but rather in Vancouver???

here are the details of the win:

Holiday Inn Express

11/24 - 11/25

$66 plus $16.20 = 86.20 total

Hotel - NoOfRooms:1 room , NoOfNights:1 night

Holiday Inn Express Vancouver, BC

2889 East Hastings Street

Vancouver, British Columbia V5K 2A1

Canada

(604) 254-1000

Should i call Hotwire? Or should i ask the hotel to see if i can stay in their other property???

thanks in advance, bjc

[thereuare]

That was the Holiday Inn Express i was refering to. the one in Burnaby didnt' show on the map i was looking at, but i guess this explains the difference in amenities between this Holiday Inn Express and the one previously reported..

The hotel is within the shaded region of the zone, and that is the ultimate determining factor (not the name of the zone). I don't think you'll have much luck calling the hotel and asking to stay at the other property... i think your best course of action is to call HOTWIRE and take the stance that you didn't understand or realize just how big the zone is since the name of the zone is Burnaby-Coquitlam and the hotel you won should be labeled in the Vancouver Downtown zone. Your goal should be to try to cancel the reservation (imo), as they won't be able to switch the hotel for you.

Let us know if you may any headway.

Good luck.

[bjcinbc]

thereuare,

thanks for being on top of this message board. it's been really helpful. so i called Hotwire and asked to cancel my reservation due to the fact that the hotel is listed as Vancouver...even though it happens to be within the shaded area of their zone. (I'm going to be looking close at the edges of these zones in the future!) i talked to a customer service rep who told me that it was in the zone and i couldn't cancel it. i asked to speak to a supervisor and told them of the "bigger picture" here, which is listing a hotel called Holiday Inn Express VAncouver in a Burnaby/Coquitlam listing. Well, he didn't budge and he wouldn't cancel....he agreed to write it up to let upper management be aware.

Any thoughts on my putting a dispute on my credit card about this one?

thanks for the help...

~bjc

[millrat]

I'm looking for a hotel @ metrotown also.Did the hotel you won show the amenities you stated with business and fitness,i don't want to stay on hastings.

Thanks

[bjcinbc]

no. i followed instructions on post #4 in this thread and put in 2 adults and 2 children to get the HI Express Vancouver. The one you mentioned with those 2 amenities i think is in New Westminster ...i figured it out via another thread on this message board though it was not a confirmed buy. it had those 2 amenities listed...

[thereuare]

Any thoughts on my putting a dispute on my credit card about this one?

It's your perogative to do so if you wish, but the hotel is within the boundaries of the zone as defined by HOTWIRE, so i don't you have much of a case in this instance.

I don't know the needs you have for this stay, but the two hotels (this one and the HI Express in Burnaby) are only about 10 minutes from each others, can you make it work for your needs?

[bjcinbc]

there was some logistics stuff involved in this stay. you know, i read another thread about someone's complaint about their hotwire experience and what other posters said in defense of hotwire. i learned from it and figured out that as much i want to argue the semantics of the name of the city attached to the hotel versus their "zone map," that you are right,....the hotel was in the boundaries. i will just have to be more careful next time. there was a different scenario in this particular stay compared to other stays i've had in other cities....i guess ordinarily the hotel offered would have been okay. i just felt that i was focusing on "Burnaby/Coquitlam" so much that when i got a HI Express Vancouver....i thought i needed to say something. well, if it helps the next person.....

thanks for the info. on this board! i appreciate it.....peace.

[tilepusher]

One lesson to take from this experience: if you're going to purchase a hotel room through Priceline or HOTWIRE, and you're not sure what hotel you'll get (which is almost always the case with PRICELINE, and often the case with Hotwire), you have to be prepared to stay anywhere within the zone they show you. In this case, the fact that the Burnaby-Coquitlam zone includes parts of Vancouver was not an issue because ending up in East Vancouver was hardly the worst-case scenario: most of the hotels in that area are closer to Metrotown than the ones in Coquitlam (or New Westminster, which is also part of this zone). Another hotel that's been reported in this zone, the Best Western Chelsea Inn in Coquitlam, is about a 15km drive from Metrotown! So if you need a hotel room in a specific area, it's generally not a good idea to use an opaque service, especially when the hotel is in a zone as huge as this one.

I'm sorry that you had to learn this the hard way. I hope that everything worked out okay, and that you have better experiences with HOTWIRE in the future.