I do find it amusing going down the rabbit hole of hotel reviews among other things and the it's ridiculous how much frankly obvious fraud there's going on with either individual hotels or the third party booking websites themselves.
I research properly and I do it early, and it's so obvious some of these hotels are making use of review bots to bump themselves up on the ratings and get noticed by google maps in the hopes getting suckers to book their hotel by default without checking anything properly and you realise they've done this with the negative reviews from real customers.
Also amusing are how even simply glancing on street view the apartments or hotels generally look shady as fuck. Things like they aren't clearly signposted. It's obvious it's some apartment building somebody has done up and it's a side gig of some kind, I even wonder if part of the scam is to sucker as many people as they can, rip them off, then sell the property to a bagholder after it's stopped being profitable.
Then there are the snobs who write their reviews and you can see the pompousness oozing out of the text where they're complaining about really minor shit like not having sheets immediately and a bit of shampoo not being in the dispenser when they could ask for that to be taken care of at the desk therefore low rating.
When I book a hotel, I make a concerted effort to do it directly from the hotel's website and not through one of the many intermediary sites that book for you for a big upcharge which dominate search engine results.
Last time I did that however, I slipped up somewhere along the way and ended up booking through hotels.com or something and ended up paying an extra $50 for the room. I realized this too late; so out of curiosity I looked up their reviews. Lots of people complaining they got tricked like me or they couldn't change their reservations or even get refunds. I then considered myself lucky that I even got the room at all.
Hotels.com tried to sell me a breakfast add-on, but the hotel I booked offers breakfast as part of the booking regardless. I ended up going directly through the hotel itself. I payed less that way anyway.
I work at a hotel. Always book direct. I can't even begin to tell you the number of horror stories I have with "guest thought they had a reservation through Expedia..."
Yeah, that's a good tip, putting my programming hat on I've surmised this is a convenient 'bug' where the orders go through even after clicking cancel and their website's interface doesn't update properly and I've seen those reviews as well about hotels.com so customers think it's been cancelled but it actually isn't. Which is almost bad as the shit amazon pulled with their stupid prime pop ups.
They clearly must make enough money off it they haven't bothered fixing it and informing people so they're operating like a scam site. Amazing how many businesses operate like this and stonewall customers hardcore then wonder why they're going out of business and don't seem to understand people don't trust them anymore.