My letter to Hotelconnect:

My live-in and I spent the weekend in Amsterdam 19-22 October, 2006. We followed a link to Hotelconnect.co.uk from Sterling.no where we bought our plane tickets.

As Sterling is a low-price airline and your company advertised with lowest possible prices we made a quick booking after looking at the web pictures of the Hotel. Upon arrival at the hotel we find ourselves having paid aprox. 125 Euros per night through your company, for a product the hotel itself advertised at 85 Euros per night. We were then given an incredible small AND intensely smoke-smelling room worth of 85 Euros. The young clerk apologized for this, but explained that they had only received aprox. 85 Euros from Hotelconnect - and hinted at us being stupid for not booking directly with them.

After undesirable discussion and quarrel we were able to get a reasonable room similar to the one presented to us at the web upon booking. With the explicit risk of having to pay an extra fee when meeting the manager morning after. After another not-what-you-want-on-a-holiday-discussion this was just nearly avoided. The phone numbers to Hotelconnect on our voucher was impossible to reach for our clerk who made numerous attempts to call (this was 20-21 in the evening). No answering machine stating an extra number outside normal hours.

Needless to say we found this not all satisfactory. It's even tempting to call this a straight forward fraud if the figures and margins above is what your company normally operates with. Hopefully this is an excerption and some sort of miscommunication at a hotel not used to receive guests through other channels than direct booking. No matter what we'd like your opinion on the matter before we share our experience with friends and colleagues.
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I sent this mail to Hotelconnect the 2nd of November - still no real response. "Just we will look in to it". That much for their price guarantee.