i-Hotel is a budget boutique hotel located at The Strand, Kota Damansara near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
In February, many people booked i-Hotel Superior Room for free after news broke out about a glitch in this hotel’s website (http://www.i-hotel.com.my).
The listed price for the Superior Room in the website is RM 98 per night. However, the price was somehow set as RM 0 in the booking system.
When i-Hotel realized the problem, they apologized in email,
“”Well, we made a big mistake in our pricing engine that capped every booking on the site at RM0.00. The mistake started at 25/2/2011. When we figured out the mistake was happening, we had to shut down the site for a bit until we got the pricing problem fixed.
While we’re sure this was a great deal for guests, it was inadvertent, and we took a big loss so far. However, it was our mistake. We will be honoring all bookings that took place on hotel website during our mess up. We apologize to anyone that was confused and/or frustrated during out little hiccup and thank you all for being such great guest. We hope you continue to support i-Hotel. We will email our promotion for this matter individually.”
At first they only offered 50% discount on every night guests have booked. Many people were disappointed and wrote negative reviews about this hotel on the Internet.
In the end, i-Hotel changed their minds and sent out confirmation email to affected guests and offered them free rooms.