Online Travel Agency Amoma Ceases Operations, Customers Left Stranded

Online hotel reservation agency Amoma has left its clients stranded after hotels stopped honoring reservations booked via Amoma due to its failure to pay its bills.

Amoma has ceased operations and filed for bankruptcy, according to a report by Spanish site Referente. Customers apparently will have lost both their money and reservations if they paid directly at Amoma.

On Saturday, Amoma stopped taking bookings. It posted a message on its site blaming price-comparison sites for unfair business practices, claiming that these sites charge a price per click from hotel booking websites, and the more you pay, the better you’ll be placed in the search results. That means that the cheapest price won’t necessarily be shown first, hitting Amoma which had thrived from undercutting hoteliers prices.

Trustpilot, a site collecting consumer feedback, reported a flurry of messages from users this morning saying that hotels had denied their bookings because of payment problems. Amoma has been attempting to get TrustPilot to remove many of them for “inappropriate content.”

Amoma had suffered from negative publicity in the past from consumers.

“Everyone knew this was going to happen,” Guilain Denisselle, editor of French trade publication Tendance Hotelerrie. The question was not will it happen but when. You can find hundreds of bad comments from consumers in forums on TripAdvisor.”

Prior to this event, Amoma had been a long-standing partner of many online travel agencies, hotels and travel planning sites, including TripAdvisor.

Many hotel critics alleged that Amoma misused wholesale rates not intended for public consumption by taking inventory that hotels had set aside to distribute via wholesalers to offline markets, such as travel agencies in ethnic communities, and re-purposing the discounted inventory for general public consumption on their site.

Amoma has repeatedly declined media interviews in the past couple of years. But in public forums, the Geneva-based company noted that Switzerland has lower taxes than some other countries and that that sometimes gave it an advantage on price.

Google’s price-comparison search tends to favor agencies with the lowest price, even if the agencies don’t pay the highest bid in Google’s advertising auctions. Trivago and some other so-called metasearch companies also promoted Amoma using similar ad auction mechanisms.

In 2016, Google chose to make Amoma a partner for its instant-booking service. That meant that Google customers could buy rooms from the online agency without leaving its interface. The move appeared to provide critical fuel for Amoma’s growth.

In 2017, Amoma claimed it processed about $560 million (€500 million) in bookings, mainly for hotels.

How Can I Get My Money Back?

Amoma usually charged the full price directly when booking the room. Paying at the hotel or paying the hotel directly was usually not possible. Because of this, the hotels won’t keep these reservations. If you’re affected by this, contact your hotel and let them send you a confirmation, that your booking has been cancelled.

Afterward, you should contact your bank if you paid with a credit card or direct debit. It should be possible to request a chargeback because you didn’t or won’t receive what you paid for. You will, however, usually need a written confirmation that you’re reservation has been cancelled. If the hotel doesn’t send you this, this could take some weeks, but you’ll at least get your money back. Amoma will probably not, however, compensate the caused damage, i.e. the cost of a new reservation.