I think we may be being a little harsh on the OP. It was an honest mistake and easy enough to make.Many search engines do similar things.

I, for example, was almost caught out by searching for places in Siena, and finding out just in time that they were in the region of Siena, but many kilometres from the city.

I don't think there is any milage in trying to get the CC company involved. It was the OP's error. It is useful to have such stories posted on Fodors as it acts as a warning to other travellers not to make assumptions.

Thanks for sharing your story. These things do happen unfortunately. And even if you plan everything to a "T", other things might pop up like freak weather, bad service, strikes, increased prices, overbooked hotels, etc.

agree, either plan everything 100% and reduce your risks of this or don't plan too much and accept that things might happen. At the end of the day, you are out a 100 bucks or so and half a day but have a good story to tell for the rest of your life. Might be a good bargain.

Good story, we learn from the experiences of others! It is also an example of 'cognitive dissonance'. I drove a taxi while at college. A German passenger thought he was in Appleton, Oregon...instead he was in Appleton, Wisconsin. The same thing has happened in other similarly named cities.

An old favourite (a mistake of several thousand miles):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2172858.stm

Elsewhere there is a post about someone booking a hotel in Mestre, and then being VERY disappointed that the hotel wasn't in Venice. The hotel came up on a Venice search, but the hotel web-site states quite clearly that it is located in Mestre. The web-site doesn't tell the enquirer that the hotel is NOT in Venice, (nor in Rome or Milan, for that matter.)

Further to this particular post re Lugano, does anyone else book a hotel in an unfamiliar city without first determining where said hotel is located within that city? I thought not.

The OP's issue is that the hotel refused to do a refund even though he/she called.

This is the case for all Priceline hotels. You pay for the room, and it is not refundable. Period. Says so up front. That's why Priceline is cheap.

Presumably _Bookings.com_ is similar.

Hold on. If I understand it right, the OP called to get directions when they got lost and were given information to get there. When the OP still had trouble, they apparently just gave up and never showed up. I don't see any indication they ever called the hotel back to say "we aren't coming". Even if normally you call to say you aren't coming and the hotel refunds your money, in this case why on earth should the hotel refund their money?

Hi nc,

Chalk it up to experience.

In a year or so, you can get a lot of laughs out of your experience.

In a similar vein:

A few years ago a group of Northreners showed up at the Chop House Grill in Madison a few minutes before closing.

They were hungry, tired and in a bad humor.

Seems that they went to a convention in Atlanta. A friend told them that they should definitely go to Buckhead for the nightlife.

One of them looked up Buckhead, GA and got a map and driving directions. They rented a car and drove to Buckhead; a tiny little town about 2 hrs from Atlanta, with no nightlife whatsoever.

The Grill management fed them.

((I))

Ackislander, no, you don't pay upfront at Bookings.com (I use them often to book hotels), you pay when you leave the hotel.
They were charged one night as a no-show. The OP should have had to call them again to say they were not going to show.

MY DH and I once spent a (very cheap) 3 days about 15 miles OUTSIDE of Trieste instead of IN it, because of just such a mistake...it happens and you get to know some local village/suburb very well as a result.

You also get to find out all about the wisdom of Mapquest, Mappy.com etc and Google Earth features for future visits.

However, for those who checked out PatrickLondon's amusing story of the couple who mnistook Canada's Sydney for that of Australia, I have an update. The young couple (surnames Nunn and Christian, if you can believe that!) had a wonderful time in Sydney, Nova Scotia on the province's Cape Breton headland's hiking in breath-taking scenery and eating wonderful fresh fish and lobster and generally being feted by locals.

Its all in the attitude...

This is not going to help the OP now, but...

The town the hotel is located is called Lavena Ponte Tresa - amazingly, it's printed right on the Bookings.com page! The bracket (Varese) means it's in the <b>Province</b> of Varese, not the city.

The actual way to go from Lugano is to take the Swiss regional train from Lugano FLP to Ponte Tresa. It takes 21 minutes and runs every 20 minutes. The hotel is about 0.5km south of the Ponte Tresa train station.

Hm... Took me about 15 minutes to find out all these.

And I just looked up the Bookings.com site. Here's what I found:

If I search for &quot;Lugano&quot;, the next page asks me whethrer I want:
- Agno airport
- Lago di Lugano region (Italy and Switzerland)
- City of Lugano (Switzerland).

If I click the city, they have 34 listings. The first 23 are indeed inside or close to the city. Starting at 24, they show both the distance <b>and</b> the town, province and country name <b>in bold</b>.

Hotel Socrate (#28) is shown as <b>9.2km</b> away, and in <b>Lavena Ponte Tresa (Varese), Italy</b>.

I'm sorry - but any time you look up hotels on any search engine after picking some options the first thing you do is find out exactly where they are. The hotel's exact address is listed. And, if you put that on a map web site it would be apparent where it is.

If you go to many of the travel web sites and search for hotels in New York City many come up that are in New Jersey or the outer boroughs.

If you read them quickly - 4 miles to Times Square (they don;t mention the Hudson River is in between) you might book it thinking you were in New York. Unless you looked at the address and find it says Weehauken New Jersey.

I agree - the situation was unfortunate. But- you didn't do even the basics in terms of getting info on the hotel you booked. You can't expect computer web sites to point out things like this to you.

As the old saying goes - when you &quot;assume&quot; you make an ass of you and me. Although - I don't know what the hotel could do- unless you emailed them in advance for directions from the Lugano train station.

maybe this is just a good warning to other folks who aren't used to booking online or booking travel, in general. Most websites that have a search will show you hotels within a certain radius of a city where you want to go -- and many many folks like those options, as maybe they would be willing to stay in a small town nearby, at the airport or suburb, etc. You just have to pay attention to what you are looking at. It isn't anything &quot;wrong&quot; with a website for listing hotels in nearby areas. Some good websites will sort them by the distance.

Of course you can't complain to a credit card company because you couldn't find your hotel so didn't go there, and they charged you for a night due to their deposit policy.

Wow. Why are we even discussing this? I finally decided to go to bookings.com and enter Lugano and see what I found. Almost immediately I saw this Hotel Socrate. In rather bold letters right after the name it states 9.2 km from Lugano, and then in bold letters as well it says Lavena Pont Tresa (Varese) Italy.

To be perfectly frank, I think if the poster wants to blame anyone it should be her school teachers who never taught her to read. How much clearer could this be?????

I was mistakenly thinking the issue was that she didn't search far enough to find out the truth, but actually it was right there in BOLD LETTERS next to the image and name of the hotel. How could ANYONE miss it?

And also, when you type in Lugano into the search section, it gives you separate options for hotels in teh town of Lugano, and elsewhere on the lake, and the Socrate was in teh correct section (ie not pretending to be in the city). I do feel sory for the OP who clearly had rather a distressing day, but I'm afraid it really was your own fault.

Nonconformist - Socrate does show up as #24 if you pick &quot;Lugano&quot; city. But like NeoPatrick and I have found out, there are distances and town names listed in bold.

And like everybody has said, it's normal to list surrounding towns, even if one specify &quot;Lugano&quot; city.

And as to the hotel not refunding the money. Let's assume YOU owned the hotel. The person with the reservation called and said they were in Lugano and needed help getting there. You gave some advice. How long would you wait before renting out that hotel room? Can you imagine deciding at 5 PM that they people weren't coming and so you went ahead and rented it out. Then the people arrive and say, &quot;You know I called you and was in Lugano. How could you possibly think we weren't coming?&quot; Seems to me the hotel owner would be doomed either way.

In the whole story, the only thing that's unfortunate and not directly OP's doing is that the tourist info lady and the hotel cannot give the OP the direction from Lugano to Ponte Tresa. Which I don't quite understand why. They should all speak Italian there, and while the tourist info person may not know a smaller town in another country, the hotel person should have no problem giving CORRECT instructions how to get there from Lugano.

My guess is that the tourist information lady saw the world &quot;Varese&quot; and thought it was in that city; which was wrong. I have no idea who she talked to but I doubt she actually talked to anyone in the hotel.

Because the hotel person would never told her to go through Mendrissio. Mendrissio is on the other side of the lake, but makes sense if one's going from Lugano to Varese (the city). The hotel person <b>has to</b> know they're not in Varese, but in Ponte Tresa.

So, I wonder if the OP and the tourist information actually &quot;made contact&quot; with the hotel at all.