Maybe I've just caught them on a bad day...twice now.
I have only used Hotels.com to book places twice and both times they either screwed something up or did not honor what they claim.
First time was several years ago, just got a regular hotel room in Pismo Beach to see my parents. Show up to the hotel, no reservation. Had my print out from hotels.com but they still couldn't find it and basically said it was between me and hotels.com. I called and they claimed they show the reservations, here is the numbers which I gave to the hotel...nothing. Hotels.com blamed the hotel, hotel blamed hotels.com and I ended up getting refunded from hotels.com and have to pay almost 2x for the room for the night.
Yesterday, the latest and final time I tried them out was to book our hotel for Vegas this summer. Chase is giving some extra points for booking with them so what the heck, they have a "best price guarantee" and free cancellation so why not. I booked with them (Flamingo) and then went to the actual Flamingo website to check on upgrades and a couple other things. They had a banner claiming some sale so I checked my dates and sure enough, it was $137 (total) cheaper.
I put in a price match request on hotels.com, attached a screenshot as requested and I get an email 10 minutes later that I was credited $16.74?? I called to find out what that was about and the phone rep I talk to says I was actually credited $77 (he wasn't sure why the email said $16.74) and I told him that still isn't correct. He pointed out $74 is the difference in what I paid for my reservation and the difference shown in the screen shot. I then pointed out that the Flamingo reservation includes the $20/night resort fee ($60 total, separate line item) and the hotels.com reservation does not. He tells me they can only go off the stated total. I made sure he understood what I was talking about, how if I stuck with the hotels.com reservation I would have to pay an extra $60 not included in their price and he kept telling me there was nothing they could do except offer a voucher for $60 on my next stay...um no thanks, I'll pay the lesser amount and won't book with hotels.com again.
They had no problem cancelling my reservation and I booked directly with Flamingo. I could understand if my screenshot just showed the total without the line items but it clearly stated the resort fees, room rate and taxes all as separate items. Apparently using common sense isn't part of their CSR training.