Hotel Villa Paradiso

We have stayed here many times, it's very special, like going home kind of feel! The rooms are very nice, a place to put everything, great bathrooms with plenty of space to store everything. Outstanding rooftop for beautiful breakfast and late afternoon drinks before dinner, and after dinner, fantastic views of the sea and volcano! Great location to everything you want to do and see, even tennis courts behind the hotel, and gorgeous park and gardens! I just can't say enough things about this very special hotel and it's history! We would only stay here!

We had reserved an exclusive suite at Hotel Villa Paradiso for three nights a year in advance through hotels.com. After arriving at the hotel on the check in date, we soon discovered that the hotel wasn't able to find any booking with my name from their own systems even with the booking details from hotels.com. After spending some time trying to find the booking, the person on the front desk explained to us that they aren't able to find our booking anywhere but they can help us out finding a new accommodation. Knowing that Taormina is small, fairly expensive and fully packed with tourists still at this time of the year, we were shocked to hear this. It would truly be a challenge to find a decent accomodation for three nights for a fair price this late. At this point we challenged the hotel to be in contact with Expedia (parent of hotels.com) to find out why they aren't able to see the booking. From this point onwards we were unhappy on how passively the hotel staff took the request as we were the ones that were asked to find for example a phone number for them to call hotels.com / Expedia. It felt a bit odd that they didn't know how to deal with their own partner, especially the size of Expedia. It was also slightly odd that they didn't check their Expedia extranet to see if they could see our confirmed booking over there, which would have calmed our nerves down a lot at this point. We waited for an hour standing next to the reception desk asking time to time for status if they have been able to be in contact with Expedia yet and even volunteering to call them by ourselves until we finally got resolution. The hotel claimed that there had been a system issue and therefore they had never received the booking confirmation from hotels.com. Hotels.com would be all to blame for this but they (the hotel) could help us find a new accommodation. We agreed to let them find us an equal level hotel and room with the condition that we would not need to pay any extra compared to the original booking. They managed to find us a junior suite room in a nearby 4-star chain hotel, which was alright, given Taormina was nearly fully booked, but it was something we wouldn't have booked ourselves for the price of the original booking in the exclusive suite. During the same day, we had to contact hotels.com in order to cancel our booking without penalty and request for a fair compensation for all the waiting, trouble and lower class room as based on the hotel it had been all their fault. Contacting hotels.com had been made as hard as possible but when we reached them and asked for the compensation, they claimed our booking had been fully valid and they had received a confirmation from the hotel. If we were to receive compensation, that would be the hotel's responsibility as they had not informed hotels.com about the overbooking situation early enough. To not spend all the time chasing who the responsible party is, we contacted the hotel again after our holiday to give them a chance to apologize for the lousy customer experience and to compensate us as hotels.com had stated it had been the hotel's fault. The hotel again claimed not to be blamed here and used the stressful situation as an excuse for not giving their best when it comes to customer service. No apology. All in all, the end result was a stalemate, having two parties pointing fingers at each other and no one taking responsibility for the system issue.