Global Hotel Alliance Reviews 23

Title: Poor customer service and unresolved account issues

I am a GHA DISCOVERY Titanium member and have repeatedly faced issues with account management and customer support.

These include incorrect account changes, wrongly tagged membership details, missing DISCOVERY Dollars (D$), and sensitive booking information being sent to incorrect email addresses despite multiple requests to correct this.

I have raised these issues through customer support and even during hotel stays, but the responses have been generic and the problems remain unresolved, with no clear explanation or accountability.

Most recently, a stay booked under my name was not credited with D$ due to an invoice naming issue that was never communicated at checkout and has not been an issue in previous stays.

Overall, the service recovery process has been disappointing and lacks proper escalation handling or meaningful resolution.

The is a terrible program. Didn't allow me to redeem my discovery dollars when I stayed with them and then took 104 discovery dollars from my account for no reason. They take months to reply to emails(if ever).

We recently stayed at the NH Bologna, and while the hotel itself was perfectly fine, my experience with GHA Discovery customer service has been one of the most frustrating I’ve had with any hotel loyalty program.

All I wanted to do was consolidate two accounts under one profile and ensure that the points for our stay at NH Bologna were credited correctly. Despite providing confirmation numbers and all relevant information, the process turned into a long back-and-forth exchange of roughly ten emails. I was repeatedly asked for paper copies of the stay invoice and other documentation, even though the stay details were already in their system.

After all that time and effort, the issue was still not resolved. Unfortunately, the experience with customer service has been so unnecessarily complicated and time-consuming that I’ve decided to close my affiliations with this hotel group altogether. A simple request should not require this level of effort.

Had a couple of hundred dollars of credit, I was staying in a resort and when I checked out they said they had expired the day before I checked out!!

In the past 12 months I have stayed at 2 of the GHA's hotels. I had to follow up several times to get the points from my first stay. Now I have written to them about my 15 night stay in January as it was not automatically crediting my $ bonus. I have used their website and attached the Tax Invoice from my hotel stay plus emailed them with no response. I have tried 3 times. Their customer service is very bad.

I've been receiving annoying spam emails that I never subscribed for. When trying to get rid of these spam emails, I get stuck in a screen having to solve little puzzles.
If they want to disturb other people so desperately, they need to make sure that their website functions properly.

GHA DISCOVERY had a promotion selling DISCOVERY dollars, I was taxed on the purchase as a Canadian resident, this is a non-taxable item I checked with the government, I forwarded to GHA the reference number in the tax act, only to be ghosted, they rip me off over $200

They are very good at marketing the products and are very clever to protect themselves with no empathy when their marketing content caused confusion and you are being tricked into purchasing "upgrades". they will be very careful to use all the T&C to protect themselves. Great marketing, ZERO customer service. Despite writing in to them, being a loyal 5 year member and a Titanium member now. They get your money but don't bother about your loyalty. Good luck to them!
Do not even consider continuing as the discount they pride themselves in is almost negligible now.

I tried booking a hotel room using this booking platform but at the end of the process the room was not confirmed. On the day of the reservation the hotel charged the credit card for the whole stay claiming it was a no show. Discussions with GHA Discovery and the hotel were disappointing as they were pointing at each other for the mistake. Eventually, I had to ask the credit card company to get the money back, which they did.

Extremely frustrating experience as a Titanium loyalty card holder. A wrong account (created without my consent) keeps reappearing, erasing my stay history and downgrading my status to Silver every time I update the app. Despite repeated complaints, the issue remains unresolved. The app is dysfunctional and full of critical bugs — it seems the top executives have never even tried using it themselves. Totally unacceptable for a premium program.

This loyalty program is a joke.
Just had a negative experience with the Avani Hotel Pattaya.
Although I am a Titanium member, only one Suite category (located on the ground floor, with no view and very dark behind the swimming pool) is made available for upgrades, all other six suite categories, even Junior Suites, are excluded.
What's more, the upgrades are only availability anyway and are not confirmed in advance.
It's better not to bother with the loyalty program, dealing with frequent travelers in this way only leads to frustration.

Disastrous. Booked a series of rooms through GHA for a group holiday. Holiday plans changed and all rooms were cancelled well within cancellation period (5 months prior to initially planned travel). But the hotel still charged for the rooms. One transaction for one room made it on to the securing credit card, the others were blocked by bank credit card security technology. However, that first transaction is still in dispute, with the hotel claiming it was a valid no show. Despite my having all the cancellation paperwork! Of course the experience resulted in a cancelled credit card, always a nightmare, and a few penalty fees from other merchants when my direct debits bounced within days of the new credit card being issued Be aware, be very aware!

This company is a scam. They incorrectly booked my hotel, were unavailable to resolve the problem, refused to take accountability, and did not return my money. Do not use them.

Booked a hotel through GHA well in advance. Turned up to find that the hotel had no record of my booking. This is the second time this has happened, on this occasion however the hotel was full. Had problems with points and G$ being added to my account and no response to emails. The worst loyalty programme i have ever dealt with.

To be clear at the outset this review is about the GHA loyalty program and not their hotels. I recently stayed at one of the Anantara properties hosting a work offsite. In 2 days we spent a significant amount of money hosting 12 of our employees. When I went to claim D$ I was given a reason why they wouldn’t grant them. I explained to the GHA and emailed senior management explaining that we had planned to host our quarterly offsite at this hotel as well as taking a person vacation in Thailand which would result in well over €150,000 being spend with them in the following year. No one from senior management replied. It is clear that GHA does not understand what a loyalty program is supposed to do. It seems lost on then that you give clients some D$ which costs them nothing and represents a small % of their spend on hope that they come back and spend 100x that amount. This is a loyalty program that is managing some of the best brands in the world that does not have a clue about loyalty and therefore it cannot recognise it or adequately reward it. I have as a result cancelled my platinum membership will never spend another Euro, USD or THB in any of their hotels again as there a many other loyal programs representing other amazing brand which do know how to recognise and rewards loyalty.

Steaming pile of feces. Don't buy this card. You won't get any Expedia member discounts or rewards. The site is super slow and buggy. I don't know why Expedia would damage their brand by having such a poor card. I'll be using booking.com in the future

Not a very good experience for me. Their website to book hotels is pretty clunky compared to other search engines. They also charge a substantial amount of money for their service (in my case, £57 for a booking worth £400, so more than 25%) that I find difficult to justify and they only tell you about when you’re about to pay. But the worst part was when I received confirmation of the booking with wrong dates. Whether it was my mistake or theirs, they didn’t help at all.
In conclusion: Clunky website, expensive and not very helpful. I’ll never use their service again.

Price is double the amount when using other companies. It's ridiculous

Their definition of an eligible stay is unclear and you don't know at the time of the booking whether it's eligible or not - probably written in some obscure places.
Also, I stayed at Pan Pacific Perth, which is old and tattered. The water coming out of the bathtub is brown...

This is the worst hotel loyalty program around. I have stayed at 5 hotels this year and each time had to follow up to get my stay credited despite providing my membership at booking. I have just stayed at Tivoli in Sao Paulo, and there was no record of my membership so I had to request the 'platinum benefit'. I had also redeemed my platinum 'reward' but arrived to learn the spa had not received it from GHA nor was the spa open at that time despite GHA sending a certificate confirming award with date and time. I wont stay at Parkroyal, QT or Tivoli again. I will stay at Alila as it has seen the light and left GHA and gone to Hyatt. Run for the hills.