It sounds like you dealt with a rotten hotel, sorry for your experience. Unfortunately, the OTA is only as accurate as the hotelier filling in information about their property.
Hmm... I'd like to see the ratings for that hotel on booking.com, because I wonder whether such experiences are actually avoidable using the mechanisms (user to user ratings) provided.
In our case the reviews were really great. One of the reasons we chose this place. We can't prove anything, but to put it mildly, I have a feeling not all reviews were genuine.
I'm not using any of these services (expedia or booking.com), but have heard similar things several times ... "Genuine" reviews are a difficult problem to solve though, even if you have the identity of actual "customers" at your disposal. The price of one stellar review is then basically the cut of the referring website, when e.g. a hotel employee "books" a stay at that hotel just to be able to give it a positive review.
Actually, the one thing that separates the OTAs is that their reviews are "verified" and are submitted by guests who have completed reservations at that property so they are supposed to be a lot better. If you compare this to Tripadvisor, anyone can submit a review so they have to deal with more fraud.
There are also several OTA's that decide to carry fewer hotels, and actually send an employee there undercover to check it out first before doing business with them. At the one I work at, we also look for hotels that cause lots of people to need to call customer service and remove them. We don't have as many hotels in as many places, but our target customers are the travelers who refuse to stay in subpar hotels.
So in other words, use hotel.com at your peril, because the sole reason to use the website is probably broken. And hotel.com won't do anything about it.
