Questionable Geography - They think Texas is in Illinois

There was a pretty big event, the SXSW (South By South West) event in Austin, Texas on Sunday March 11th, in which Norman Reedus and Sean Patrick Flanery from Boondock Saints were to be attending. My sister and I decided on a whirlwind trip to see them. On Saturday March 10th, I booked a hotel (Quality Inn and Suites) for a single night in Austin, Texas. I was charged $81.40 and told that the reservation had been confirmed. The web site information looked good, and when I Googled Venere, I found most people claimed it was a reliable source. However, upon arriving in Austin, I found that the hotel I had been booked at and charged over eighty dollars for didn't even exist. It hadn't closed down; there had never been a Quality Inn and Suites in the location on the website ( http://i1011.photobucket.com/albums/af233/Bat_Spork/VenereHotelMislabeledWebpage.png ). The hotel in question is, in fact, located in Elgin, Illinois. However, when I pulled up the map on my iPhone, the location given to me was on the corner of 5th and South Congress in Austin. The email and the website state that the hotel was in Texas. This is basically fraud. I didn't think to check for the legitimacy of the hotel before I left on my trip; I wasn't under the impression that listing imaginary hotels was considered good business practice.

The only good thing that came out of it was, I contacted the venere.com customer service and they informed me that they were run through hotels.com, and I would need to contact them. I contacted hotels.com, and ended up FINALLY getting a refund for the money I had lost.

(The link is a screen-cap of the page I took with my computer two days after the whole event. I have informed them of the mislabeled tags, but they have yet to change it. Tabs in webpage have been blurred out for privacy reasons.)