Dishonest business practice and despicable customer services

travelling out of the UK, I made a reservation AND PAID via website hotels.com in October 2017. Arrived at the hotel and was told that the reservation was visible but I needed to make payment at reception. This I did, effectively paying twice, and have since then being battling to extract a refund from this establishment despite communicating with numerous hotel staff including Promise, Gugu , Bradley and the manager Jacques Slabbert as recently as February 2019. What a frustrating exercise ????