The reservation was cancelled without any notification or prior warning. I arrived at the auto-check-in machine, which informed me that my reservation had been cancelled because I wanted to check in one day later. According to the terms and conditions published on hotels.com, cancelling a reservation is not an explicit consequence of a later check-in. This alone already constitutes a breach of the booking contract.
I would also like to point out that I received no notification whatsoever about the cancellation – if I had, I would obviously have looked for another hotel. As a result of this situation, I spent over an hour in the freezing cold (the check-in machine was located outside).
During the first phone call with an agent, the line dropped and no one answered my subsequent calls (and there were many of them within that hour). Only after calling from my work phone number was I able to speak to someone again and learn that the reservation had indeed been cancelled and that there were no more rooms available at that hotel.
Consequently, I initiated the refund process, which will now be handled in the coming days/weeks.
In summary, I strongly do not recommend this place. It is a fully automated hotel with no serious customer service and an unclear reservation policy that, in my case, only generated further problems.
