This is what Laura Buckner looked like after her second night at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.
“I have never had acne in my life,” she says. “I look like the ‘before’ picture.”
Yeah, that looks kinda painful.
What happened?
The second morning of our trip, I woke up with a horrible rash on my face. The only thing I could pinpoint was, the night before I used the hotel’s bar soap and washcloth to wash my face.
A hotel representative came to her room and wrote up a report. When she got home, a voice mail from the hotel was waiting for her.
The Bellagio has offered to invite me back for three nights and two comped buffets. The only thing is, I already get this offered from their casino’s player’s card.
For Buckner, the offer doesn’t begin to address her problem. On the day of her reaction, she’d planned to see a show at the Mirage. It took away from the experience. She also couldn’t visit the pool.
“I was too freaked out to go,” she said, adding, “it ruined the trip.”
“Do you think what they are offering is fair?” she asks.
Good question. If the offer is redundant — which is to say, if the Bellagio is making her an offer that it has already made — then I think an argument can be made that the apology is less than genuine.
We’ve seen some half-hearted gestures from hotels recently, like the Best Western property that invited a guest back to stay in what by one account was a bedbug-infested room. Is this just another apology that the hotel knows Buckner will refuse?
On the other hand, can we be certain that Buckner reacted to something from the Bellagio? Perhaps she ate something at a restaurant that made her break out? Then again, she could have had a reaction to the dry air in Las Vegas (I’m not a medical professional, so my uninformed conjecture is just that).
What do you think? Should I mediate this case?
A survey of more than 600 readers answers that question pretty definitively.
