It was February, and she and her husband were looking forward to escaping the cold Toronto winter. They’d booked a week at the Husa Cayo Santa Maria through Transat Canada. The trip was booked through her sister-in-law, who is a travel agent.
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Jeanette Burton doesn’t smoke. Neither do her grandchildren, ages 5, 10 and 15, with whom she spent a recent Spring Break weekend at the Holiday Inn Sunspree Resort in Galveston, Texas.
But the hotel begged to differ. Maybe it was the fact that Burton and her extended family were there for Spring Break, which can be a raucous time in Galveston. Maybe the staff simply got her room confused with someone else’s. But after they checked out, Burton found a $150 fee on her credit card.
“I talked with the hotel and they said they charged another $150 because housecleaning had reported that I smoked in the room,” she says.
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Trevers’ case is a difficult one because there are so many players. More than usual.
He says he asked the hotel to fix the broken AC in his room, but it didn’t.
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Instead, she received an apologetic e-mail from the Excellence Playa Mujeres, saying that while the hotel was “truly very sorry” about her canceled flight, it would be keeping her money. “They were unwilling to refund a penny,” says Li, who works for the city of San Francisco. “Not even in hotel credits.”
She and her husband lost $1,656, the entire cost of the hotel.
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Just one problem: She hadn’t purchased any footwear. As Fox, a college professor from Philadelphia, rummaged through her pocketbook to find her credit card, the phone rang again.
“It was Coach handbags asking if I wanted the $750 worth of handbags shipped to a different address,” she says. Calls to her credit card revealed another bogus charge for $7,500 at Home Depot.
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My husband and I decided it was worth the risk of losing our $800 so that we can have the oceanview. This was risky since we have four small children and anything could have happened to force us to cancel our reservation.
When we arrived at the hotel on Friday, March 2nd, they gave me a landview room and told me that Expedia booked me a landview room. I thought once I called Expedia, the issue would be resolved but after an hour on the phone with a supervisor who was extremely rude, I had no such luck.
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That’s what Laura Bradmeyer says a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., hotel did to her parents when they tried to check in recently. A receptionist told her father the hotel wouldn’t honor his reservation.
“He was told that no women were allowed,” she remembers. “My parents were not charged anything, but they were turned away.”
Eventually, her parents found a room in a different hotel. But Bradmeyer wonders: is the resort allowed to tell guests to leave because of their gender or sexual orientation?
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