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Oh no they didn’t! Hotel charges guest $37 for incoming phone calls

April 28, 2008

Here’s a clever twist on one of the most enduring hotel scams. Instead of charging an outrageous markup on outgoing phone calls made from a room — a practice that’s generating less and less money because guests are simply switching to cheaper cell phones — one property has figured out a way to reverse the equation. It’s evidently charging guests for incoming calls.

That’s right, incoming phone calls.

Mary Vella told me the following strange but apparently true story of her husband’s visit to the Thistle Charing Cross in London. (I say “apparently” because I’ve tried to contact the hotel to get its side, but it hasn’t responded. I will, of course, update this post when I do.)

While he was there, our home back in the States was damaged by smoke. I telephoned him several times over the next few days because there were a lot of insurance issues to discuss.

I recently received our phone bill and was shocked to see we were charged $37.40 for 113 minutes of calls to this hotel. Our phone service includes free calls to England, so we called our phone company. It told us that this hotel charges for incoming calls!

This is a new one on me and I am not a happy camper.

Nor would I be. But my worries extend far beyond the $37 Vella must pay. I know hotels as a group are upset to have lost all those revenues from outbound phone calls. Have they finally figured out a way to reverse the trend? If they have, they aren’t winning any points with guests like Vella.

I’m not even sure of how to describe this policy. I feel that when I dial this number there should be a warning stating that you will be charged $.34 per minute for this call. If you wish to accept this charge, press … and so on.

I feel helpless and cheated, especially after the amount of drama that came with this disaster at home. Can you help me understand how this is possible, reasonable and forgivable?

How is it possible? It’s the travel industry, and when it comes to fees, anything is possible.

Reasonable? No, absolutely not.

Forgivable? Given the hotel industry’s long history of adding ridiculous surcharges like resort fees and mandatory tipping surcharges, unlikely.

Update (6/14): Vella has received a credit from the hotel for the incoming calls.

Today we were astonished to find a credit on our Visa card for $40 and a letter from Sarah Wilkinson, General Manager of the (now) Guoman Charing Cross Hotel. She states:

“….I was concerned to learn that you incurred telephone charges when your wife called you using the 0871 dial code. It is apparent that it has become standard practice with many businesses in the UK in order to reduce domestic call costs. However, I have raised the concern regarding the impact this has on international incoming calls within our company as it is not our intention to penalize our guests in any way. As a gesture of apology I have arranged for a £20 credit to be applied to your Visa. I hope this goes some way to assure you of my concern in this matter.”

I am guessing that you were responsible for this action and we thank you so much for intervening on our behalf. The responses that came from the posting on your Web site suggested that this was a lost cause and we never imaged we would see any results. What a startling surprise it was to receive this gracious response from Ms. Wilkinson!

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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17 comments

  • Dan Bustillos

    Elliott – The hotel did not charge them for this perse. They were calling a non geographic number which you are charged on a per minute rate. It is not just hotels but Airlines, Car Rental Companies, My creditcard etc that do this. It sucks, but there is a charge for theseand I am guessing the OP has Vonage and it i very clear on there site that certain numbers will incur additional charges even on free calls to xxxx.

  • Stephen Paliska

    As I recall I stayed at a Hilton in Akron Ohio several years ago. Noticed a telephone charge on the check out invoice and stated to the desk clerk I neither received nor initiated any phone calls, not even a wake up call. The answer was that the charge was for the privilege of having the phone in my room. After a discussion which bordered on becoming somewhat heated, the charge was reversed.

  • Jennifer

    Mr. Bustillos, perhaps you can reread your post and rewrite it because, frankly, I can’t understand it. I don’t think a lot of people could. I think you write that the writer was using VoIP. How do you know this? She called her phone company, not her internet service provider. Maybe they are one in the same but there is not enough information provided to come to that conclusion.

    Right now it appears the calls were made from Mrs. Vella’s home phone to her husband’s hotel room phone. I will wait to see if Christopher posts a follow up on the hotel’s side of this story. This fee would be appalling to me.

  • Jasper

    I think in this case it’s actually the phone company that has part of the blame. They should have warned *their* customer from the predatory charging by the hotel chain.

    I am not sure why a phone company would allow companies to charge you extra without notifying you. I am also not sure why they would collect such charges. What’s in it for them? Oh wait, I am sure another rip off to their customer.

    The hotel policy is too ridiculous to comment on.

  • Mary

    This subject is my issue and yes, we have Vonage. When my husband contacted them about these charges they told him that there are “premium” phone numbers out there that do charge for incoming calls. In our 3 years with them we have never experienced one of these before. It just seems that there should be an advisory when you dial the number stating “additional charges will be incurred.” I have called him at hotels in China, Korea, Germany, Turkey (to name a few) with Vonage and never have we been charged such an outrageous amount. I don’t expect to get my measly $40 back but the public should be aware of this potential charge for dialing certain phone numbers.

  • Mike

    As mentioned, the issue here isn’t that the hotel “charged” for incoming calls but that they have a non-geographic number.

    The reason for this is that within the UK you will pay only local call rates to contact the hotel from anywhere within the country. However the downside is that these non-geographic numbers are not included within call packages from home phones, mobile (cell) phones, VOIP packages etc even for a UK user never mind a international callers. You are correct, your phone company should alert you to this when placing a call. Whether this is an issue for the hotel?? They would argue they are giving their UK customers a better service by making it cheaper for them to call.

    If you (or for anyone else for that matter!) are placing a call to a UK number that begins +44 (0)870 or +44 (0)871 check out http://www.saynoto0870.com/search.php

    Then, for example, searching for Thistle Hotel lists all the hotels and gives the geographic number that the 0871 number is mapped to (does that make sense?) so 0870 3339121 (the number called? I think you may have been at what the Thistle group call Thistle Westminster rather than Charing Cross) = +44 (0) 207 8341821

    This second number would be included within your call plan.

    It’s an imperfect science because the website relies on people submitting updates etc, but may be worth checking to save $$

  • Mary

    Mike…so who gets all the money from these charges on my Vonage bill?

    The number I was calling was 448713769012 and that is the number that was on the reservation confirmation and on the Thistle Charing Cross bill. Too bad it didn’t say something like….”in the UK dial….”, “…outside the UK dial…”.

    Anyway, thank you for your comments. I’ve learned a lesson from this. I just wish everyone else would not have to learn it the hard way, too.

  • Mike

    Hi Mary,

    I suspect the hotel will receive a portion of the call charge, they certainly would if you were calling from the UK. It may however only be a portion from the local telecoms company that handled the call once it reached the UK.
    On the flip side they would probably have paid money to get the number in the first place and “offer” that service to their customers.

    I see which hotel it is now. It’s in a sub-brand of Thistle which is why I couldn’t find it on the main Thistle site (http://www.guoman.com/charing-cross/) To be fair to them they do list both an “international contacts” including numbers in CA and NY and an “international reservations contacts” listing numbers for a whole bunch of countries and a direct dial UK number, so they probably feel they’ve covered it.

    However I would agree that the wording on these pages doesn’t make it clear whether you could use these numbers to contact a hotel guest if dialling from abroad, and not including something on a reservation confirmation is poor.

  • Dr Wong

    Many US hotels charge you for “free” calls lasting more than an hour – even if you’re calling a toll-free number or dialing into a local AOL server. Supposedly it’s because the user is tieing up one of the hotel’s incoming or outgoing lines, which the hotel is paying for. But at least the US hotel warns you.

  • Regina

    If a fee wasn’t disclosed up front, always insist on having it removed from the bill, and if they refuse, take it up with your credit card company. It’s not worth getting upset about it because the credit card company will always get the charge reversed in these situations. You can also tell the vendor that if they don’t reverse the charge, you will take it up with the credit card company. When a charge is put in dispute the vendor gets what is called a chargeback notice, and nobody likes to get them…if you have a lot of chargebacks, it can cause you a problem if you ever decide to switch credit card processing companies or banks. The vendor also has to pay a chargeback fee to the credit card company. It’s not much but they add up over time. I just stayed at a Westin in San Francisco and they charged us $20 for the privilege of receiving two Fedex packages at the hotel. These charges were not disclosed so we told the front desk to remove them, which they did without an argument.

  • Mary

    Hi all,
    Regina…I could dispute the charge but it showed up on my Vonage bill (which I pay by credit card). I don’t want to punish them for this because I happen to really like the service they provide us. It’s an incredible deal to be able to call our family in Australia without even thinking of the cost.

    I am getting over it after hashing it out on this blog but it’s just really annoying to discover after the fact that I was “taken”.

    Thanks for the support and attempts to figure this all out.

  • Mike

    Regina,

    The charge is disclosed on their (Vonage’s) website.:-

    http://www.vonage.com/intplans_details.php

    “Please note: International Calling Plans do not apply to certain call types, such as cell phones and other non-geographic and special numbers.”

    Quite how a resident of the US is to know what constitutes a “non-geographic” number in the UK…. I don’t know. But I’m not sure there’s room for a dispute.

  • David

    There’s a half truth here and an attempt to shift the blame.

    Mary Vella says “Our phone service includes free calls to England”. Not completely true – if she asks them they will tell her that calls to UK numbers beginning 01/02/03 are free but I’d bet that calls to 07 numbers (cell phone/mobile) are not. We have the principle that cell phones have a discrete set of numbers which are charged at a higher rate to caller.
    Receiving calls on a cell phone is free in the UK (as long as the UK is your home country and you are not roaming from a different country).

    We also have some numbers starting 08 which have a range of prices – from free to quite a lot – and some of them result in the called party getting some money for incoming calls.

    My guess is that the hotel has a UK 0870 xxxxxxxx number which generates revenue from incoming calls – which annoys UK callers too.

    Her telephone provider is being economical with the truth when saying
    that calls to England are free – only some are.

  • Dave Lieberman

    This isn’t the hotel’s problem, it’s a fundamental difference between how phones work in the US and how they work in the UK (and elsewhere in Europe).

    The UK works on what is called a “caller pays” system. This means that there are very few numbers in the UK that are free to call (from within the UK — stand by for why this matters to Americans with Vonage).

    The ONLY calls that are free to the caller to make are called “freephone” and start with 0800, like the American 1-800.

    All other calls — regardless of how far you’re calling — have a per-minute charge associated with them. Even if you’re in the UK dialling your next-door neighbour, you are going to pay a per-minute charge. (By contrast, in the US, numbers within a certain distance of you are included in your monthly line charge.)

    Certain numbers are cheaper to call than others — an 0844 or 0845 number is a “split” charge, where you pay part of the charge and the person you’re calling pays part of the charge. And an 0870 or 0871 number is paid for wholly by the caller, much like a 900 or 976 number in the US.

    While I agree that a recording would be nice, I can see that with 190 countries (or whatever) each with their own weird dialling rules the administrative burden would be significant.

    In any case, it’s not really the hotel’s problem. The money went from Vonage (who chose not to include 0870 and 0871 numbers in their all-you-can-dial plans) straight to British Telecom. With 0871 numbers, the hotel does get a 2p per minute kickback, which is meant to recover the annual cost of the line (currently £79 per incoming line). Had you been dialling an 0844 or 0855 number, it would have been half the price ($16.50), and had the hotel had an 0800 number for incoming room calls (highly, highly unlikely — 0800 numbers typically cost the owner £100 per year each and 10p per minute), it would have been free to you. So it was a fee, yes, and a stupid one from an American point of view, but not a hotel fee, not imposed by the hotel.

    You could lobby Vonage to see if they would be willing to include these numbers but at those prices (from the UK, about 7p per minute, or US$0.15) unlikely.

    Now, none of this excuses the hotel from having the equivalent of a 1-900 number… but I suspect that most foreigners don’t know or don’t care about the charge. I would call the hotel and insist that the local number be published on the website.

  • Mary

    Surprising news to those that followed this thread. We got a refund of $40 with a really nice letter of apology from Guoman(formerly Thistle) hotels in London. I gather Chris Elliott advocated on our behalf and got results! I’m impressed! Perhaps it was a good will gesture, and I’m all for good will.

  • http://www.rentalcar.com.sg Michael

    I am glad you got back your money.

  • Vickyharriman

    the incoming call charge actually happened to us in a hotel back in Sydney some years ago and cos about $150 .
    When we reported it to our insurance they informed us that it is quite a common practice now.  Have you ever heard of such insanity???

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