When a hotel changes its name, what happens to your reservation? That’s not a theoretical question for Tami Pope, who reserved a block of 22 rooms at the Holiday Inn Express in La Grange, Ky., this summer.
Until the Holiday Inn Express became a Comfort Inn & Suites.
“I got online to check on my reservations and it said they were canceled,” she says. “Never received any cancellation notice from the hotel, so I called. I was told that the hotel was changed to a Comfort Inn & Suites and were no longer going to honor the reservations.”
Why hadn’t anyone contacted her? A hotel representative said Holiday Inn would take care of it, and that they would call to rebook her 22 rooms before her stay in June.
“I was not contacted by anyone or offered rebooking at another location in the area,” she says.
Could the new Comfort Inn honor her old reservation? Sure, if she wanted to pay $275 a night, as opposed to the $102 she’d been given on her original confirmation. We have received more complaints about Holiday Inn failing to honor their reservations.
She adds,
I called Holiday Inn guest services and they called the hotel and were told that they would not honor the reservations.
I then contacted the hotel myself, trying to find out who their management company is so I can contact them, and was told that they would not give me that information to call Holiday Inn.
No one will own up to this and they are just leaving me out in the cold. I have tried to find other accommodations in the area and I can’t find anything less than an hour to 1 1/2 hours away.
I can’t believe this can be legal.
Well, Tami, neither can I.
My advocacy team and I have some great contacts at Holiday Inn, so we figured this would be easily fixed. We reached out to them and a few weeks later, received a hopeful, one-sentence response: “Just to let you know this has been handled!” (Here is our ultimate guide to resolving your consumer problem.)
I asked Pope if this had, indeed, been handled
“That would be the wrong word,” she says. “I finally heard back from Holiday Inn corporate yesterday and all they did was say, ‘I’m sorry, we can’t do anything’.”
In the meantime, Pope has paid more money to stay at a Marriott property a half hour away.
How about Comfort Inn? (Related: A guest had an uncomfortable night at the Comfort Inn.)
“The Comfort Inn did nothing and refused to return any calls,” she says. “Comfort Inn corporate refused to give me the name of the management company that runs that hotel. Their response to me asking for that was, ‘Go to the hall of records and get it yourself’.”
Really?
My advocacy team and I contacted Comfort Inn. It hasn’t responded to me, either.
I’m not happy to close this case. Someone should have taken responsibility for Pope’s reservation during the reflagging. You don’t just walk away from a 22-room reservation like that.
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