It may sound insignificant, but to Mona Ogden, the fireworks at Disneyland are a big deal. She even spent $900 to upgrade into a “club-level” room at the Disneyland Hotel on a recent visit because they promised “a view of the Disneyland Park fireworks show from above with in-house soundtrack.”
“Night after night we planned around the supposed show time and hauled back to the hotel, up to this special room,” she says. “And nothing happened.”
What, no pyrotechnics?
One moment, 8-year-old Brent Midlock was swimming in a shallow saltwater pool at an all-inclusive resort in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. The next, he was gone.
“It’s something I think about every day,” says his mother, Nancy Midlock. Her son had been sucked into an open drainage pipe, his shoulder and elbows violently dislocated by the force of the water. His body was recovered a day later.
Athena Foley and her husband wish they’d never stayed at the Hotel Ändra. When they checked into the Seattle boutique hotel this summer, one of their bags was stolen after they surrendered it to the bellhop.
Foley lost $1,000 worth of items, including clothes, eyeglasses and medicine. She wants the property to compensate her for the loss. But today’s “Is this enough compensation?” case is not an open-and-shut case, as you’ll see in a second.
Hotwire’s low-price guarantee says you can be “sure they’re the lowest prices you’ll find.” But that’s not what Carol McCoy discovered when she booked a hotel in Rehoboth Beach, Del., on a recent holiday weekend.
She paid $140 a night for a two-star hotel, which seemed a little high to her. (Hotwire doesn’t reveal the name of the property until you’ve paid for it.)
The hotel wasn’t what she had hoped for.
When Carol Pulido tried to check in to the Puerto De Luna Hotel in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, a few months ago, she got some bad news.
The suite she’d reserved and paid for through Hotels.com wasn’t available.
“They said they were overbooked and no longer had any suites, but they could give us two rooms,” she says. “I wasn’t very happy with the arrangement because we wanted to keep our party together. But we went along with it.”
Here’s a relatively common problem with a so-called “opaque” booking site — with a relatively common resolution.
Unfortunately, it’s the wrong resolution, as far as Phillip McKeough is concerned. He recently booked a Hotwire room in Grand Rapids, Mich. Or thought he had.
Hotwire’s system is not like other online travel agencies. You get to select the room category and location, but don’t find out which hotel you’re staying at until after you’ve made the purchase. When McKeough selected his hotel, he was given a room at a property in Walker, Mich., a suburb about seven miles away from Grand Rapids.
“I believe there has been some sort of mistake,” he told me. “The brand of hotel and price are all fine, but I can’t use a room in Walker. I would like a refund or credit to use in the actually city I need to stay in.”
Glenn Robins is grossed out. As a frequent traveler, he assumed the sheets on his hotel bed are changed between guests.
But a new TV ad by the Hampton Inn chain calls that assumption into question. It shows housekeepers changing sheets in hazmat suits, at what appears to be a competing hotel chain.
“The implication was obviously that other hotels do not change the sheets for every new guest,” he says.
Robins is troubled by that.
“It’s a disgusting enough thought that the sheets were not changed,” he told me. “It gets even more disgusting when one considers the previous tenant’s possible activity.”
A confession: I changed the last part of Robins’ quote to spare you some graphic detail. Use your imagination.
True, Jorge Sanchez-Salazar booked a nonrefundable room at the Hampton Inn & Suites Reagan National Airport through Orbitz. And it’s true, too, that he canceled the trip, and that under the rules, the hotel could keep his money — all of it.
But that doesn’t sit well with him, and on second thought, maybe it doesn’t with other travelers, either.
Even airlines, with the restrictive and often customer-hostile policies, offer customers who cancel their nonrefundable flights the ability to use their flight credit (minus a confiscatory change fee, but let’s not get mired in the details).
No one expects to get whacked by a tsunami on their vacation. I certainly didn’t when I checked into the Grand Wailea Resort in Maui on Wednesday night.
But on Thursday evening, the sirens started blaring, warning that a killer wave could be headed our way.
The Copacabana Palace Hotel and Spa has a reputation as one of the finest resorts in the southern hemisphere. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced through its Art Deco halls and the Rolling Stones tuned up in its grand salon before their concert on the beach, according to the hotel.
The luxury comes at a price: Room rates start at $623 at this time of year, not including taxes and gratuities.
Aleksandar Milosevic knew the Copacabana wasn’t inexpensive when he checked into the hotel last May, but he also knew he wouldn’t have to pay for it. The Brazilian government was hosting Milosevic for a UN Alliance of Civilizations conference in Rio. The government had chosen the hotel.
Milosevic made sure all of the arrangements were in order when he arrived, and was assured that Brazil was picking up the tab for his room. But when he checked out of the resort, a hotel employee surprised him by showing him a bill for $2,430.
“You have to pay,” the associate told him. “The Brazilian government canceled its sponsorship of your accommodations.”
Then things turned unpleasant. Milosevic asked why he hadn’t been informed of the government’s decision, and according to him, a hotel manager told him it wasn’t obligated to do so. The Copacabana insisted he pay before being allowed to leave.
