Help! My hotel is oversold
Q: Last fall I booked a room at the Peabody Hotel in Orlando for a bridge tournament event being held there. Yesterday, only a few days before I was supposed to check in, I received an overnight letter informing me that the Peabody was oversold and that I had been moved to the Renaissance Hotel.
The Peabody offered to pay for my first night’s accommodation and offered complimentary trolley passes as compensation. I am 71 years old and recently had hip surgery, so I will not be able to use the trolley.
I called the hotel and got through to a sales manager, hoping to explain my situation. He was rude and unhelpful. My son also called him, and the manager was not very pleasant to him, either.
How can I get the Peabody to honor its reservation?
– Virginia Gomprecht, Jupiter, Fla.
A: There is no law - at least none that I can find - that would force a hotel in Florida to honor a reservation. I’ve read all of the relevant statutes, and am pretty sure that what the Peabody did is legal.
But is it right?
Probably not. Yes, overbooking is an industrywide practice. But there are ways of doing it and keeping your customers happy. I remember arriving at an oversold Ritz-Carlton property a few years ago. I was promptly transferred to a more expensive, smaller inn that ended up being a terrific experience. The hotel even paid my bill. That’s how to do it.
Notifying guests at the eleventh hour that their accommodations have been changed (and then giving them grief when they try to find an acceptable alternative) is probably not going to make them happy.
In fact, they will probably write to me, just as you did.
What’s the hotel’s story? It blames a reservation “systems fault” that wasn’t discovered until shortly before guests were to arrive. “All of us at The Peabody Orlando deeply regret that this unfortunate situation did not reveal itself [sooner],” a hotel spokeswoman, MaureenBrigid Gonzalez, told me.
Although the property is under no obligation to do so, I think it would have been a thoughtful gesture to ask a more able-bodied guest to move to the Renaissance. But the Peabody offered another solution.
In addition to paying for your first night’s stay at the new hotel, it also agreed to charge you the rate that you agreed to pay at the Peabody for the duration of your stay at the Renaissance. Because the Renaissance room rate is higher, this accommodation will save you some serious money. The property will also provide you with free door-to-door taxi service from the Renaissance to the Peabody while you are in Orlando.
I think the Peabody’s latest offer is a lot better than its first. If you still don’t want to stay at the Renaissance, I can think of one other possible fix: Ask one of your bridge tournament colleagues who is staying at the Peabody to switch places with you. I am sure the Peabody would be able to set that up.