My wife and I had booked, via their website, a stay of five nights at Hub by Premier Inn on Rose St and printed out the reservation details when we booked it several months earlier. The day before we arrived in Edinburgh, I received an email from the hotel telling me that our reservation period was one day later than what we had booked. I had to rack up a lot of roaming charges trying to get through to the hotel on my Canadian cell phone to ask what was going on and it took forever to get through. I was only able to reach some central number for the hotel chain, not the hotel itself. When I finally got through, I was told that the dates they had listed were different from what I had booked and that there were no rooms available for the night we were going to arrive. We had to book another hotel for the first night at the last minute.
Evidently, there was some bug in their computerized reservation system. When we checked in a day after we were supposed to and showed the receptionist the printout of the days we had booked, it was confirmed that the check-out date they had was also one day later than the day we had booked to check out and fly out of Edinburgh. So we requested that they cancel the last day that their system had incorrectly booked for us.
The main issue then became one of receiving some assurance that that last night would be refunded. It was impossible to get any written confirmation from them that we would actually get this refund, given the errors in their system that had already occurred. One so-called "manager" that we spoke to became noticeably hostile wean we asked for such a written confirmation, telling us that the hotel would not allow him to do this and that we would just have to trust him. This was like us telling him that were were not going to pay for our stay until after we got back to Canada and that they would just have to trust us that we would pay. On the day before we left, I did get a slightly better response from a manager there, who gave me the email of the general manager of the hotel, suggesting that I email them to ask for some clarification of our refund. I did send them an email but never heard anything back.
A few days after we checked out, I received an automated email from the hotel chain titled "How did we do?", asking for feedback on our stay. I wrote about the same details I am listing in this review but never received any kind of response. One wonders what is the point of these "How did we do?" emails if there is no sign that anyone has even read our feedback.
My impression is that this hotel is trying to cut corners as much as they can, using a buggy automated reservation system and also by rarely having anyone available at the check-in desk, where staff seem to be doubling their duties between the reception desk and the cafeteria, where they seem to mostly spend their time at the latter.
This experience has made us decide never to stay at any Premier Inn hotel anywhere. read more