I've never had a worse check in experience and I was grateful for witnesses to the behavior of the…read moremanager, C, and the employee, J, during the evening we arrived.
After driving 5.5 hours to get there for a conference, I discovered that my reservation had not been properly made with a credit card authorization. I had an email from the person at my company who booked it, saying that she spoke to hotel management who said she did not need a specialty form. This would make it THE HOTEL's FAULT. I showed this email repeatedly to the staff, along with the confirmation email she had received, indicating she paid for the hotel. There was no tax summary, no final total, which would be over $820 I found out. The clerk said this was fees and taxes. The rooms booked are $150 a night, so that $450 nearly doubled upon arrival.
The man, J, was nearly instantly rude to me, not listening to what I was telling him, no apologizing, telling me that everything was laid out in my confirmation. I have a doctorate and I was reading the confirmation my company contact sent me -- there were no details included, no link, nothing. He basically stopped talking to me and called for a manager, rudely.
I looked over to where the manager, C, was, and despite looking like she was about 15 years old, she was really nice to a woman who was attending the Sam conference, complaining of broken AC and her room. Without proof, the manager was very kind, apologetic, calming, so I had hope.
Alas, I am a fat woman and clearly that wasn't welcome here. The tone was immediately bad and I even asked the desk guy, J, what I possibly could have done for them to be kinder to me.
Immediately, when the manager came over, she just jumped right in and said that I was wrong and too bad, I needed to pay $820, sorry that's policy. They kept saying the word policy to me, but I was trying to show them an email including their own forwarded information. This girl tries to tell me about "lawsuits" from charging credit cards, and I finally tell her I'm a law professor and I get it.
She blames ME for the reservation being made improperly and not knowing their terms. It was like they've never had someone from a business stay at their hotel. I finally handed her my phone which she eagerly took to try and prove me wrong, but she also couldn't find the information they both insisted I must know, and she then declared it must be a convention booking issue -- like that excuses this? She didn't seem to understand (repeatedly) that at 10:30 at night, I cannot get in touch with a financial specialist of one of the largest university systems in the world. She walked away from the counter, refused to even look up any information about the phone call the financial specialist had, despite me giving her a date, area code, and 3-4 hour time window in which the call happened. She was dismissive and waved me off.
Eventually, she says "what we have done in the past is charge one night and hold the other two until the finances can be resolved" and I had to ask these two people if the understood how different a temporary charged $270 was versus $820. The manager, C, rudely told me "well we were trying" and rolled her eyes at me and inferred I had been the problem.
I had to explain to them that a customer should be allowed to ask questions to resolve a situation. Also, my colleague was told that she would be charged a $60 hold and the credit card POS showed $60. She was actually charged $60 per day, which wasn't clear from the transaction. She watched these people treat me poorly and was deeply angered.
The cherry on top was an email from another customer service manager about my experience who gave a boiler plate apology and reinforced that this was "policy." They did not ask what happened, more detail, etc.
I will not come back here and will actively avoid any event held here in the future. This was the worst customer experience I've had at any hotel.