I reached out over a month and a half in advance of our stay to inquire about bringing our ADI Certified assistance dog, at which time i was told it would be no problem, and management asked no further questions.
The night before we were due to arrive, i was contacted by Larisa suggesting that we change the location of our stay to their other property, the Bumblebee Bight inn, which was not on the water, due to the View suites "being fully booked". I kindly said no thank you.
Then, the next morning (the day of our reservation), Larisa contacted me again regarding our assistance dog asking for additional information about the work she does. I explained that her tasks were in the context of my job as a nurse in a trauma-informed treatment center for adolescents, and due to the length of our overall vacation, we had to take her with us to keep her training sharp. At that point, Larissa changed her mind about allowing us to stay with the assistance dog. THE DAY OF our reservation!
The time to ask questions about her work and potentially decline our reservation would have been when I reached out to them nearly 2 months before our stay. And I would have been fine with it. Instead, they waited until the day of our arrival.
If the roles were reversed and it was me running the place, I would have been flexible enough to allow the guests to keep their reservation and stay, given it was the day of.
The reason i contacted them in advance was to avoid a situation exactly like this.
To us, it felt like there was an ulterior motive to get us out of our reserved room for some reason.
Fortunately, we were able to find a wonderful Airbnb last minute, but this property caused a lot of unnecessary stress on our vacation.
But it gets better.
Larissa was initially apologetic of the situation, and said "Of Course, we will issue a full refund for your booking." 10 days later, when my refund had STILL not been issued, I reached out to her to inquire about the status. At that point in time, I was informed "your reservation shows as completed" and directed me to reach out to Booking.com customer support. I initiated a cancellation request on Booking.com, which was apparently denied by the property, and From there, I continued to get the run around from Larissa at The View Suites.
Ultimately, we ended up having to File a complaint with our credit card company in order to obtain our refund for a cancellation the property initiated on us.
It honestly wouldn't even surprise me if they had someone lined up to stay in our room (hence why they wanted us out), and thought they could charge us AND whoever actually stayed there that night. read more
