Cancelling a hotel room that you booked but you aren't one of the guests in

[meremac]

You can't cancel a reservation in someone else's name. You can agree to pay for a hotel room for someone else, but agreeing to pay for it doesn't mean that you are in control of the reservation. If the reservation is in your grandmother's name, it's your grandmother's reservation. The only exception to this is if a TA books it for you. Then the TA owns the reservation and nobody else (not even the guests themselves) can cancel it.

This isn't fraud. It's common practice in the travel industry. If I have three rooms as part of one group booked through our travel agency and one person calls and says the group wants to cancel, I need the lead guest on each reservation to shoot me an e-mail or give me a call to authorize the cancellation, regardless of who's paying for it. This is to protect everyone involved.

I know your grandmother didn't want an MDE account, but that would have been the easiest way to get around this: create an account for her, link the resort reservation to her account, then cancel it online. Or...just have her over for some tea or something and chat while you're on hold, then put her on the line to tell them she wants to cancel.

 

[Lewisc]

Is that actually fraud? Like if I booked a room for my parents, for instance, as a gift, and used my credit card? Actually curious about this.

That's not an issue.
Later telling Disney

But I’m telling you that I don’t authorize this person to stay in that room on my credit card, and I want the reservation canceled.

Is not truthful and might be fraud.

Set up an MDE for Granny. Put her on the phone long enough to give permission to deal with you.

 

[Mrs.AMC]

I suspect once you put it in her name, it was hers, plain and simple. How that works with Travel Agents, I'm not 100% sure, as only the agent can make changes to the vacation. Somehow they must keep the details under their name (which is what allows for their kickback from Disney). I wonder if there was some way for you to do that sort of situation, without handing over complete control to her. Over my head, but someone here probably knows, as I know many TA and ex TAs are on this board.

It’s just booked different when a TA books
Thinks of it as a totally different type of booking if that helps
sort of how a TA uses a different booking platform to book
a private party can’t booked a TA type of reservation
they have to be done through a licensed agency
not just anyone can call and claim to be an agent

 

[RamblinWreck]

I bet you can’t name another hotel on earth where you could be in possession of all of the confirmation details, access to the email address that booked the reservation, be there owner of the credit card that paid for it, and have trouble canceling it.

In 99.9% of cases you could easily do it online.

And if I had created a dummy profile for my grandmother to assign the reservation to, I could have easily canceled this online as well. The problem is that their system isn’t designed to function at all if reservations aren’t linked to a profile, and their nonexistent (unless someone cares to prove otherwise) policy that you can only modify a reservation for a room that you out yourself as a guest in makes no sense.

 

[meremac]

And if I had created a dummy profile for my grandmother to assign the reservation to, I could have easily canceled this online as well.

Right. That would have been quick and easy!

 

[RamblinWreck]

Right. That would have been quick and easy!

It would have. But I would have had to do it prior to making the reservation. And therefore I would have already had to have had prior bad experience with a terrible system with arbitrary, unpublished rules to even think it was important to do

 

[Mrs.AMC]

It would have. But I would have had to do it prior to making the reservation. And therefore I would have already had to have had prior bad experience with a terrible system with arbitrary, unpublished rules to even think it was important to do

No. You could have done it after the fact

 

[meremac]

It would have. But I would have had to do it prior to making the reservation. And therefore I would have already had to have had prior bad experience with a terrible system with arbitrary, unpublished rules to even think it was important to do

No, you can do that after.

 

[Boomatt]

Dispute the charge on your credit card. They’ll cancel the reservation real quick after that!!!

 

[TheOneWithTheTriplets]

It would have. But I would have had to do it prior to making the reservation. And therefore I would have already had to have had prior bad experience with a terrible system with arbitrary, unpublished rules to even think it was important to do

Seriously doubt the rule is unpublished. Did you actually read the terms and conditions you agreed to? If the terms say that only the lead on the reservation can change or cancel, then you're the one in the wrong for failing to understand what you were agreeing to when you put your card on the reservation.

 

[DisneyMommyMichelle]

The simple way I do this when I am booking and paying for multiple rooms on vacation in Disney is to put myself in each rooms 'party' and link them all together as one big group. It allows me to manage all the reservations and do whatever I need to them.