Thanks for your feedback it sounds like you had more than a few issues with your recent stay at the Swan.
If you have traveled the world then you know that hotels can't just modify their front desk billing system to suit your individual requests.
The resort fee is added to the folio for each room nightly. There is no hotel folio system or workflow to move only the resort fees to your room's folio. You could have prepaid all the resort fees for all the rooms at check-in. This would have been reflected on each folio as a room credit. As an alternative you could have stopped by the front desk on night before checkout and paid the resort fees for each room to clear the folios for check-out processing early on the check-out day.
Day 3: Plumbing issues develop all over the world and it is unfortunate that it happened on a busy day for you or to you at all.
Did you request a better room and were you willing to pack, leave your luggage at Bell Services while you went about the rest of your day? Or did you accept the convenience of an available clean room over a room with a balcony and a equal or better view than your original room that may have been available late in the afternoon or early evening?
True nothing was offered but did you ask for anything for your inconvenience or the impact to your plans? The most common guest recovery request would be a resort credit for dining or folio credit but you have to ask for it if you expect anything.
Day 4: Did they actually charge your credit card or just put a credit authorization your card? Or do you mean they added an extra room for your length of stat to your folio? Either option would have been human error by the front desk or the back office personnel and not a computer glitch or error.
Day 5: You indicated that you have traveled the world on business, you must know that you don't wait until after check-out to dispute folio charges. If your credit card was actually charged you would know that you could easily call your CC company and dispute the invalid charges on Day 4.
I am not sure why you say "nothing was offered" did you ask for any compensation for you time or inconvenience? Don't expect to be offered random stuff. Don't expect the front desk staff to speak for the hotel, the day manager, night manager or even the General Manager should be available in-person or via a simple phone call. Emails can also be quite effective.
Dave
I have a few problems with this reasoning, the biggest being that this all assumes that OP has the same level of familiarity with the hotel’s internal systems as its staff or an experienced, repeat Guest. As someone who’s worked extensively in customer service, I was taught that you never can or should make that assumption, because most Guests don’t. The average Guest wouldn’t know the majority of what you’re assuming that they would (the average Guest doesn’t even understand FastPass). I can assure you that the average Guest likely wouldn’t know that it’s a cardinal rule to not wait to check out to address unauthorized folio charges. For what it’s worth (and I’d consider myself an experienced travel), on the rare occasion I’ve had an issue with my bill, I’ve addressed it at check out.
In regard to the unauthorized charge itself, that would be a huge issue for me. Contrary to what you imply, it sounds like the hotel needed to move the OP for safety reasons (which is perfectly reasonable; it happens) but it made a mistake with a billing. It doesn’t sound like the OP had much of a choice to move, so I’m not sure why you’d expect to pay for your “new” room — the hotel is still fulfilling your existing reservation. That then makes the $2,000 charge problematic, and their unwillingness to treat it with any sort of urgency would also bother me. This reminds of when Disney accidentally charged monthly APs for four months at once earlier this summer. While you may be in a different financial situation, there are plenty of people who have bank accounts or credit cards specifically for their vacation budget and a massive unexpected charge or authorization can create a big problem. Beyond any freebies, the best Guest Recovery in that situation is to fix it. To say to a Guest, “we don’t have thousands of dollars just to refund” wouldn’t fly in any customer service job I’ve worked. Like others have mentioned, it sounds like (given their current financial situation), the hotel staff is just not being empowered to try to remedy these situations. I can say that I’ve been offered (without asking) Guest Recovery at the Dolphin on a number of occasions for far less.
Your assessment of the resort fee charges is likely what happened, however that doesn’t make the hotel blameless from a customer service perspective. Several hotel staff told the OP that it wouldn’t be an issue. That shouldn’t have happened, and instead of either giving the OP incorrect information or blowing the OP off with their “best guess,” they should’ve asked a manager who likely would’ve suggested what you did. But if the hotel staff repeatedly told me that this could be done and then it wasn’t, that would irritate me.
All in all, I think you’re being a bit too hard on the OP. It’s easy to Monday morning quarterback these situations, but it does sound like the hotel dropped the ball on a number of occasions during their stay (and never realized they were dropping it). If this were an isolated event I wouldn’t read too much into it, but I’ve heard a lot of not-so-great experiences about the S&D over the last few months (really starting from their “surprise” change in transportation), so as a long-time S&D fan, I’m worried.
P.S. I understand the pandemic angle, and while I absolutely wouldn’t be getting six groups of people together to travel right now (I think it’s a really bad idea), if the hotel is still accepting those reservations and allowing it then I’m not sure why the OP would expect to receive tainted customer service as a result.
