The hotel itself was nice, clean, centrally located, but I have to warn travellers who require *any* modifications to their booking, or those who book through Hotels.com. I spent a total of 4 hours on the phone with Hotel.com's customer service and the Hotel Monaco front desk dealing with an error that was made by Hotel Monaco.
I had originally booked a large room (advertised at 500 sq ft), but had requested two beds, as we had our 10 yr old daughter with us. What we ended up with was a 300 sq ft room with two double beds, which had labels on the mattresses that stated 'Queen sized'. Despite the smaller room, the nightly rate was still the same. Anyone who has travelled with a child will know that 300 sq ft with two double beds in the room is not a lot of space, and this was not the room I had originally booked and paid for. Naturally, I went to the front desk and inquired about room availability, but I was told by the representative that the hotel was fully booked for the weekend. I had found another hotel in the area that had room availability and had much more space, so I talked to the front desk again, to cancel the room reservation. Here is where the runaround began:
Hotel Monaco’s front desk redirected me to contact Hotels.com, because the booking was made through the website, and claimed that Hotel Monaco could not modify any reservations or administer any refunds. A customer service representative from Hotels.com informed me that they could not administer any refunds without speaking to Hotel Monaco. So I connected the two parties together, and Hotels.com refused to cancel my booking with a refund. The Hotels.com representative tried to end the call several times by telling me that the Hotel Monaco clerk would give me some offers to offset the costs and the inconvenience, and that Hotels.com would give me a 10% discount if I decided to cancel the reservation. So, I talk to Hotel Monaco’s front desk, and the offer ended up being two drink tickets to the lounge. The lounge we cannot enter with our 10 year old daughter. While the clerk was apologetic, she was incredibly uncompromising. She even admitted several times that the room was downsized based on my online request via Hotels.com to have two beds instead of one.
After a lot of back and forth with Hotel Monaco’s front desk clerk, it was already past midnight, and we had wasted most of the evening dealing with this situation. Our 10 year old was asleep in the hotel lobby. We decided to take the 10% discount from Hotels.com and stay the one night at Hotel Monaco, in the 300 sq ft room, despite paying the 500 sq ft rate. The plan was to cancel the reservation for the 2nd night and move to a new hotel, but we could not do this without speaking to the Hotel manager in the morning.
The next day, I called Hotels.com again, and spoke to another customer service rep, who stated that there was absolutely no note from the previous rep about a 10% discount. They also reiterated that the Hotel Monaco would not allow a refund for the 2nd night either, so Hotels.com had their hands tied. The representative tried several times to end the call, and raised his voice at me before finally acquiescing and offered me the 10% discount. I requested to speak to a supervisor, and after being put on hold for about 10 minutes, the rep came back and gave me a 15% discount, saying ‘this is the best we can do for you’. This phrase was repeated several times in response to anything I said subsequently, as I insisted on speaking to a supervisor. My intent was not to obtain more of a discount, it was to give feedback on the entire process, discuss the many limitations of using Hotels.com, discuss how the two reps I spoke to did not provide adequate customer service, and my interactions with Hotel Monaco’s front desk from the night prior.
After I dealt with the Hotels.com rep, I walked up to the Hotel Monaco front desk, and asked to cancel the booking for that night, to which they obliged. They approved my request for a one night refund, and said they would handle it with Hotels.com directly. My family packs up and we were just ready to leave our room, when the room’s phone rang. It was yet another rep from Hotels.com who had called to process my refund. The rep asked me for my name, my itinerary number, and my credit card info. This info was used during my past two calls with Hotels.com, so clearly I had the right info. However, the rep could not locate my account and booking despite me repeating this info numerous times. After about 15 (yes, 15) minutes of me repeating my information and the rep re-trying to search for my account, she finally realized that there were multiple people who had the same name as me. I presume she tried using my itinerary number for the first time at that point, and she finally correctly located my account. She then put me on hold for what she said would be ’30 seconds, maximum’. After about 4 minutes of waiting on hold, she accidentally hung up the phone. She then called me back on my cell phone. I asked her if she could call me back on the hotel number since I was being billed long distance charges on my cell, but she said ‘no, you won’t be’ – I still don’t understand this (my long distance charge was $4 for a 2 minute call). After this call was all done, we left our hotel room to check out, about 30 minutes after we had one foot out the door already.
I have worked in customer service myself, and I consider myself a reasonable consumer. I do not feel that as a paying consumer, I did anything wrong when I booked the rooms online, and during my interactions with all the parties involved, yet my family lost our entire Friday night and our Saturday morning. We have completely lost faith in Hotels.com as a reliable hotel reservation provider, as well as Hotel Monaco. We will never stay there, or use the website again, and I intend to provide this feedback on all the travel boards. This was also our first Kimpton hotel experience, and my wife had signed up for an account prior to our check in – but we will not be using it any more after.
I did not use any of the hotel’s amenities, so I cannot comment on those.
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