Phish is performing at a massive festival in Delaware. Hotels are just canceling reservations to re-sell the rooms for more.
A year ago rumors began that Phish was launching a festival in Dover, Delaware. People booked hotel rooms for August 15 – 18 in advance of 45,000 fans swarming the town.
That got them regular rates on rooms. These aren’t mistake rates. They paid what a hotel normally cost.
To hotels, though, it was a lost opportunity and regret. The fans knew what hotels didn’t – that these would be dates with high demand, and people would be willing to pay more. So the hotels have been cancelling on fans, and doing it at the last minute.
The Wyndham Garden Dover hotel was cancelling rooms – that had been booked for a year- on Sunday morning, just days before the event.
- Some guests received messages that they had cancelled the bookings themselves
- Others were told their ‘payment’ hadn’t gone through, even for non-prepaid rooms
- Still others were just told the hotel was overbooked and wouldn’t honor their reservation
Complaining customers were told to write in, and the hotel ignored the messages. Some who did manage to speak to someone were told that the hotel had bookings they needed to honor for Air Force guests (that they somehow didn’t know about earlier). Meanwhile hotels were charging three times more than usual. Those bookings, apparently, were being honored.
Wyndham corporate directed guests back to the hotel. People sometimes mistakenly assume they’re a customer of the chain.
- Hotel owners are the customers
- Guests are the product.
Hotel owners sometimes refer to loyalty members as “leads” as in sales leads, or prospects to market rooms to.
This is hardly unusual. Hotels cancel guest reservations when they can sell rooms for more all the time, like during the NFL draft or a solar eclipse or a big college graduation.
Sometimes the hotel just resells rooms and is honest about what they’ve done. That’s happened to me more than once (a Westin and an Alila). Here’s how to avoid getting walked when a hotel is oversold.
When writing these things can you recommend some recourse or course of action guests can take? Complaint to state attorney general? Pay 3 times the rate and file credit card charge back? There has to be a commerce or federal law that covers this stuff.
Per current law, in the event a hotel does not honor your booking, it just needs to refund you.
If I managed this hotel, I’d first make sure my social media profiles were scrubbed of any mention of me being the manager. Then, I’d cancel on all the suckers who paid regular rates last year and rake in that sweet profit from last minute festival attendees. This is business, folks.
I’d then monitor Google, Yelp, and Tripadvisor and flag all the negative reviews that flood in on the basis that the reviewers were not my customers.
You want to complain? Go to your lawmakers and get a law on the books that protects hotels from pulling these maneuvers.
The Phish hotels rot from the head. They should be sued though I doubt that there is enough money involved to get lawyers to take the cases, even as a class action suit.
we had a booked a room in a suite hotel in Bellevue WA in 1987- loved it- so when we returned in summer 1995 we booked again- with another kid in our entourage- When I called to ask about laundry facilities, as our stay was longer, they said they had no reservation , even though I had a number and date of the reservation- Fortunately I forgot to cancel a buy one room, get one free at the nearby Hyatt- we couldn’t find a room within 70 miles. Why? Launch of Microsoft Windows ’95- AWFUL- never tried to stay at the suites place when we returned- Should be illegal-
SFO/EWR – Bad actors are the reason legislatures pass tough laws, which then create compliance burdens for everyone, including honorable and honest actors. The goal should be less regulation, not more. So, don’t give the legislature reason to regulate more.
@Veejay this is a ridiculous take. It’s a contract, and one of the parties unilaterally backed out of it for an egregious reason. In a real estate contract when one of the parties backs out without cause, there is a penalty. There is nothing wrong with certain regulations being in place to protect the innocent consumer from being harmed by corporate greed.
@Michael – it is a contract but one that guests can typically cancel with no penalty a day or 2 (sometimes longer but that is the norm) before the reservation date. The same goes for the hotel. If you want all hotels to honor reservations then eliminate the ability of guests to ever cancel once they are booked (essentially making all reservations prepaid with no cancellation option).
Yes it is bad press and I would hate to have it happen to me but it is not uncommon (as Gary noted) for major events (happens all the time on football weekends here in the South) or if a wealthy guest decides they want to rent out the entire hotel (or an entire floor). Bad form yes but not illegal as the contract allows EITHER party to cancel. BTW, you also know rental car companies don’t have to honor your reservation right?!
Making asinine excuses for the obvious money grab is typical for the morons who have posted their stupidity here.
These foreign born hotel owners have little respect for America or Americans. They’re here to extract as much cash as possible by any means possible. I had business dealings with some, and they will lie to your face and rip-off anyone they can.
@H2oman may be statistically right based on hotel ownership rates. But when things ARE GREAT AGAIN the hotel owners will be deported, right? The US has a great record of dealing with inconvenient folks who look different, even if they they are entirely within the law.
@rj123456
Some of them don’t live her to begin with so I’m not sure what you…..oh wait, I get it. You don’t agree with me so you have to go political. I’ve had dealings with both foreign and native hotel owners. It’s day and night difference. I’ve had them look me in the eyes and tell me to lie to corporate.
Ignorant scum owners, hope they have lots of bed bugs and their roof caves in on them. People act like this type of business practice is ok. It’s not.
The best part is they claim it is because of a contract with the nearby Air Force Base that requires rooms be available
Wow. You guys are so well trained to allow hotels to cancel your rooms. Freehdums eh?
I’m with @Michael. While it’s great to know about bad things like this happening it would be vastly more helpful to have some idea as to recourse if it did happen. For me personally, if I was screwed over by the hotel in such a fashion I would be sorely tempted to make a very LARGE sign saying that this hotel does not currently have bedbugs and picket outside for a while.
Hotels that pull this cancel and resell scam on hotel guests need to be found liable for more than merely compensatory damages arising from the consumers’ detrimental reliance upon a contracted booking. The hotels ought to be subject to punitive damages too so the industry learns a lesson and has to pay a big price for such business practices.
It’s businesses ripping off and otherwise deceiving consumers like this that are the reason why laws and regulations need to come into being to deal with such unscrupulous business practices.
Hotels and other businesses have become ever more egregious about unfair sales/trade practices because they can get away with it so easily and cheaply — (sort of ironically) even more so in this era where more widely sharing complaints about businesses is supposedly easier than ever. Something is rotten in the Kingdom of Corporate America and the rot is starting from the head of the fish: corporate apologist politicians, corporate apologist regulators, and courts stacked with corporate-apologist judges (regardless of the party affiliation of the President nominating them).
H2oman with his xenophobic attitude as always.
The problem isn’t the origin of the hotel owners. The problem in part is that customer-unfriendly deceptive business practices spread across firms in an industry via spreading knowledge about how to do this kind of stuff and knowing how easily they can get away with it because we are ruled by corporate kiss-ups who don’t take consumer protection as seriously as they take ridiculous culture wars and kissing up to money.
I don’t know. In today’s world of very angry people with mental challenges and 2nd Amendment rights, companies might want to rethink the way that they treat just about anyone. A restaurant in our area has already been firebombed twice and if they catch the person, it’s most likely going to be a disgruntled customer or employee.
@AC, I understand that, but what he is advocating for is no regulation, and that’s what I have an issue with. Let hotels and companies in general do whatever they want and whatever it takes with the consumer to make more money. There are consumer protections for a reason, and conduct so egregious should at least, for lack of any regulation, lead to brands pulling the franchise agreement from this property. This is fraud, no matter how some people try to spin it otherwise.
I agree with @Michael
If you reserve you expect the room. Period.
I sometimes reserve knowing i can cancel 24/48 hours before the arrival time.
However IF they told me that unless I paid in full at the time of reservation they reserve the right to cancel my reservation for no reason, then I would pay in full at time of reservation. The consumer needs to be informed, then we make our own decisions. But to NOT inform the customer and pull the reservation is fraud.
@Michael I so wantthere to be legalmconsequences to these hotels. But, consumers game their reservations all the time. What consumer, having reserved a hotel room and discovering a last minute bargain, doesn’t cancel the old andcstayvat the new? Good for goose. . .??? But, the hoteld tick me off more here.
@Dave W: The difference is a consumer who cancels a room at the last minute almost never costs the hotel revenue. Either the hotel isn’t sold out, in which case the consumer never prevented the hotel from selling a room in the first place, or it is sold out, and there’s going to be demand for that room and it will probably sell.
When a hotel cancels a room to resell at a higher rate, the consumer is absolutely getting screwed.
Bullocks!
This is unbelievable with the impact, Tourism, Job Creation and respect to Honor the Festival Entertainers, attendees and vendors the establishment should look at the bigger picture. If an establishment treats consumers in this matter it places More on Attorney Generals Office which consumers preplanned should be compensated as well to never overcharge because it impacts Tourism and the Reputation of the area which is unacceptable. Each business as well as lodging would be experiencing economic growth yet Price gouging should be placed in law to avoid this even the Olympics in France assured not to not price hike according to media and during these economic times in America I still am shock to even see this happened. Unbelievable
This is a two way street that goes both ways. While it’s obviously ignorant and wrong what hotels can do to guests in this realm, don’t get amnesia about the other half. Guests every day make reservations with credit cards that they know cannot be charged so if they can’t/don’t show up, the property has no way to charge them which is of course, as you guys like to say, part of the contract.
Even if you can charge them, it’s not uncommon for a guest to lie and make up a song that they cancelled and it was hotel’s fault (even though magically record of that exists) and then card company X goes ahead and does the chargeback against the hotel when the hotel did nothing wrong.
While you people like to bash the hotel-parent company-management company-owner as being a bunch of heinous criminals at times, understand the flip side which is that far more guests than you would think also pervert their end of “the contract” which contributes tremendously to creating an adversarial operating environment.
People camp at Phish festivals. That’s the whole point of a festival. You stay on site and dont deal with driving once you arrive. So whatever in my opinion