A Hilton Honors Diamond member booked two regular price rooms at Canopy by Hilton San Francisco SOMA. The price was $288. The hotel cancelled the reservation, but didn’t notify the customer. They saw the cancellation in their Hilton account and contacted the hotel.
Credit: Canopy by Hilton San Francisco SOMA
They had gotten a good deal for the stay over Super Bowl weekend. Often booking far in advance you’ll get a deal for special event dates. You may even find free award night space.
The fact that this guest did just that is why the hotel decided to cancel. You expect rooms booked via Hilton to be honored, especially when these aren’t ‘$1 a night mistake rates’ but regular rates that the hotel usually sells rooms for. Especially for Diamond members! And when the hotel reneges, you’d expect them to… notify the customer.
Credit: Canopy by Hilton San Francisco SOMA
And advertising rates, taking bookings, and then ransoming the bookings for more money is at least bait and switch pricing, right?
Here’s the booking, and a note from the hotel offering a ‘special rate’ of over $1,000 per night.
In this correspondence to the customer, the General Manager of the hotel appears to clearly be lying “at no point did we load a $288.00 rate over those dates.” The hotel doesn’t want to sell rooms at regular price during the Super Bowl. But it’s their rates that were loaded, and they weren’t blocked off during the Super Bowl. This wasn’t a “system glitch” it was a regular price that humans failed to prevent from being bookable.
In all likelihood, the hotel just failed to manage the inventory manually for Super Bowl dates and allowed the system to take historical data and sell at what they expected to be able to get.
This is hardly unusual. Hotels cancel guest reservations when they can sell rooms for more all the time, like during the NFL draft, a Phish festival, a solar eclipse or a big college graduation.
Credit: Canopy by Hilton San Francisco SOMA
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.
The simple lesson here is that hotels do not always honor reservations. That’s especially true when they decide they can sell the room you’ve reserved to someone else for more money. It’s not exactly common but happens more often than you’d think. In the past Hilton corporate has been no help on issues like this. It’s California, I’d complain to state agencies.
Outrageous. I would be interested in hearing more about systemic self-serving cancellations of reservations, and how often this happens.
Perhaps Jerome Stack should consider changing his title of “Chief Enthusiast.” Chief Downer? Chief Retaliator?
Sadly you can’t complain to the CFPB since we DOGE’d that too. You know, what the little guy was screaming for during the campaign.
Simple $25 suit in Small Claims court will clear this right up and be in the customer’s favor.
Small Claims against a corporation is something severely underutilized in this country. They never show for the hearing and the default judgement is always entered like 98% of the time.
I did this to Facebook in Massachusetts over $4,000 and won easily.
@Mike Just curious….when you won…did you actually get the $4k from Facebook? And if so…how long did it take?
@Mike – you won’t win and are wasting your time. Don’t know basis or outcome of your action against Facebook but hotels are different (just like car rental reservations). Just as a customer can cancel a hotel reservation (unless non- cancellable where you got a lower rate in exchange) up until a certain deadline (day before, 48 hours, etc) hotels can also cancel your reservation. Read the fine print in the reservation or the terms of service on their website. Most hotel reservations and car rentals are not legally binding.
Not common but does happen. I live in NC and this is VERY common the weekend of college football games in smaller towns (Clemson SC, Athens GA etc). No legal recourse and very frustrating but a risk you run especially if you think you got a “deal” during a special event.
“Chief Enthusiast” is a real puker.
I’m the one who was affected by this and I posted an update on Reddit as well as the full email exchange for transparency. Unfortunately, Jerome doubled down on his stance and refuses to honor this rate. It’s appalling. Take a look at the updated Reddit comment on the post.
The issue with small claims court is what state to sue in can not easily serve a company that is not in your state
AC, that may not be true if the person spent money in reliance on the reservation and cannot find replacement accommodations. For example, if the hotel cancels at the last minute and the hotel customer bought things in reliance on that reservation (such as nonrefundable airfare or theater tickets, for example—Super Bowl tickets would likely be too easy to resell at a profit haha), it’s possible that there might be a reliance case to make against the hotel, regardless of whether an actual contract existed or whether it allowed cancelations.
AC, hotels can write whatever they want in their T&C but a court will decide based upon the law and the three elements of a contract are offer, acceptance and compensation. There is also the legal concept of justifiable reliance.
Bottom line is my guess is that a court would be extremely likely to find that there is a binding contract and that refusing to honor it is not only a breach but unjust enrichment. If the hotel cancels reservations as a mater of policy then there is a good case that this is fraud.
If it is common in NC then either your state has a very different understanding of what constitutes a contract, a special carve out that would be interesting to know about or, more likely, people haven’t sued when hotels breach their obligations.
Tomri – service in California on a corporation is easy. Corporations are required to have an agent for service of process and a small claims complaint can easily be served. This link is to the Cal. Secretary of State’s website page for Hilton, listing the corporate agent and a number of employees there with the address. Service can be mailed to any of those employees in Sacramento.
https://bizfileonline.sos.ca.gov/search/business
Total BS. The Super Bowl will actually be in Santa Clara, where the 49ers play, which is almost an hour away from downtown San Francisco. Hotels in downtown SF will not fill up for that event.
Many better options in that area anyway.
Would it make any difference if you did a pay in advance rate and had already paid for the room?
@Steve, excellent points. In addition, as the corporation must be represented by counsel in small claims and rarely bothers to show up, there’s no one to argue the corporation’s side. I imagine that would make defending their contractual terms challenging.
@Steve and others – any contract law is influenced by the terms accepted by the person when they booked the reservation and, similar to an airline’s contract of carriage, they are very one sided. Practically no one reads or understands exactly what they are agreeing to but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valid. IMHO no lawsuit would get to a jury as it would be dismissed based upon the agreement in place. Also the fact a traveler can cancel at will undermines the premise that a hotel can’t do likewise.
Speculate all you want but from a practical standpoint there is little recourse.
Wondering if a prepaid reservation at a special event location would provide protection…any thoughts or comments?
@AC: I’d think that the hotels in major college football towns would want to automatically have high rates for every weekend during football season. Then once the schedule is announced and some of the weekends turn out to be scheduled for road games with no football game in town, they could lower the rates to normal prices.
I mean, it’s a shame. But the argument about whether it’s human error or truly a system glitch is rather moot. The cases where an item is listed for 1/10th or 1/100th the price are usually also human error (either they missed typing a digit, or in the 1/100th case thought that it was price in dollars and it was dollars and cents); the cases where an item is listed for $1 is due to bad user interface design (price is pre-filled in with $1, and they forgot to replace the price, instead of left blank so you can’t add the item without adding a price) My point being mispricing due to a true system glitch is exceedingly rare.
That said.. they definitely should have let the customer know the reservations were cancelled. And they shouldn’t falsely claim it’s a system glitch, just say the price was in error. But Superbowl hotel pricing is insane, I don’t really expect the hotel to eat over $4800 because someone neglected to block off those dates far enough ahead (rounding down, $800 difference between their rate and special price, x3 days, x2 rooms, is already $4800… and I suppose the ‘special rate’ could be a $1 discount, but it’s probably not, I wouldn’t be surprised if those rooms weren’t going for more like $1500 a night.)
Jerk GM , wants to covet himself with owners. This guy needs to call Chris Nasetta, the CEO of Hilton and raise cane. So outrageous this is allowed.
I got a $600 sofa for $199 because the company made a “mistake” on the website. Did they cancel the order, no. I worked for Hilton as one of my first jobs. This is not how we are trained to treat Diamond members. Sounds like the brand has gone extremely downhill since I’ve worked there. They knew there was an event they should just eat that and learn for next time. Tell Sally in accounting that next time she needs to make sure that the rates are correct for special events.
Small claims court commentators.
The OP point is that the corporation is not going to show. That doesn’t always happen because large corporations general have ambulance chasers/3rd rate lawyers on retainer to handle this low level stuff.
If I remember correctly small claims filing in MA is $150.
I had a similar thing happen years ago at the Hyatt Regency Orlando, only they didn’t exactly *cancel* our reservation (see below…).
I was attending a convention, and booked a convention rate of $65 for 4 nights through the official convention booking page. Full disclosure, this was for a ‘studio’ room, i.e. a larger room with a couch/sitting area but *not* an actual multi-room suite. The standard rooms were going for a bit more (I forget how much, maybe around $100), so I did suspect maybe something was up – but to be fair, the hotel also charges a $48/night resort fee (I don’t remember if it was that much back then, but still significant), so I figured I’m actually paying more like $113, which is pretty reasonable for a convention rate. (Back then, I was only Explorist, not Globalist, so I would still be paying the fee.)
Soon after booking, I noticed that that room type was no longer being sold at the convention rate, but the standard rooms still were; maybe there were limited studios available at the convention rate and I’d booked the last one. Still, I had my confirmation email (still have it!) and everything seemed good to go. I booked in January for a convention in May, well in advance.
Then, TWO DAYS BEFORE ARRIVAL, I get an email from their convention reservation system with the subject, “Hyatt Regency Orlando Reservation Update Confirmation.” I had not made any changes to the reservation, so I thought that was kinda weird. I open it…
They added a ZERO to my rate all four nights.
“$65.00” became “$650.00.”
Seriously?!? If it was a mistake, it seems like maybe they forgot a 1 at the beginning – “$165” instead of “$65” – AT MOST. If I recall, I could go to their website and book a studio room for around $150 (maybe less) outright, with no group discount or anything; this was not some luxury $650 suite!
I called them immediately, and they insisted that they never offered any $65 (pre-resort-fee) rates and that they couldn’t honor it. They denied changing the rate themselves, even though obviously *someone* did.
Luckily, my group also had another suite booked, and someone in the group ended up not being able to make it. So ultimately, when we arrived, I explained the situation again in person, they again denied having anything to do with the rate change and insisted they never offered such a low rate to begin with (despite my confirmation email), but they ‘graciously’ allowed us to cancel the modified reservation at no cost and just stick with our other suite. (And to their credit, we had paid to add Regency Club access to our suite, which is normally only for 2 adults, so they extended it to all 4 of us at no additional charge as an apology for the ‘misunderstanding’ while still refusing to admit it wasn’t a misunderstanding but blatant fraud on their part.)
Our stay was actually pretty good other than that. This was seven years ago, and I haven’t been back since, but would probably be willing to give them another try now. But that whole debacle just left a bad taste in my mouth. As this OP said, that is absolutely no way to build trust; quite the opposite.
@Steve–You state that “the three elements of a contract are offer, acceptance and compensation.”. I am not a lawyer but that sounds reasonable. However, I don’t think a credit card guarantee to secure the reservation would stand up as compensation, so even by your definition, it wouldn’t be easy to prevail in court. I have no idea who actually owns this hotel but it’s probably not Hilton–it is more likely a franchise. We have heard many stories about how Marriott franchisees refuse to honor elite benefits. This sounds like a similarly bad situation for travelers but in the Hilton universe.
Please don’t confuse my statement above as condoning the cancellation by the hotel. To use my own legal terminology, I think it sucks. The only satisfaction here might be that as this story gets out, this particular hotel might lose more in regular business than it gains by Super Bowl gouging.
I’d file in small claims court. Unless it will cause grievous harm to one party a deal is a deal.
This is fraud. Hotels will continue to do it as long as customers allow them to get away with it. This happened to me during a stay in Louisville, KY over the Kentucky Derby weekend. I filed a police report and my cancelled reservation was reinstated at the original rate.
Come freakin’ on! Super Bowl weekend, San Francisco, $288??? This guy’s a big dummy to not know that what he booked isn’t real. Hilton surely could have handled this better … like a phone call or a personal email? The guy is a Diamond, that’s what I’d expect. I just had an awful experience with a Hilton in Europe; I wrote one email to the Diamond Desk and the cost of my room was immediately refunded. I’ve been Diamond a long time, and I like the way Hilton takes care of me. I suspect SF had lots of bookings at this rate so they just didn’t bother. Actually, So of Market is to be avoided, except at high noon, so he’s lucky they gave his room to someone else.
,@AC. You are very very wrong on your blanket SCC statement. How many corporations have you used? I have sued numerous and never lost. Suing one right now. This particular suit is for about $18k. Been going on for a year with discovery and motions. The other side easily spent $60k so far in legal fees
Curious what would happen if someone took the time to sue the hotel in small claims court over something like this.
I’d suggest anyone anyone who has had an airline or hotel cancel their reservation to seek advice from someone other than AC. I say this having both won in court and had airlines settle rather go to trial.
That you are allowed to cancel does automatically mean the other the other can. As just one example if that were true then there would be no right of action when involuntarily denied boarding for a flight.
As for hotels when they take a booking they enter into a agreement to provide a room or be liable for damages if they do not. That they voluntarily include terms that allow you to cancel does nothing to alter or negate their contractual or legal obligations (such as against fraud).
Steve from Seattle, consideration (I wasn’t thinking when I used compensation) has been explored in depth by the courts and can come in many forms. In this case it would be executory consideration, payment performed at a later time.
The hotel could argue that there was no agreement because there was no meeting of the minds in that they never intended to offer the rate at the time they offered it, but the facts don’t seem to support this. In the end the decision would be up to the court but in general they take a dim view of purveyors who offers goods or services to the public and then refuse to deliver them at the price or under the terms at which they were offered. This is particularly true when the sole reason is they would like to sell the agreed upon goods or services to someone else for more money.
David427, in almost all jurisdictions lawyers are not permitted in small claims court. The company would have to send someone other than a lawyer or paralegal.
Tomri, who to sue can vary but in this case it’s almost certainly whatever entity manages the hotel. You could either serve them at the hotel’s address, their company address or as stated previously their agent for service which an entity is required to have for every state in which they do business.