Furious with OOT hotel- venting

pixalicious · June 2012

I am so irritated about this I feel the need to vent. I set aside 15 rooms for our OOT guests at a nice downtown hotel in the city my wedding will be (we have quite a few oot guests). I won't mention the name of the hotel on here, but will sure write an honest and scathing review of them on other websites. So I signed the contract over 6months ago for this block of rooms for our wedding guests... the kind that our guests can call in and reserve at a nice discount. It turned out that a lot of our OOT guests preferred to stay at a different, cheaper hotel closer to the airport. No big deal though. We still had 15 rooms set aside at the downtown hotel, and only 3 rooms were booked there. So there should have been 12 rooms left in our block. Two of our friends informed us that when they tried to call to book a room from the block, the hotel told them that the block was full, hotel was full, and they'd have to stay somewhere else.

Now I am furious because I specifically set aside 15 rooms for my guests to book. There is NO REASON that they should have been turned away. There should still be 12 rooms available at the wedding discount rate. And of course, the managers and group reservations employees for the hotel only work M-F, 9-5. So I have to wait all weekend long until I can call them up to b*tch and sort this out.

I'm not the type of person to go yelling at someone over the phone or turn into Bridezilla, but I think I'm going to have to grow a pair and do it. This was completely unacceptable for the hotel to do since I already had a contract signed with them and know FOR A FACT that rooms are available. Has this every happened to anyone else? Anyone who works in the hotel industry that can give me some pointers for when I make my phonecall on monday morning?

Thanks and if you've actually read this far, thanks for hanging in there.

BTCarolus · June 2012

I just looked at your profile, and it says that the wedding is in 21 days. Most hotels have a policy of releasing the rooms in the block 30 days before the wedding (sometimes 45), so that the rooms can be booked by other guests and they don't lose business. So, I'm guessing they released the block a little over a week ago. Did the hotel not tell you of this policy, or not tell you the date that the block would be released by?

roseofdeborah · June 2012

I work for hotels. They either do what the PP has said in that they tell you that they will hold rooms for you for a certain period of time before they release them. They do this so they are still able to make the revenue if you have been mis-informed as to how many guests would be staying there. The second thing that would change that would be if you had some form of payment guaranteeing the rooms. This would mean that if you guaranteed 15 rooms you gave them a credit card saying that if we do not give you 15 rooms you can charge this card for the price of the rooms we said would be booked and have not. Downtown hotels fill up very quickly in the summer for the weekends and they are pressured to fill all of their rooms every night, so they need a firm guarantee this will happen.

pixalicious · June 2012

Thanks guys. The date that they would hold the rooms for was Friday. Our friends told us that they called the week prior and were denied the room. We called Thursday and Friday with no success (thanks to the unhelpful front desk woman who kept trying to push us off onto the companies automated reservation system). I understand that they had to create a 'release date' for our rooms. But our friends were trying to book the hotel room one week BEFORE the release date. This is why I'm angry. They have 21 more days to get all of the unbooked rooms filled.

Furious with OOT hotel- venting

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