I Guess She Won’t Be A Regular Anymore

I work in a hotel. Recently, our management changed, and the old manager had a lot of these “regulars” who would never have to pre-authorize their credit cards and would just pay for the rooms at checkout. Our new general manager is pretty stern about always taking pre-authorization no matter who the guest is, which is pretty fair.

A lady comes in claiming to be a regular. She tells us she used to work with the previous manager, and she is being nice, so we also check her in politely while making some small talk.

Me: “Can I please see your credit card and ID for pre-authorization?”

Her entire expression changes and turns into a scowl.

Guest: “You’ve never done that before!”

Me: *Politely* “It’s a standard process, so I need to do it.”

She quickly hands me her ID and credit card. I put in the pre-authorization amount.

Me: “Can you put in your PIN, please?”

Guest: “I don’t remember my PIN; I never use it.”

I offer to manually put in the credit card details to process the pre-authorization for her, and she agrees and lets me do it for her while standing right there the entire time.

We then finish the check-in and I hand her the form to put in her car details. She doesn’t remember them, so she goes outside to put that in and comes back. We hand her the keys and it’s all good until the next day. We receive a call from the guest’s daughter yelling at us for noting down her credit card PIN in our “notebook”.

This confuses the h*** out of me because I vividly remember what happened.

Me: “Ma’am, your mom didn’t even know her PIN, so there was no way for us to note it down if she didn’t have it in the first place. I manually entered the details into the credit card machine, and your mom was there the entire time, so there was no way for me to write in any notebook so that isn’t true.”

Daughter: “This is ridiculous! You’re just trying to scam my mother!”

This incident happened a month ago. Yesterday, the guest left a review on our website stating that we noted down her PIN — which she didn’t even know — and scammed her! Oh, well. I guess we are magicians because we can put in her PIN even though she herself didn’t know what it was.