Turned Into A Meal Ticket  

This happened in the 1970s at a well-known hotel chain in Oklahoma. My (now-ex) wife and I stayed there one night because she was having an outpatient procedure at a hospital in the area early the next morning. 

It was a disaster from the beginning. The room was dirty, to the point where I got stabbed in the foot by a straight pin that was in the carpeting. There were cracker crumbs ground into the carpeting. Very little about the room was right.

As there was no alarm clock in the room, I requested a wake-up call for 6:00 am.

We woke up at about 8:00. No call.

I called the desk and angrily asked what had happened to our wake-up call. “I don’t know. I just came on shift.” No apology; no acknowledgement of the problem that they had caused.

I called the hospital, who said they could still get us in as long as we got there as quickly as we could.

We ran down to the desk, rushed through checkout without looking at the bill, made it to the hospital, got the surgery done, and got home safely.

Then, I got the credit card statement. They had charged us for a meal in the restaurant; we had never been in the restaurant at all!

So, I wrote a strongly-worded letter to the hotel manager, with a CC to the chain’s headquarters. The original, sent to the hotel itself, clearly had “CC: [corporate headquarters]” on it.

A short time later, we received a money order from the hotel for the amount we’d been overcharged, along with a handwritten note apologizing. The note was poorly written, with misspellings and other mistakes. It was obvious that someone in the hotel had intercepted the letter and replied in the hope that management would never know.

Okay. We got our money back.

A week or so later, we got a check from corporate for the full amount we’d paid, along with a very nice, typed letter promising that they would investigate the incident.

We ended up with more than we had paid, which I figured came close to compensating us for all the crap we had had to put up with.