Hotel Smoking: UPDATE

So, I was on an epic drive from the East Coast to the Midwest recently and on that drive i received a call from Marriott Corporate saying that all the charges regarding the Marriott Smoking charge in San Diego was going to be returned to my credit card. I immediately was relieved and told the representative at Corporate that it was “the right thing to do”…and it was, because I was getting ready to not be very pleasant with Marriott. You see it was getting personal.

Flashback to the end of October…if you don’t know what’s been going on with my saga with the Courtyard Marriott in San Diego, I invite you to now read my previous BLOG Entry on Hotel Smoking Gone Bad…then come back here…

Go ahead…I’ll wait…

—-for those of you who have read that post…read on…

as you now know, Courtyard Marriott at San Diego Mission Valley/Hotel Circle was not so pleasant to Moi. The manager there thought he had a pretty solid case of a guest in one of his rooms smoking and thus he would drop the hammer and teach that boy a lesson. A very expensive lesson to not smoke in one of his hotel rooms again…to the tune of $265 buck-uh-roll-eez, Buckaroos!! Well, once I heard that that I was this manager’s Hukelberry, I did what any unhappy customer does…started spreading the news…and this is where the story continues…

Once I left town…I immediately got on the horn with all of my Twitter friends. all 2,500 of them…I started Hash Tagging and saying what rascals Marriott was being in regards to my situation. I wrote my first BLOG entry about it…now you know that, right?! I contacted news outlets with letters about my situation and began digging…and digging..and what I found was not very pleasant for any consumer-any potential hotel guest at ANY hotel! I’m not the apathetic type…never have been…never will be. Just sayin’. And because of this and only this…I got results. I made waves. I even contacted a lawyer…
I continued to make calls and I called out Marriott International Corporate on my Twitter to look into my situation. I got a message then a call from them. Kudos to Marriott Corporate. But I state here…I had once already contact Marriott Corporate and was brushed off (make sure you read my previous BLOG for the running account of this)…so, now I had their attention…in front of all their followers on Twitter, etc.
Marriott Corporate followed up and I talked to a nice and courteous representative that said he would follow up and that it would take a few days. He was true to his form…in a few days made the aforementioned call.
All good right?
Well, not quite…

I checked my credit card a few days after and saw that there was a charge removed…but not the entire amount. About 15 dollars was not. Hmmmmm…..A little dig from the local Courtyard, I presume. I am disputing and will get that off too…but how nice of them to do that right?
Also, no apology, nothing. Just the phone call saying that the charges would be taken off…and of course, saying that Marriott has strict guidelines as to this type of charge…which I think Corporate does have…the problem is that this is a Franchise…look how large they are…it’s impossible to keep QC if you run a company this way….You charge and charge you do…and hope the charge-ee doesn’t fight it because it’s too big of an issue for them or they just don’t have the time. Whatever…NO! NOT “Whatever”! This is wrong! It’s White Collar Crime!

The issue also was that there wasn’t any evidence on the claim that I smoked in that hotel room. NONE. What? Some ashes and smoke smell in the bathroom/toilet? What a crock! This is what the Courtyard Marriott in San Diego based their entire $280 “smoking” charge on? Really? I had to go through these great lengths to get this removed….How arbitrary. How much power these people that work behind those counters have….wow! I’m blown away! Just like Art C., the rude, and inarticulate Manager at that Courtyard who, after pleading my case and him, knowing what lame evidence they had at best, proceeded to try and teach me a lesson for some quota he had…or to save face as a “hard ass” because he’s always right on everything…you know the personality type…

Well, I guess I couldn’t even think of an apology, even at this Holiday Season. I won’t even hold my breath. Maybe they already think that they might be open to some kind of Legal Action (and they already are but that’s another story…) because they dropped the charge. Maybe they should have thought about all of this when I called and stated I didn’t smoke, and to take that a little more seriously looking into their protocol and follow up instead of trying to be some version of John Wayne.

Well, there you have it. The saga.
Stay cool everyone. And if you lose your cool, make sure it’s for a good reason.

Happy Holidays Buckaroos!

JA

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