One of the benefits of having a young only child is that parents can easily take a trip and pay for just one room for the family. Given my predilection for fabulous hotels, I am going to take full advantage of the wide expanse of a king-sized bed until she simply won’t fit between Jamil and me. But I don’t usually just book a basic room. I book an upgraded, larger room, typically at least a deluxe room and more often than not, a junior suite or suite.
On our recent trip to Maastricht, I selected a junior suite at a five-star hotel, called the Maison Centrum. I didn’t indicate that we were a party of three because I never have had to. Upon check-in, I’ve had hotel staff inform me that I need to pay an upcharge because of the third person in the room. No big deal.
But this time, I got quite a shock: Despite the larger room I booked, they would not permit the three of us to share a room! They wouldn’t let me pay for a rollaway bed. They wouldn’t let me pay an additional price. And when I said that if I paid for a second room, as they wanted me to do, we’d all sleep in the same room anyway, they told me they wouldn’t allow it. To make matters worse, the cancellation window for the hotel had passed, and they intended to charge me for both nights – even though we couldn’t stay!
You can only imagine my fury. It was 5:00PM, we had no hotel, and we were squandering money on a room that would sit empty. Plus, based on the hotel staff’s claims, I wasn’t at all sure I would be able to find a hotel in the Netherlands to accommodate us. But Jamil reminded me that our hotel in Amsterdam, the Mandarin Oriental, had gladly welcomed Josephine. There would be a hotel for us; we just had to look a bit.
So we wound up calling this hotel, called the Kruisherenhotel, the most highly recognized hotel in the city for its design but one I’d been reluctant to choose because of the small square footage of the accommodations. Funny enough, they happily allowed Josephine to stay with us in a petite room, half the size of the one I’d reserved at the Maison Centrum. Who knows how those rules really work… I think it’s a matter of who’s working the desk.
On a happy note, I read the policies published by the Maison Centrum, and they were quite misleading, so I contested the charge with Amex. Amex granted me a refund. At the same time, Hotels.com, the online booking service I used, also agreed with me that the terms were unclear; they gave me credit for the value of the original charge to use towards a future room. So all is well that ends well! And we have another story of crisis averted to add to our repertoire.
