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• 1976-01-03
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myOtaku.com: Panda


Monday, March 13, 2006

   Customer Service is a Lost Art.

The "White Tower" must actually be Crowne Plaza!


Hey all. So here's the deal with my beef with the Crowne Plaza. As you all know we are going to Sakura-con. We made our hotel reservations a while ago in the discounted room block Sakura-con set up. Today we worked out our schedule to stay an extra night in Seattle. So we needed to add one more night to our reservations. This seems like it should be easy enough to add one more night, wrong. Get this, even though the Sakura-con website still shows openings at Crowne Plaza at the group rate the hotel refused to let us book the extra night at that rate. They wanted to charge us $230+ for the extra night!! This is over $100 more than the room block rate. This of course, does not include that $27 a day parking fee I was stressing about earlier!

I was, needless to say, ticked off.

I then rant on the Sakura-con message board and find out that the rooms needed to be booked at least 30 days in advance in order to get the group rate. Ok, fine, but then why does it still say the rooms are available at the reduced rate on the Sakura-con website? Meaner people would scream false advertising! Lawsuit! or the like. I just figured screw it and canceled our entire reservation at Crowne Plaza instead. If they don't want to give me the rate I had previously booked my rooms at for the extra day, fine. Apparently for Crowne Plaza customer service is not a top priority and they would rather have an empty room at full price than one filled all weekend at a reduced rate. Not to mention the lost revenue from what would have spent in their restaurant and lounge. If they don't want my business I can go to a place that would like my money.

The moral of this story, I will never stay at a Crowne Plaza ever.

I know this isn't all Crowne Plaza's issue either since Sakura-con's site still shows the discounted rate. I did mention in my postings on their message board that it should be updated to reflect the fact that those prices are no longer available. If I knew that the rates were null and void 30 days prior to the convention I wouldn't have even bothered trying to book the extra day. I would have just crashed at one of my family member's house in Seattle versus dealing with this headache. It just left such a bad taste in my mouth that I never want to deal with that hotel ever again. Like it would be so tough for them to honor that previous rate for one extra night....sheesh.
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