This week, the Compensation Clinic case comes from a piece we published four weeks ago (read more here) about reader’s issues at the DoubleTree by Hilton Antalya-Kemer in Turkey that appears to be canceling reservations.
Remember that you can always email us, send a message via Facebook, or use Twitter and include photos too. We’ll try to cover a Compensation Clinic case here regularly.
You can access DoubleTree by Hilton Antalya-Kemer here.
READ MORE: Hilton Honors Rate & Bonus Points Offers
Here’s part of what we covered in the reader’s question piece (access it here):
Reader’s Email To Us:
We’ve recently had very bad experience while staying in DoubleTree Kemer. I’ll appreciate, if you share my story with the readers to prevent them from having same problems.
Here’s the review that the reader left for this hotel:
I highly do NOT recommend this hotel due to a simple reason: having a reservation doesn’t mean that you’ll be actually accommodated in this hotel.
We booked the hotel for September 2023 in May 2022. Price was quite good, 90 euros per night.
The day we were heading to the airport I received an email that my booking was canceled. Since our friends were staying at the hotel too and were already there, I asked to know, what was happening.
The hotel claimed they had received reservation from Hilton system only that day and since they were overbooked, they couldn’t accommodate us. But they could give us a family deluxe room for both families. Staff told us they were doing us a favor.
We had to live all in one room – 4 adults and 2 kids – for one week. Personally me and my girlfriend were living in a small room without a window.
I studied reviews on Google Maps, Tripadvisor etc. and found out that it’s normal practice for this hotel. They sell more rooms than they have and then lie to the clients, for whom they don’t have capacity.
Hilton support haven’t helped at all. They only credited me some points. How those points would help me, if we didn’t have a place to live?
Also, cleaning lady broke down our mercury thermometer and hasn’t warned anyone. Luckily, I quickly noticed that. By the way, the hotel didn’t compensate this.
Corridors are dark in the hotel. Personnel, except some of them, are impolite or even rude.
No one even apologized for all these issues. Disgusting attitude!
I was in touch with the reader and wanted to find out if they had opened a case with Guest Assistance:
When we arrived to Turkey, I contacted Hilton support chat. They only advised me to call their hotline, because chat support couldn’t resolve that.
When we arrived to the hotel and didn’t receive any good solution from hotel staff, I called Hilton hotline. They called the hotel and asked them to provide us with accomodation in another hotel, but the hotel refused. So, all they could do is to register this refusal in the case.
At some point, my case was transferred to Executive Customer Relations (probably, because I asked my employer to help as well). But eventually this led to nothing.
We forwarded the case to Hilton for comment and received the following statement:
“Hilton strives to provide the very best experience for our guests – every stay, every time. Unfortunately, this was an isolated incident, and we are in touch with the guest.”
Reader Email: DoubleTree by Hilton Antalya-Kemer Cancels Valid Reservations For Dubious Reasons?
First update from the reader:
Hilton contacted me and offered 4 “Be My Guest” certificates. I accepted their offer; they promised to send them by post. I’ll now forward you their email.
I guess they did it, because you contacted them. Thanks a lot for your help!
Also, my friend was still staying at the hotel, when General Manager approached him and started to ask questions about me, whether I had an acquaintance with a journalist. He said I made a lot of fuss. That was really funny. A person, who takes rather high position and is supposed to help hotel’s guests, is complaining about a guest to this guest’s friend, who also suffered.
Second update:
When I sent a reply that I would accept the certificates, Hilton support suddenly realised I’m living in Russia and wrote me that it would be hard to send me the certificates “because of the sanctions” (I don’t know, how the sanctions influence simple post delivery).
At first, I refused, but my second thought was it was a good deal, so I agreed. Today they credited 200,000 points to my account.
Since different Hilton support employees had credited some points earlier for this problem, total points credited are 255,000.
I think it’s a fair compensation.
Thanks again for your publication. I hope I managed to warn a few travelers. Also, probably Hilton will do something with this hotel. Cheating on clients like that is disgusting.
Conclusion
I am glad that Hilton corporate made it right to the reader, and I hope that this hotel in Turkey will learn their lesson, fix their internal policies, or get booted from the system.
There surely is no disincentive for a hotel like this to cancel bookings coming from Hilton if they don’t like the paid rate or reimbursement they get for award nights UNLESS the penalty is more significant than what they gain from this practice.
It seems that this specific hotel, based on the reviews and comments left on TripAdvisor and Google, sometimes cancels reservations on short notice for very dubious reasons.
I believe that they have realized to be in an oversold situation and would need to “walk” some guests, i.e., move them at the hotel’s expense to other similar quality area hotels, but are too cheap to foot the bill and hence these cases.
