See bottom of this post for Update...
I have been coming here for nearly 2 decades and have been a very vocal advocate for the place here and elsewhere for a very long time. In all that time, they have been nothing but the very epitome of professional, bending over backwards to do things right and make guests happy. We booked a trip back in May for this October. We had to shift the dates a little over a month ago, and as a result ended up with a pool view room. At that time, I asked the reservations group to let me know if any ocean front rooms came open. 11 days ago, I got a call that an ocean front room had come open, and I paid the extra cost to reserve it.
Today, we arrived, and at the front desk, they handed us papers with room 216 (oceanfront) on them, but were told “you are in room 211”. No mention that 211 was not an ocean front room, no explanation of why we were being moved to a pool view room. We checked in at the dive shop, tried to pay for something, were told “you are not checked in to 211 yet.” Went to go to the room and found our bags in front of 211, a pool view room. When we went back to the front desk to ask for an ocean front room that we had paid for, we were told that they didn’t have the authority without the manager onsite to make any changes. Obviously that is not true, because our paperwork was filled out with us in 216, but we were moved to 211. So somebody decided that somebody else needed the room more than we did, and took it away from us, and were too cowardly to even mention it to us when checking us in.
I have had a lot of good times here, have made it an annual trip for the last few years, and have recommended it to dozens of people. But some upcoming changes the current management team has been making, and this episode of extremely unprofessional conduct by their front desk team is very disturbing to me. The difference between the rooms is not really that big of a deal to me. What bugs the crap out of me though is that they didn’t communicate the change to me at all, gave no reason for why it happened, and made no offer to make it right. So now, instead of starting to relax into my vacation and unwinding from what has been a very stressful few weeks at work, instead I am laying here mad, my wife is stressed and unhappy, and it was all because somebody at the front desk decided to screw over a couple that has been coming here for many many years and had finally decided to spring for an ocean view room for the first time. Real buzzkill you know?
I will update tomorrow if they are able to fix it, but for right now, this may be the nudge we have needed to go try someplace else next year. Or maybe we will just try SCC instead.
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UPDATE:
So here is the update... when I got to the lobby after breakfast at around 7:30am, Mick and Charlize were at the front desk digging through records trying to figure out what had happened. They asked who I had talked to for the upgrade and I pointed them to the booking receipt I had emailed the front desk the night before. They said that they would figure out what had happened and figure out a way to make it right for us and asked us to come back after the morning dives. After lunch, Mick and I spoke, and he did exactly what I would have expected from LCBR based on past knowledge of their operations. He took responsibility for their mistake and apologized right away for their error (he used more colorful words, ones that I think were more applicable too). It sounds like somehow we wound up with two reservations in their system, and one of them was cancelled...he was still looking for who and why, but I suspect that the front desk did not have the record of our upgrade from Reef Fantaseas and cancelled it. He appropriately didn’t throw his people under the bus in any case. The upshot is that they do not have an ocean view available for the rest of the week, so he is refunding the cost of the upgrade, plus the cost of our nitrox all week. They also worked hard to find us a room with a king bed so we could move there instead of the room with two doubles that we were in.
In the end, his response was what I would have suspected, and probably would have happened right away if we had arrived any day except Sunday. They screwed up, he knows it, and I suspect will make changes once he figures out how it happened. As has been pointed out, it is too nice of a place to get too worried about the difference in rooms. They have responded appropriately and I no longer have any worries or concerns about how it was handled by the resort. My problem was with how the front desk staff reacted, and I now understand that they thought we had cancelled the ocean view and that is why it was treated as a “change” when we requested it.
