The Compensation Clinic is in Bangkok at the Hyatt Place this week, where I had a three-night stay and the hotel unfortunately messed up the payment process, resulting in a double charge that took them forever to resolve.
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This Hyatt Place is one of the nicer select service properties in Bangkok (sometimes rather expensive, though) and I have booked stays here several times in the past.
It was always rather uneventful, and I think this hotel isn’t for someone who spends a lot of time on property but is more a place to have a comfortable overnight in a good location.
During check-in I was asked for the credit card as usual and I noticed that I left my Chase Sapphire Reserve which I prefer to use for travel purchases in another wallet. I decided to just check in with the American Express and then change the payment method later.
The hotel employee said she would take authorization of 6000 Baht which wasn’t the exact amount of the stay, but a little more so this didn’t strike me as odd. Later on, when I got my Visa card back, I settled the bill with it. A few days later, I noticed that the authorization on my Amex had changed into a full charge, so obviously there was some mistake.
I contacted the hotel and the staff took several days to even request a refund. Needless to say I wasn’t happy and gave them another 2 days to take care of it. Still nothing. At that point I told the General Manager of the hotel that I’m requesting 10,000 points for this and that I’ll file a chargeback with Amex simultaneously with their own refund process.
They showed me documents they had requested the refund with their own bank, but things in Thailand always take a little longer. I submitted those documents to support my chargeback claim.
Finally, the fund showed up:
Amex informed me a few days after that the chargeback was closed and that a $1 currency difference was applied as well.
The 10,000 points posted to my Hyatt account as well:
With all this back and forth I found that 10,000 points are a reasonable amount of points as compensation in this case. It’s too much when you consider that a night here only costs 5k points but that doesn’t compensate for all the follow-up and time lost in the process of figuring out how to get the second full charge on my Amex back.
Conclusion
Changing the method of payment or splitting payment after authorization on another card was made is a common procedure that happens all the time. It was pretty obvious that the employee at the front desk processed the entire charge incorrectly because she deducted an amount as payment from the card that wasn’t even the total billing amount.
This could easily be avoided with better staff training. I have a suspicion that this staff member had no idea how to operate the credit card terminal which ended up causing the mess.
