Excerpt from Washington Post
More and more often, hotels are offering more nonrefundable rooms, and customers are falling for them without even noticing.
Hotel guests such as Jim Pattiz, a filmmaker from Peachtree City, Ga., are surprised when they discover there’s no grace period for canceling reservations at one of these highly restrictive rates, often called “prepaid” in industry parlance and often the first rates that appear on hotel websites.
Pattiz recently made a reservation through Marriott’s website without noticing the fine print and assumed he could cancel the reservation without penalties up to 48 hours before his arrival. Wrong. When he tried to cancel, a Marriott representative told him the room was nonrefundable.
Nonrefundable room rates used to be a rarity, reserved for special events or five-star resorts at the peak of high season. But after the pandemic, the hotel industry started to tighten the refund rules. The proportion of nonrefundable hotel rooms jumped from 35 percent in 2021 to 40 percent last year, Tim Hentschel, chief executive of the hotel booking site HotelPlanner, told me recently.
there are hotel guests who make reservations and then notice a mistake, such as a wrong date or an incorrect address. Sorry, now it’s nonrefundable. Hotels won’t even offer a room credit. If you don’t stay in the room, your money is gone.
If the hotel industry really wants to emulate the airline industry, then it won’t be long before all of its affordable rooms are nonrefundable, just like airline tickets. Granted, securing a 24-hour rule for hotels might be tricky, but fortunately, that precedent also exists.
The Federal Trade Commission has a “cooling-off rule” that allows consumers three days to cancel certain types of door-to-door sales made at your home, workplace or temporary location (such as a hotel). A cooling-off rule for hotel bookings would give consumers time to fix any booking errors or seek a refund.
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