Guest User
November 22, 2022
I'm going to let the letter I wrote to Choice Hotels head office tell the story of my experience. They were apologetic and nice but, after almost three months, I've had no response from the hotel itself. Not surprising. I've noticed that a lot of the manager's responses to negative reviews often involve him blaming it on something the customer did or didn't do. Let's see if he does it for this one. Anyways, here's my letter: "A couple of weeks ago, my 26 year old daughter started a cross Canada drive from the east coast to Alberta for a new job. She decided to take her 16 year old sister to keep her company for the long drive and help with her two dogs she had with her for the journey. Dad (me) was in charge of booking hotels along the way once they decided how many more hours they would be driving that day. While going through Ontario on August 27, 2022 they decided that their stop for the night would be in Sudbury. I jumped in and started calling hotels in the area. I called three hotels in Sudbury to find out that they were all full or not pet friendly. I decided to take a different route. I’d call one of the 800 numbers for the hotel groups so this would cover several hotels at one time in the city. As I am a Choice Privileges member, I decided to start with them….or you I guess we’ll say. I spoke with a great guy and asked him if he had any pet friendly rooms for any of your hotels in Sudbury. He advised me that the Econo Lodge in Sudbury was pet friendly and they had rooms available. Great! We went through the booking process where I also mentioned that my daughter was travelling with two dogs as I wanted to be sure there wasn’t a limit on the number of pets. Two dogs were fine with a $20 charge per pet so I paid for the room with my Visa. Reservation confirmation number ********. Late in the evening of August 27, after about a twelve hour drive, my daughters called me from the parking lot of the Econo Lodge to let me know they had arrived safe and sound. They were taking the dogs out of the car and heading in to get settled away for the night. A few minutes later my daughter called back crying. I could hear a man in the background yelling at her. She told me he was saying that we had lied about the reservation by not telling them we had pets. He was telling her to leave the hotel and he would be charging our credit card because we lied. I was totally amazed. I asked her to hand the phone to him and I spoke with him myself. I repeatedly tried to explain that I had told the call center we had dogs and I had specified a pet friendly room. He kept cutting me off and told me I didn’t….over and over again. He didn’t even listen to me…just kept telling me that I didn’t. I asked him his name and he barked “Mitchell”. He then handed my daughters phone to her and repeatedly yelled at her to get out of the hotel. Wow! I didn’t know what else to do other than call the booking center back. The new guy I got checked m