FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - New IHG Best Rate Guarantee - Discussion & Feedback
Old Sep 23, 2011, 3:54 pm
  #83  
3544quebec
 
Join Date: May 1998
Location: australia
Posts: 5,755
Originally Posted by limelight
I've been back in touch with the BRG agents... not foot-stamping, more pointing out loyal-Ambassador-many-years-lotsa-money and all that... and they do seem to be trying to negotiate with Le Grand to make things right.

They've agreed the rate was publicly available, and have been trying to get a manager at Le Grand on the phone (by Monday, now, apparently)... So their judgment on my claim has gone Approved > Denied > Approved-if-we-only-could.

But it seems that the BRG agents simply don't have the power to over-rule a hotel. If the first person they talk to at Le Grand doesn't want to honor the claim, they pretty much have to keep calling back and pleading with them until they do.

Seems like a very labor-intensive way to run the system, doesn't it? Every claim's going to need a negotiation, every hotel's going to have a different attitude.
I cannot imagine that this is the proper process for adjusting the rate and don'tbelieve that you should be accepting it as such.
This new BRG policy is IHG driven not individual hotel driven.The whole purpose of it is to stop hotels offering rooms at lower rates than they offer them through IHG websites.
There must be something in the contracts between the hotels and IHG that stipulates this and there must be something that stipulates a penalty for not complying. There must also be a clause that stipulates how this penalty is set. IHG would not be widely publicizing the most powerful BRG in the business if it did not have the right to enforce it on the individual hotels.
So my take on this is that if the BRG desk accepts a claim then that is the end of the story between you and the BRG desk/IHG. Everything else is between IHG and the hotel and it is IHG's responsibility to ensure the hotels' compliance with its contractual obligations.
Any pleading of cases has to be from the hotel to IHG - if the hotel does not believe the BRG claim is valid then it needs to convince the BRG desk of this. If the BRG desk accepts the hotel's argument then the BRG desk has to decide how to proceed - whether to accept the cost hit to its own department or to tell the customer we the BRG desk made a mistake and your claim is not valid and will not be honored.
For the BRG desk to try to pass it off as the hotel refusing to honor the claim is a cop out on their part - either them not wanting to do their job properly or them not wanting to admit that they made a mistake and suffer the customer's dissatisfaction.
There are rights and obligations between the customer and the BRG desk as set out by the Ts&Cs of the BRG policy; there are rights and obligations between IHG and the hotel as set out in their management contract. Between the customer and the hotel there is absolutely no relationship when it comes to a BRG claim.
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