Roger, agreed - I did talk to AMEX about the first charge and directly to the desk manager at the hotel. The charges are showing up on my actual statement with the card company and not under "outstanding authorizations".

I'm interested to hear if anyone else is seeing this behavior? The desk agent I spoke with at the Palmer House this morning clearly stated it was their policy to pre-authorize and insisted the authorization would clear, and was either ignoring my statement that this was an actual charge or didn't understand it.