I traveled to South Florida over Thanksgiving and through the weekend. I used the Visa concierge service and used the luxury hotel collection offer to book a room for one night at a Waldorf Astoria resort in Key West. If any of you read the offer, most of the VISA luxury hotel collections offer 7 benefits to book through their website including a 3pm late checkout subject to availability, free room upgrade, as well as free continental breakfast. Long story short, in that 24 hour period the hotel staff were mostly clueless about these perks through the program and I had to waste a lot of time explaining it to each individual as and when I wanted to use the service and sometimes had to speak to multiple treatment. It was not the "VIP" treatment they had mentioned on their website.
In either case, prior to checking out I did send an email to the concierge informing them about my experience. In less than 24 hours I had the person responsible for training all their staff across two Resort properties called me apologizing profusely and also refunded my daily rate. $240 in total was refunded! The people working at the concierge do go above and beyond to ensure that if the customer doesnt receive the level of service advertized they get reimbursed. Although that doesnt bring back the time spent there etc, atleast it makes me feel better about not having to pay for it! Also, the next time I go there, the resort manager has asked me to personally contact her for my reservation!