My family and I had planned a long-term vacation in San Diego from Nov 7th - Dec 2nd (25 days) at the Four Points by Sheraton San Diego. I had business matters to take care of down here, so we decided to make it a trip with all of us. There were 4 of us total (2 small children). Everything was fine the first day. We had a nice dinner at a restaurant up the street.
How quickly things changed...
We're only 1 night in to the reservation, and the next morning we are awaken to gun shots in the room a couple doors down. Long story short, we were less than 25 feet away from a murder suicide. You can read about it
here.
Police wound up closing off the entire wing. The hotel wound up evacuating everybody in our wing from their rooms, and offered everybody replacement rooms. Since we were going to be gone all day, we chose to just leave.
As you can imagine, the situation was pretty traumatizing. We actually wound up checking in to a Hilton down the street. It is now the 22nd and we still haven't been back to the hotel. I filed a report with SPG customer service, and the hotel wound up calling me a few days later apologizing and saying they would give me 5,000 Starpoints. I was pretty offended they only offered me 5,000 Starpoints, given that I had a 25-day reservation and spent thousands of dollars with them, my kids were with me, I checked in to another hotel, etc. I was heading in to a business meeting, so I didn't really have the time to express that to the hotel rep on the phone, so I took the 5,000 Starpoints.
I contacted SPG directly over the phone the next day and expressed how I felt that was not reasonable. 5,000 Starpoints would only get me 1 free night at the hotel. They asked me how much I feel I should get, and I responded, "a substantial amount". They said they would contact me within a week, but it's been a week now and I haven't heard anything back yet. It is now the 22nd and I have wasted 15 days now.
And while I don't blame the hotel directly for what happened, I do expect them to have great customer support when dealing with stuff like this.
Right now I am a gold member, and was hoping to reach Platinum with this stay because I have extensive traveling planned in 2016. I would like to avoid receiving a refund because I need most of these nights to qualify (even though one was never offered).
For those with more experience than me, is 5,000 Starpoints warranted? Is that offensive? What should I do in this situation? I feel like I didn't handle it correctly by accepting the 5,000 Starpoints the first time because I was in such a rush to get off the phone.
This guy apparently got 10,000 Starpoints for being cursed at. And while I definitely don't condone that, I feel my situation is MUCH worse. Not to mention I was told I would be hearing back within a week, and nobody has got in contact with me yet.
What should I do? Thanks for any and all suggestions.