Depending on hotel franchisee's internal policy, I have seen they will do an "authorization" with your credit card without billing upon the days after your initial reservation. Probably to make sure your card works and sometimes have enough money to cover part of the stay. You won't see anything on the credit card statement, but during the 7 days after getting authroization code, you may see a pending charge on your credit card. After 7 days, the pending charge disappears. Key point is the hotel still have the authorization code to charge you that. So they can use that same code to bill you if you don't show up.

This is similar to when you check into hotel, they swipe your credit card for authorization (but don't bill you) for a portion of your stay. Then when you check out, they cancel the original authorization (or ignore the original authorization) and then do a second authorization to the amount equal to your bill. Then "complete" the cycle by billing you the amount within the next few days so it shows the charge on your credit card.

There have been cases where companies overseas did not "bill" me after authorization until a month or so after... So this does happen.