Originally Posted by
dtremit
To my mind, an award reservation is essentially a prepaid reservation. The hotel has already taken your "money" — the expectations are different from a normal reservation simply held with a credit card.
Frankly, I don't entirely understand why a hotel would even be running the credit card of a guest on an award booking a week in advance of arrival.
You're right. The OP "paid" for the reservation with points. If the CC was expired, the guest could have swiped a different card at check-in for incidentals. If the OP had paid $1,000/night for a basic room, I highly doubt they would have cancelled the reservation without an e-mail or phone call.
This sounds like a pure money-grab by the hotel. They cancelled the points reservation under a technicality, to sell the suite for $$$$. And some of the posters here are defending the hotel? Do you really verify the CC you have on file for every trip in advance? I have never verified my CC before a trip, and I'm over 2500 hotel nights at this point. I've only been walked once.
The only way to stop this type of behavior is to name the hotel and write reviews on travel sites like TripAdvisor.