Hotels Tonight Tried to get the Lancaster Marriott to charge the Hotels Tonight credit card, twice, but the Marriott Lancaster Refuses to do so.
Chargebacks are not as painless or prompt as they used to be. They are not as automatically resolved in your favor as they used to be either.
I'm not quite sure I understand the apparent reluctance to let the Marriott Lurker try and sort it for you. They have volunteered. It might even work. You would not be giving them any information the hotel does not already know. (Years ago and a less complicated situation, but they did somehow push down a correction on a hotel for me).
But if you are determined to skip that step and go directly to chargeback; there are some details you may need to gather while you still can. You will need the same information if you let the Marriott Lurker try. Maybe you have already done so; but if not:
Do you have copies of all four room folios? I at least hope you do rather than a single combined folio. You need to be able to isolate specific transactions by room.
If you don't have those hopefully you can pull the folios off your Marriott account.
Even more than that I hope they put through four different charges, one for each room, so you can isolate which rooms were paid twice. (If they didn't you will have much more trouble explaining the chargeback to your card issuer).
With both of those things you can cleanly document what may be two different chargebacks for duplicate payments.
You seem to present yourself as a younger traveler. Most of us on this board are cranky old people who have made mistakes and gone through a few negative hotel stays. We can make suggestions based on years of experience. I have four for you today going forward:
- Avoid fourth-party grey-market booking channels. Most of us avoid even using well-known third-party OTA's. Or anything that involves pre-paying a vendor other than the hotel or Marriott. This is the kind of stuff that happens.
- If booking pre-paid rooms, and most of us have been burned once and don't, put the incidentals deposit on another card. Or decline another card swipe.
- Nothing beats getting paper folios for documentation as you leave, although I realize it isn't always practical or possible.
- Not saying it would have worked for you, but before I swore off OTA's, having a copy of my third-party booking saved me from a double-payment.
Hope it all works out for you.