This happened to me at an IHG hotel
Voco Edinburgh Haymarket
In that case, I earned a small amount of extra CC points because they agreed to refund the incidentals deposit to a different card to the one which I paid on.
Also happened to another poster at hotels in France but the replies (other than mine) did not believe or understand that OP
Hotel security deposits
Oh lawd, the potential for fraud that hotel has is just incredible. By allowing refunds to a credit card other than the original form of payment they can be ripped off very easily - the two most common are
- Make a very large reservation on a stolen credit card, insisting that payment be made now due to funding/budget reasons or whatever. Cancel the next day, but tell the hotel the card was cancelled and should be refunded to the new card, which is a legit card that the fraudster has access to. Hotel then receives and loses a chargeback on the original card since they can't show the refund went back to the original cardholder
- Hotel employee charges the guest as normal. After guest checks out employee fakes a complaint that the guest should be refunded, then refunds it back to their own card.