Originally Posted by
muzthe42nd
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.
My story sounds more exciting than the reality.
Not trying to defend the practice, but that hotel charged an incidentals deposit of £30 and it was only that £30 that could be refunded to another card. This appeared to be the standard procedure for all guests. I doubt they would agree to refund high value reservations elsewhere.
My rate was around £400 so they charged me £430 on check in. I had £20 of incidental spending so it was only £10 that got refunded to a different card, and I had to tap that card on the reader. The redacted number of both cards appeared on my final bill.
The avenues for fraud/theft I can think of are limited to:
- spending more than £30, blocking your card and running away
- obtaining another guest's information, knowing they haven't spent anything and impersonating them at check out to present your own card for £30
Based on the OP's additional information that the GM stated it was not the hotel's standard procedure, a rogue employee sounds possible, but I can't imagine they would get away with it for long.