I paid for two nights, arrived Friday.

Saturday, up early and left only a change of clothes in the room. I return after midnight and my key doesn't work and there are noises in the room. Front desk says I checked out. There is even a note saying that I checked out and did not request a refund for the second night.

Manager won't answer the phone. Area hotels are booked. The night auditor eventually calls a guest who has not checked in and releases his room to me.

The auditor can't find my clothes, can't get a manager and can't offer any resolution to the problem.

So, in a few hours a chat with the Assistant GM, any suggestions on talking points?

***More in post 7

Which hotel is this?

If your clothes were stolen from a room that you had absolutely not checked out of, I would call the police and have a report taken

TW

Where did this note come from? Is it something a staff member wrote or are they asserting that you left a note asking to check out without a refund?

Bloomington Fairfield Inn

The Asst GM made a note and attached it to my record.

I thought of that this morning, maybe the GM would have picked up the phone then.

From conversations, housekeeping decided I had left the building, collected my clothes and brought them to the front desk.

The front line employee put them "in the back" with my room number.

The Asst GM did a walk through and put the room back on the market.


This morning, the A-GM refunded both nights and told me to go to WalMart to buy another set of clothes for the morning meeting.

Once housekeeping arrived, the bag of clothes was not located. As of 4:00pm, they are still missing.

Marriott customer care sent me a generic email reply and told me the local GM would handle the problem in 3-5 days. So much for Silver, should of made a stronger push for Gold

Glad you figured out what happened, although it makes me uncomfortable that housekeeping can determine, based on seeming random criteria, that I've abandoned my room prior to my checkout date. Exactly how many articles of clothing must one leave to avoid this?

And then there's the issue of taking your clothes from your room and then losing them! (I won't even touch the issue of suggesting getting replacements at Wal-Mart.)

If my experience as a Marriott Gold is any indication, it wouldn't have made any difference. It seems that if the hotel is satisfied by the resolution, so is Marriott Corporate, regardless of what the customer thinks.

OK I have to know, you had no suitcase or toiletry kit that was left out in the room, or you took those with you?

With all respect to what is a frustrating experience, many of us who at some point essentially lived in hotels have had something similar happen. Without arguing it shouldn't have happened to you, you can travel too light and leave a room too clean.

It was quite clean, just a change of clothes on the 2nd bed. I took the kit and overnight bag with me (trip to a gym during the 18 hour day). Perhaps it was the tip left for the housekeeping that threw them off.

First for me! I think I have a particular level of discomfort as I used a gift card upfront applied to the bill.

Given your history, what response would make you 'whole' after that kind of experience?

First, it's not okay that the hotel personnel didn't know what was going on. Additionally, with the exception of midnight to 6am, I believe every hotel should have a manager available in person or via the telephone. And, your clothes clearly shouldn't have been misplaced.

But, I think most of us that have worked in hotels would agree that similar scenarios happen occasionally. For a wide variety of reasons, people check-out early without telling the hotel. Of course, people accidentally leaving clothes in the room after departure happens almost every day. Manager have to make judgment calls based on the available information. If I could only find a single change of clothes in a room, I would have made the same decision. Hotels do not do this to piss off guests; it's actually to avoid billing/credit card disputes.

If I was the manager, I would have tried calling the phone number listed on the reservation. If that number was a cell phone, this entire ordeal would have been avoided.

Sorry to hear about your situation - That has never happened to me but good to know it can happen

Out of curiosity was it in Bloomington IL? I am now traveling to bloomington fairly regularly and it would be helpful to know. If you aren't comfortable posting in the public forum please PM me if you don't mind

Thanks in advance

My reply would have been. Sorry honey but I don't shop at WallyWorld. Let me go and get something wearable from Bloomingdale's. I will bring you a receipt for reimbursement purposes. Cash only.

But that's not checking out early. That's leaving early and, assuming that the guest is paying for the 2nd night, why does it matter?

Sure...people leave stuff behind after departure, but that's sort of a separate issue. I'm glad that most hotels at least have a process for gathering stuff and, when appropriate, reuniting stuff with owner.

I get that at some point you have to make a judgment call - but shouldn't that call have been made on Sunday, not Saturday? If you're in the room on Saturday, know the guest is booked there one more night with a credit card on file, see clothes in the room, how can you assume anything BUT the fact that he's going to be back for the 2nd night? If he's not, no big deal - the room is sold. Then you can deal with the clothes on Sunday.

I understand that too...in the context of automatically checking the guest out on Sunday, after the two nights are done, when you can't locate him and have made a judgment call that he's gone and not coming back.

It sounds to me like people made a mistake and thought he was only confirmed in the room for one night, not two. I would find it highly irregular to come back to my room and find myself auto-checked-out early simply because I was traveling light. In fact, I've entirely vacated rooms in the middle of a long hotel stay before...it never occurred to me to talk to the front desk about it in cases where I was in a large western hotel that had my credit card and my signature authorizing the terms of the total stay.

Sounds like a big event in the area and the Manager was only to happy to try and "double dip" or whatever the industry term there is for collecting from two parties on a single room...