Residence Inn by Marriott San Jose North/Silicon Valley

The room and employees were fine, but there is a big issue with their system when it comes to handling your credit card. I understand that a hotel will put holds or pending transactions on credit cards, but during my 5 night stay this hotel’s system continually added $1k credit card holds until they maxed out my card. After talking to 4 different people at the front desk to try and find the cause of the duplicate holds, it was “resolved” and I was allowed to check out. The same thing happened to another coworker who unfortunately used their personal card. This nearly ruined my business trip because my company card got maxed out by these pending holds and I couldn’t use it for legitimate company expenses until weeks after returning. Now today, 2 months after my stay, I see a new $1k pending transaction on the same card from this hotel. Even if it never processes into a real charge, there must be a serious issue going on with their system and I’m so thankful I never gave them my personal credit card.

After driving 2 hours and arriving at the hotel, a lady at the front desk lied to us and said that Expedia cancelled our reservation and should have relocated us. We called Expedia and they had no record of the room being cancelled. We were then told by the Assistant Manager that Expedia did not cancel, that it was the General Manager of the hotel that cancelled our room due to "maintenance" and emailed Expedia and Expedia should have contacted us. When we told them this didn't happen, they said we are fully booked. They did not offer to relocate us, they did not apologize for not contacting us, and they did not offer to give us a voucher. No remorse, no empathy. The girl who lied to us was the Operations Manager and she told us that she is the head of Housekeeping and just helping out. When asked how many rooms they had to cancel for maintenance we were told 3. They could not pickup the phone and call 3 customers? But, instead the left it up to Expedia who serves millions of customers. An hour later, as we were trying to book our room, the Assistant Manager comes up to our table and quickly shows us an email from his cell phone, telling us that this is the email the General Manager sent to Expedia. He quickly took his phone away so that we could not see the screen. We then asked him if we could see the email because we did not see it the first time. He told us no and would not let us take a picture or print it out for us, to send over to Expedia so we could get a refund. We asked him a second time to see the email and he said no that we were not allowed to see the email. Which seems very unethical. We spent 2 hours on the phone with Expedia sitting at their bar while Expedia attempted to relocate us with a hotel of equal quality and all hotels were booked except hotels who had suites available for over $500. They sat behind the counter laughing and talking watching us as we struggled to find a room. When we approached again to ask them if they knew of any hotels that were not booked, a man next to us was checking in, we said "he must be a Marriot Rewards member" to which the Operations Manager replied "Yes, he is a gold member." After finally locating a 2 star hotel to stay, the Assistant Manager walks up to us to tell us that Expedia should be contacting us shortly. Needless to say, this was a horrible unethical and illegal experience and horrible customer service. They still have not had any one reach out to us and apologize, offer their sympathy for being lied to, or being left to fend for ourselves when THEY were the ones to put us in this position in the first place. Never have we ever had something like this happen; but it has ruined our opinion of Marriott hotels. And we will make sure that everyone knows that Marriot will cancel your reservation for their own reward members which seems to be illegal and we are considering consulting a lawyer regarding this.