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St Regis Aspen — Cancellation Policy Defeated!
I’m excited to report that I recently won a credit card dispute with one of the most notorious hotels out there for crappy cancellation policies, the St. Regis Aspen.
To make a long story short:
[LIST=1]
[*]I booked a 2-night stay in September 2019 using points.
[*]They had a 30-day cancellation policy in effect and I booked inside of the 30-day window, around mid-August.
[*]I subsequently cancelled the stay and shifted to another Marriott property closer to Denver; my points were immediately refunded.
[*]I was charged $2,000 by the St. Regis roughly 24 hours after my subsequently cancelled reservation was supposed to start.
[*]I immediately called Marriott who agreed to contact the hotel and “open up a ticket”. I ended up going through this roughly three times with Marriott, each time opening up a new ticket and not having anything come of it.
[*]A few days after the $2k charge hit I opened up a dispute with Citi (I paid with my Citi Prestige card).
[*]As part of the dispute process, the only evidence of their cancellation policy the hotel submitted to Citi was a post-booking email that was sent from the concierge to me — only, [B]they misspelled my email address and I never got the email[/B].
[*]The dispute was originally decided in favor of the St. Regis, but I responded pointing out the above fact and the dispute was reopened in mid-November. The hotel did not submit anything additional to Citi and the dispute was closed in my favor on 12/31.
[/LIST]
That the hotel’s sole proof of providing me the cancellation policy came in the form of an email sent to the wrong email address was certainly a helpful fact that will be the exception rather than the rule. Nevertheless, a useful data point for the many others that find themselves in a similar situation with this hotel or others like it. It is particularly interesting to me what they submitted as proof of their cancellation policy — nothing from their own systems, only a simple email.
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