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Help - Charged £57 for eating nothing!!
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ollywood68
Posts: 220 Forumite
booked a restauraut for 20 people. only 16 turned up on night. they charged us £13 a head for each missing person. (it was not a fixed price for the meal) and then 10% service charge on top of that - TOTAL PAID £57.20 - TOTAL RECIEVED NOTHING
We were the last sitting. Place was relatively empty. Plenty of spare tables.
WAS I RIPPED OFF? What are my rights?
PS This meant my burger and chip, a quarter bottle of red wine and a coffee cost me £30
PPS - it was a place called Jeffers in Bangor NI:mad:
We were the last sitting. Place was relatively empty. Plenty of spare tables.
WAS I RIPPED OFF? What are my rights?
PS This meant my burger and chip, a quarter bottle of red wine and a coffee cost me £30
PPS - it was a place called Jeffers in Bangor NI:mad:
happiness is being able to have one more drink
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Comments
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I don't think you have any rights. You booked for 20 people and they will have been expecting 20 people.
Regardless of what else was happening in the restaurant, they may have already ordered in extra food, put on extra staff, done prep work on 20 meals. It's not their fault that only 16 turned up, and the additional work/costs were not required.
Maybe you could ask the missing 4 to contribute, as it is their fault you ended up paying the extra charges?Here I go again on my own....0 -
You don't have to pay the service charage for the meals that weren't served - you should have deducted that from the bill."You were only supposed to blow the bl**dy doors off!!"0
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I wouldn't have paid it and certainly not £13 a head. A restaurant buys food period - if they had to buy extra for a booking for 20 people then it wasn't a good business to start with.The Daily Mail
Tagline - "Why let the truth get in the way of a story to incense Middle England"0 -
I've organised several *group events* and had several no-shows each time :mad: . Sometimes it's for genuine reasons, but often as not, people just change their mind :mad: :mad: . Most places here ask for a non-refundable deposit for a large group, and I always ask people to pay in advance.
Do the no-shows realise that you're out of pocket? I'd ask them to pay, though it may be too late now.
Penny. x:rudolf: Sheep, pigs, hens and bees on our Teesdale smallholding :rudolf:0 -
You don't have to pay the service charge at all - it discrentionary. I would have personally refused to pay the extra as well, unless they had informed me at the time of booking there would be an extra charge for no shows.0
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i too would have refused to pay the extra and perhaps settled on paying for 4 meals which worked out cheaper, and they would have had no bloody tip from me at all either!0
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I would have insisted on having the missing meals and if nobody wanted extra, I would have chopped them up into little bits and put it on the floor under the table
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woohoo_postingid wrote: »I would have insisted on having the missing meals and if nobody wanted extra, I would have chopped them up into little bits and put it on the floor under the table
Exactly:rotfl:
I'd be gutted having to pay that...make sure the people who never turned up know about it...get them to pay...why should you?You may walk and you may run
You leave your footprints all around the sun
And every time the storm and the soul wars come
You just keep on walking0 -
Never been sure about having to pay a 10% service charge myself in this country.0
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You don't have to pay service charge, it's usually discretionary. If it's put on the bill you are well within your rights to knock it off and leave a tip/whatever you feel it was worth on the table. It's more likely to go to the staff if you do this anyway.
However, I think that the restaurant is allowed to charge you for the full number of bookings regardless of how many of you turn up. At the end of the day, they will have got extra staff in, bought food in etc etc to cope with the number of people that they thought would have turned up - it's not really their fault that some of your party didn't turn up. If you'd spoken to the manager at the time, then it's possible that they may have reduced the bill as a goodwill gesture, but they're not obliged to do this ... Did they warn you about this when you booked?
As someone who's worked in catering, none of the restaurants I've worked in would have charged you so much extra though (especially as it wasn't a booked 'set' meal), we'd have just taken the spare chairs away from the table and charged you for what you ordered, but policies differ. Tbh, it's a stupid policy as I bet none of you go back and I bet you'll tell lots of people how annoyed you are, so they're going to loose far more than £57. Serves them right really lol.0
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