Can hotels change their prices?

cjc3001

APV1 wrote: »

As the GM of an (apprantly much better) hotel, I can only give my professional opinion - if you have confirmation in the form of a letter, fax or e-mail then they have to honour the rate booked. If not, demand to speak to the manager and ask them to look at the booking history (most hotel computer systems will show changes made on any given reservation, so they will be able to see the original price, even if they have subsequently changed it.
Which site did you book through? if it one of the more established ones you would have certainly received confirmation and they will be able to help you hold the rate booked.
Without confirmation you may struggle. However if you really want to take them to the wall, call the local press and ask them to meet you in the lobby to document your arrival and the actions of the hotel. A call to Trading Standards might not be a bad idea too.
You need to let the advisoprs on the forum know which site you booked on and which hotel it is for - you will get better advice that way.

Thanks for this reply - it's of interest to me too at the moment as we've had the same thing happen with a hotel we've booked in New York for New Year 2009 - we had a great rate, booked it, received confirmation, booked our flights, and then some THREE WEEKS later got an email saying they'd cancelled our booking as their website rates were incorrect!

Now if we want to re-book it's going to cost us another £200 - if we'd known this beforehand we wouldn't have booked the flights in the first place or even contemplated it as a good deal!

Do you know if your advice above also applies to a US hotel? We're not really sure what we can do, short of cancelling our flights or finding another hotel at a very high price as it's New Year.

APV1

I'm sorry to say that I can only speak on behalf of my hotel and staff. We would accept that we had made a mistake and honour the confirmation. The bad PR by cancelling and asking guests to rebook is not, in my opinion, worth it. We all make mistakes -c sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and live with them.
With regards to individual companies and businesses, I cannot comment. Perhaps the US has a similar on-line "Trading Standards", who may be able to help...
Good luck.