Marriott Hotel "We Double Booked for Take That..."

GarethR

Hi all, after some help/thoughts/suggestions on this one...

So after a really crappy year for my partner with 2 life threatening illnesses I wanted to give her something to look forward to. We managed to book 2 tickets to see Take That on 31st May 2011, straight away after getting the tickets we booked into the Marriott Hotel in Sunderland which is 2 miles from the event and easily accessible, no hassle of driving miles to get there etc.

Today we received a call from the hotel to say that a system fault had occured and that of the 82 rooms at the hotel 40 had been overbooked so we now had to either go stay at the Gateshead Metrocentre Marriott which is 17 miles away or get a refund!? :mad:

Now my question is this, can they just palm us off with these 2 options and what are our rights given the fact we received a confirmation of the booking and a reference? Surely they can't just say sorry it was a computer error as we all know that given the fact thousands of fans would be trying to book hotels it would have been way more than 40 over booked.

My view is that someone has offered big bucks to stay there for a group booking & we just get kicked out.

Really appreciate any thoughts or suggestions on this one as I'm fuming about it, we could have picked a host of other hotels at the time but chose this one as it seemed to have good reviews, nice location/venue etc. Now all other hotels are full!!

Thanks