Given a rate in GBP when booked holiday but charged in euros at hotel in Tenerife

bellyjm

Can anyone help. We booked the Regency Country Club in Tenerife direct through their website at a room rate of £240 a night. We also have a written email confirmation from the hotel confirming that we booked at £240 a total cost of £1680.
They took my credit card as security but confirmed that we would pay the hotel direct.
At the bottom of the email however is states the rate as £1680 with a euro rate of 2040 in brackets. I did not read this as it was so far down the email and was not on the printed confirmation I presented to the hotel.
As you can imagine when we got to the hotel they charged us the inflated euro rate.
Do we have any comeback on this? Has anyone else had this problem and won?!

bagand96

If paying locally for a hotel I would always expect to pay in the local currency. A lot of websites will show you a price in GBP, but also somewhere dislay the € price, or an explanatory note saying that bill is chargeable in the local currency and any conversion shown is for information only. You admit that our confirmation email displayed the € price.

You need to check through the T&Cs of your booking to see what is mentioned about currency. I've tried looking on the hotel website and can only get it to quote in Euros anwyay (although I am not sure it is the "official" hotel site?). However I suspect booking a Spanish hotel, via a Spanish website the contract will be in €.

If you use sites where you pay in advance for the hotel (Hotels.com, alpharooms travelrepublic etc) then yes you will pay in GBP as they do the conversion and charge you in your local currency.

NFH

What currency and amount did their web site quote to you before you received the confirmation e-mail? Was it in GBP or EUR? If the web site quoted a GBP amount and the e-mail confirmed a GBP amount with a EUR amount only for information purposes in brackets, then they should have charged you in GBP. Plenty of merchants in Spain have the ability to charge credit cards in GBP (usually as a result of rip-off dynamic currency conversion), so even though it is conventional for hotels to charge guests in local currency, to pay by card in GBP would not be out of the question. For further advice about how to dispute this, speak to the UK European Consumer Centre on 08456 040503 (a kind of European trading standards).

Biggles

How long ago did you book it? Not long ago the rate was quite often at or above €1.2 to the £.

The hotel would be working in Euros and if they quoted €2040 and 'helpfully' converted it to £, using the rate applicable at the time, it could easily have worked out at around £1680.

But they would presumably still want to charge you €2040, whatever happened to the exchange rate in the meantime.