The Hub by Premier Inn v's The Beast from the East

frankie-the-frog

Hi! Newbie poster here. Will try to keep it short and to the point...

Basically, we had a mini-break away booked at The Hub by Premier Inn in Edinburgh which unfortunately coincided with The Beast from the East causing travel chaos. We tried our utmost to get up to Edinburgh but all road, rail and air travel in and out of Scotland was stopped resulting in only managing to get as far as Newcastle. At 10am on the morning of our first night we had tried numerous times to ring the designated telephone number only for it to ring out. After finding ourselves stranded in Newcastle and just managing to get somewhere to stay for the night we attempted to contact them online (informing them of our predicament), with no response. The next morning we again tried to get up to Edinburgh but found the travel disruption was still in place (also now leaving London and other parts of England inaccessible). So, we made our way down to Durham, again paying to stay overnight, where a very pleasant Premier Inn receptionist tried her utmost to contact The Hub in Edinburgh to no avail - after going round the houses to get a direct contact number it transpired their line was down. We did get a response that afternoon from our online communication so again informed them of our predicament. Nice receptionist lady gave us the "Guest Relations" details to contact Premier Inn to try and arrange re-scheduled dates, credit or a refund, however the website form keeps erroring on different devices for us and they have not responded to any other e-communications. The Hub online team outright said no as we had booked using the Saver Rate. Premier Inn themselves are not responding to communication. We had thought the stay was booked using Credit Card but unfortunately it has transpired we inadvertently used debit. Do we have a leg to stand on? We tried everything we could to a) contact them/keep them informed and b) get there... The cost was £180 between two couples, which is a lot of money to us.

BorisThomson

You don't have a leg to stand on. Even if you had paid by CC you wouldn't be covered, the hotel is not in breach of contract.

sheramber

You are not able to amend or cancel saver rate tickets as they are a cheaper rate. You need the more expensive flexible rate to be able to amend or cancel.

A credit card booking would not have helped unless your rooms were not available but presumably they were.

Any claim would be for your travel insurance, if you had any, but the excess would probably cancel out any payment.

frankie-the-frog

Thanks for the replies. Disappointing to hear obviously. We don't know if the hotel was open, staffed, or that our rooms were available as neither we nor the Durham Premier Inn could get in contact directly with them either day...