I had booked the room for my friend & I, because we were staying in Newport for one night, to watch her daughter’s college field hockey game vs. Salve Regina the next day. Unfortunately, the night before, she called sobbing to tell me that her elderly mother had taken a serious turn for the worse. She was most likely not going to make it through the weekend. They were bringing in hospice & she would not be leaving her side.
After comforting her & offering to do whatever I could to help, I immediately canceled my airline ticket (got the credit for future travel), cancelled our dinner reservation, and then reached out to Expedia, to see if there was anything I could do to get the thousand dollars back on the room that I had booked. Expedia reached out to the hotel and explained the situation, but the hotel was unwilling to give me any kind of refund. I just felt like, it so rarely happens that people have an emergency like this…and I felt that the hotel could have, at the very MINIMUM, refunded a portion of the charges??? Or perhaps they could’ve reached out to me, so that we could’ve talked, and they could’ve understood that this was a REAL family emergency, etc. etc.? Anyway, I just felt like it was very insensitive not to consider the circumstances of the situation.