Hotel Residence Rose

We booked a family suite at this hotel many months in advance for a 5 night stay with half board, at the substantial cost of €2178. However, somewhere along the way our plans changed and we decided to go to a different town, but unfortunately I forgot to cancel our booking. 6 days prior to arrival I realized my mistake and canceled, then immediately wrote to the hotel to see if they would work with me to rebook the room to avoid a total loss of our money, since the cancellation policy stated that if we cancelled 8 days prior we would get 50% of our money back, but at 7 days we would lose everything. Given that cancellation policies exist to protect hotels from last-minute vacancies, I hoped that the business owner here would be kind and fair, and return my money if he was able to rebook the room, since he had almost a full week to do so, and the travel business has rebounded from Covid so there were many people traveling at this time. Sadly, the owner refused to work with me for a solution that would benefit us both. He immediately charged my credit card for the full amount of our stay, including the half board (he said this was to prevent me from canceling the credit card I used to make the reservation, in order to prevent him from collecting the money). When I looked at the hotel's website to see if they had been able to rebook our room, the website showed no rooms available. So either the hotel rebooked our room and made double the money for the week, or they chose to not even try to fill their hotel and simply take a rest with one fewer guest room occupied. In fact, in a series of increasingly unpleasant emails, the owner even admitted that he had given our room away as an upgrade to another guest, since our room had been the nicest in the hotel. I tried one last time to reach a compromise with this hotel - I asked if they would return the money we paid for half board, and also the difference in price between the room we rented and the room the other guest had booked, since the other guest ended up staying in our room! The owner refused, telling me it was my mistake and he had no obligation to make any effort for me. True, he had no obligation. But I've never encountered someone in the service industry who cared so little about trying to make a customer happy. I will take my business elsewhere in the future, and want to warn future travelers that if they choose this hotel and have some kind of issue, they are unlikely to find a sympathetic host.