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PSA: Be Careful When Modifying Existing IHG Hotel Bookings

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With two solid IHG Accelerate Offers this year, IHG has once again become my go-to hotel chain. It helps that I’ve also pretty much given up on maintaining hotel status. Since the IHG Q3 promotion just launched a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been front loading my stays so I don’t have to scramble like I did at the last minute for the Q2 promotion. Now, for the word of warning…

I had originally booked a one night stay for four people near Milan’s Malpensa Airport (MXP) due to early morning flights. At the last minute, it turned out that our group size decreased by one. In Europe especially, it is very common for hotels to charge an additional fee for more than two adults staying in the same room. In this case of the Holiday Inn Express MXP, it’s a whopping 20 Euros per person, per night extra. Clearly, we didn’t want to pay that extra fee for the guest who was no longer going to be staying with us in the hotel!

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On IHG’s website, there are two options: cancel booking and modify booking. For some reason, modifying a booking doesn’t always work, but in this case, it did. I was able to modify the booking for the same night for only three adults. The price was properly reflected in my confirmation online and again in the confirmation email.

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At this specific Holiday Inn Express, payment is required upon check in, so I paid with my credit card and headed up to the room. After thinking about it for a few minutes, it seemed to me that the amount I had been charged was higher than it was supposed to be. I dug up the email confirmation to confirm.

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We had, in fact, been overcharged. I headed back down to the check in desk to explain what had happened. After some initial confusion, the employee on duty realized that they did get a booking notification but it only indicated that I had changed the expiration date of my credit card (which I hadn’t!) and not changed the number of people in the room. They weren’t able to refund the difference back onto my credit card, but I was refunded the difference in cash.

Lesson learned: IHG’s master system doesn’t always communicate flawlessly with the systems of individual hotels. When you can, cancel and rebook a hotel reservation instead of modifying an existing reservation.


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8 thoughts on “PSA: Be Careful When Modifying Existing IHG Hotel Bookings

  1. DaninMCI

    This may all be true but that particular HIX isn’t known for it’s awesome customer service or well Ice machine :) I just hope you got to eat at the Samarcanda restaurant nearby. It’s is some of the best food in the area.

    Reply
  2. AS

    This isn’t true. I have made and changed many bookings at IHGs. You just happened to be affected by this one-off glitch. I’d recommend doing some research before generalizing this in a post.

    Reply
    1. Grant

      I don’t think Caroline is saying that this happens every single time you modify a IHG hotel reservation (I’ve modified several IHG hotel reservations without any problem), this is just a warning that it *could* happen.

      Thanks for reading and safe travels :)

      Reply
      1. Caroline Lupini

        Yup, Grant! That’s exactly what I was saying. I’ve also modified other bookings and had it work out fine. More just a something to watch out for! If I hadn’t caught it, it would have cost me 20 EUR so I figure it is worth a warning to others to double check!

        Reply
  3. Pingback: Caroline Lupini: An Introduction

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