London – Still No Refund from Accor

Well, this isn’t ideal.

A few weeks ago, Accor managed to book me into a hotel that was shut. They booked another hotel for me (for which they wanted a second payment), and said they’d call back the day after to resolve the matter. Two different staff members said that I would be refunded for the new stay as it was Accor’s fault. At the time I thought this was handled well and they mentioned they considered it very serious (they seemed to consider it more serious than I did) and seemed keen to help.

I’ve been refunded some points by the closed Mercure Heathrow hotel for incidental expenses (which I kept to near zero, which was again generous of me given the circumstances), but haven’t heard a thing since (and they didn’t tell me that they had done this either). What is particularly annoying is that if I had booked with a third party booking site such as booking.com or hotels.com, then I would never have had to pay for the second hotel. As it stands, I’ve still paid for two hotels for three nights and Accor have refunded neither.

I’m in the difficult position that Amex have said that they can arrange a chargeback to force Accor to respond. However, these are exceptional times and Accor have a lot of staff furloughed, so I’ve been giving them longer, although they’ve ignored me for a month. I asked Novotel Heathrow for help, but they’ve decided they won’t be responding at all. I can’t blame them, the Accor press office hasn’t replied either, so this seems to be a new cultural thing within the hotel company.

Hopefully my £255.55 might be returned soon. It’s definitely not ideal.