My husband and I checked out of the Jacksonville Hyatt on 6/22/08. When checking out, the "key card" was turned in. Since we no longer had the card to "swipe" which opens the gate allowing exiting of the parking garage, we drove up in line by the booth where the parking attendant was. The one car in front of us clearly had an issue because we waited for at least 5 minutes with no movement. We were low on gasoline, so I got out of the car to ask the attendant if she could give us an idea how much longer the transaction with the person in the car would take. I was polite. She was on the telephone and she said to, "just give her 5 minutes". Since we had already waited at least that long, I asked if she could allow us to leave through the other exit. I told her we had just checked out and did not have the card to swipe and were low on gasoline. She said yes. I expected her to have the ability to push a button to raise the arm from inside her booth, so, we got into the other lane to leave, but instead of pushing a button, she came out from the booth with a key in hand. She inserted the key in the gate mechanism and the gate arm went up all the way. We proceeded to drive out but, almost immediately, the arm came right back down. It hit the hood of our car. We stopped right away. The employee said, "sorry", then she turned the key again which caused the arm to go back up allowing us to exit. We got out of the car and examined the hood for damage as soon as we cleared the exit. There was only a slight ding on the hood, but, it was a ding nevertheless; damage where there was none before.
We circled around to the front of the hotel and reported the incident right away. We had a very courteous garage employee take our written report and look at and acknowledge the damage. However, a couple of minutes later, another garage employee came and looked at the damage and made (what seemed) an attempt at intimidation by intimating that the garage attendant who opened the gate for us would be fired if we filed the report. We filed it anyway, although I stated that I hoped that the employee would not be fired. We were told by the first, courteous and apologetic employee that we would receive a call from Propark, which we did the next day. The call was just to acknowledge receipt of our claim and I was told that someone would call us back again to proceed further. We waited a week but never got another call. On 6/30/08 we received a letter from a Vincent Liscomb, (PROPARK AMERICA), stating, among other things, that "... It is felt there is no negligence on the part of our staff, and, we must, therefore, respectfully deny any responsibility".
In my opinion, the company made little or practically no effort to communicate with us about this incident and adopted an extremely dismissive attitude. Our car was damaged by their equipment, operated by their employee. We were acting in good faith on the words and actions of the attendant in the booth. I don't see how they can now simply state that they, "... Felt there is no negligence" and "... Deny responsibility". No one from the office ever discussed anything with us at all, other than acknowledging receipt of our written claim form. I am filing this report so that anyone who may have experienced a similar incident with this company (anywhere they may operate) will have knowledge of how others have been treated.
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