This report describes ripoffs committed by the former Sheraton hotel in East Brunswick, New Jersey. It also describes how Sheraton condones violations of contract and law by its member franchises.
Some years ago, there was a gaming convention called DefCon. The first four DefCons were held at the Sheraton in East Brunswick, New Jersey. Service was reasonable at the first three, probably because the hotel's manager saw a chance for repeat business. However, it was becoming obvious that the convention was starting to outgrow the hotel. Good service or no, the convention was going to have to move to a larger facility. This is when the trouble started.
The hotel's contract with the convention organizers had a provision allowing the guests to run their own food concession within the meeting areas. One week before the convention, hotel manager John Cirkus had a sales representative call the convention coordinators to say that they would not be allowed to run a food concession. She insisted that the contract did not allow it, repeating this until he offered to drive to the hotel and review the document with the police.
On the weekend of the convention, the hotel turned away several guests who had reservations, confirmed and supposedly guaranteed by their credit cards. Once again, hotel manager John Cirkus stood in, this time with a bullshit story about the breakdown of a bus that was supposed to take away guests who had stayed there the previous night. Not surprisingly, there was no sign of any bus broken down anywhere near the hotel.
Cirkus finally admitted the truth of the matter: that the hotel was simply overbooked. The law states that if a guest with a confirmed reservation is turned away due to overbooking, the hotel must pay for that would-be guest's stay at another hotel. When the hotel manager was reminded of that law, he did two things:
1) He said that "If you're going to enforce that law, you'll never be welcome here again." This announcement was made loudly and in the convention's registration area, for all to hear.
2) He raised the price. The contract presented a sliding scale where the cost of the meeting rooms was based on the number of rooms occupied by convention guests. Cirkus originally told the convention people that there were enough rooms rented to lower the meeting room rental. On being confronted with the overbooking law, he changed the room count to demand hundreds of dollars more in room rental. He also refused to count the rooms that would have been occupied by guests who were turned away by the hotel.
The matter was turned over to Sheraton's customer service. Convention staff received a nice letter telling how Sheraton's policy is to reimburse guests who had been turned away due to overbooking. (It's not just policy, it's actually the law.) In spite of this, no reimbursement was ever made. Sheraton's national customer service was similarly unresponsive to the other difficulties caused by the hotel in question.
Finally, a letter was sent to Sheraton's executive offices. The response received was nothing more than a polite brush-off, making clear that Sheraton had no problem letting a franchise rip off its customers.
The only action Sheraton ever took happened some months later.in the face of numerous complaints about John Cirkus and his "screw the customer" policies, Sheraton finally refused to let him renew the franchise. The reason given publicly was that the hotel failed to meet the company's insurance requirements. Those of us who visited that hotel know the truth. While this action may have kept one hotel from further damaging Sheraton's reputation, it did nothing to protect or reimburse the many customers who had been screwed.
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