We were contacted by this company on 11/10/10 stating that they could get us good rates for an upcoming convention in March. We told them we were only interested in staying at the McCormick Hotel in Chicago and they said that would be no problem.
We gave them our credit card number and they said they would give us confirmation numbers for the hotel so we could confirm our reservations. Weeks and weeks passed and they never provided the confirmation numbers. We have documentation of numerous emails promising that our rooms were booked but they just didn't have the confirmation numbers yet and they would give them to us very soon.
Finally, 8 days before our scheduled arrial at the hotel we finally got a hold of someone by calling them and pretending to be someone else. They were screening our calls and everyone time we would tell the receptionist who we were, they would say that person is not available. We had left messages for the last 4 days and no one returned our calls.
After making some more excuses, Michelle Musketa at IEP finally said "we don't have rooms for you at the Mccormick, sorry." I was shocked and extremely upset. So they took our money but never booked our hotel rooms. I now realize that they never intended to book our rooms from the beginning, that's why they kept making excuses and stopped returning our calls. I told them to refund our money and I would try to call the hotel direct. We also sent an email that same day confirming the conversation we just had and requesting a refund.
Because it was so late, we had to book the hotel rooms at a very high rate.instead of $159 a night, we had to pay $269 a night! I called another travel agent and he said that if I had contacted them earlier, I would have been able to get the lower rate but because I waited so long, I had to pay the higher rate.
I immediately put in a dispute with our credit card company because we never received the rooms. At this point I couldn't quite figure out why did they did all this. I'm sure they were aware that we would dispute the charges so there is no way they could get away with taking $1694 from us. When I received my credit card statement I finally understood the scam. They refunded the credit card with a 10% penalty charge! Ah, very smart. Now it would be much more difficult to dispute a penalty fee than the whole amount.
I called them and once again I had to receptionist I was someone else because when I first called, no one returned my calls and of course no one was available. I was very angry and I said not only did you not book my rooms and I had to book them myself but now you are trying to make $169 off of me? Michelle Musketa then said that we should have allowed them to get us a different hotel room! I said but we booked the McCormick not some other hotel. Basically she said too bad and she had to get off the phone because she was busy. She that Jason Hearne, the Vice President would call me but of course he never called me.
Also, on another note, they charged our credit card an extra 3% because we used our credit card but never told us that there would be extra charges for credit cards. This is illegal. We only found out about the 3% surcharge when we asked them why the total amount was so high. It is not itemized on the bill. Another scam by their company. I am going to contact my attorney and I am also going to bring a civil suit against this company. It is really not worth the time but I feel that companies like this must be stopped from hurting other companies like myself.
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