I am writing this due to our organization's ongoing experience with the Four Points Sheraton Detroit Metro Airport. At this point, we are still unable to get anything resolved by anyone at that establishment.
The American Birding Association is a non-profit organization that coordinates and provides educational birding workshops in North and South America through the Institute for Field Ornithology. The ABA also provides conferences, conventions and tours for their 20,000 members.
In December we sent out a request for proposals for a 2004 workshop to hotels in the Detroit area. The Four Points Sheraton in Romulus, MI responded with a reasonable offer so we signed a contract with them at the end of December. The actual workshop was not until August 30 - so quite a bit of time would pass between when the contract was signed and when the workshop took place. This is a normal time frame for all of our workshops.
In July I contacted the Four Points Sheraton with our rooming list, food and meeting space requirements per our contract agreement and was told that our contact person Tami Paulson was no longer working there. The new contact was Emily Nasibeh who is the Director of Sales and despite numerous calls, faxes and emails, I could not get her to respond or confirm our group's stay. The staff at the Sheraton was rude and uncooperative; once when I called the phone rang and rang and no one answered it. When I hung up and called back, the person who answered the phone picked it up and said, What!
Emily's attitude bordered on hostile, and she kept telling me she'd call me back and then did not. I was fed up with the whole situation, so on August 20th I contacted Tammy James-Zemla who also works in Sales, and threaten to book another hotel. On August 23rd, the week before the workshop started, I finally received responses from both Emily and Tammy and was told that everything was set-up and ready to go.
I faxed our corporate credit card information on August 25th to pay for the group's stay and emailed Emily to let her know that it had been sent.
On August 30th while the group was at the hotel, I faxed some last minute information to the instructors and noted on the cover sheet that it was very important that they receive it. When one of the instructors asked if it came through, he was told nothing was sent.
When the group went to checkout of the hotel on August 31st, they were told that the rooms were not paid for. One of the instructors, Jon Dunn, had to use his own personal credit card to pay the bill, which he was not happy about. The group also had problems getting the breakfast that was supposed to be provided by the hotel at the time it was supposed to be served and it delayed the workshop and their travel plans.
I called the hotel later that day to find out what the problem was and could not get a straight answer from anyone.in fact, they didn't even have a record of Jon Dunn staying there and kept telling me they did not charge his credit card. I spoke to the Front Desk Manager, the assistant Desk Manager, the General Manager and was eventually sent back to Emily, the Director of Sales, to try to figure out what happened.
Everyone gave me a different story - Denise, the assistant Front Desk Manager told me that all the paperwork was still in Emily's office and had not been put into the computer. Emily told me that someone at the front desk had erased the information that she had put in, the Front Desk Manager Stacy told me that some of the rooms had been paid for with SPG Award Points, but could not figure out whose points were used or how they were credited, and the General Manager said that he wanted to help get things resolved, but then passed the problem back to Denise & Emily.
So far nothing has been resolved and as it stands now, we're still going to be charged for the mediocre stay although no one can tell me exactly how much our credit card will be charged.
This whole situation has caused quite a problem with both of our instructors for the workshop, has cost many hours of our staff time, money in long distance phone bills, and it makes us look really bad to our workshop participants. Since I am in charge of the logistics for our workshops, it also looks really bad for me and my job is threatened because of it. We've run 9 successful workshops this year and have never had problems with any hotel like we've had with the Four Points Sheraton Detroit Metro Airport.
We are planning 17 workshops for 2005; because of the problems we had and due to the inability to get them resolved despite numerous attempts, we will not be sending our workshop groups to any Sheraton's in the future. We will also discourage our other tour groups and leaders from using the Sheraton hotels for any of their functions.
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