Hotel Honors Accidental Website Price of 1 Cent

doug141 writes "The four-star Crowne Plaza near Venice mistakenly offered rooms for 1 cent on its website, leading customers to book 1,400 room nights. Surprisingly, the hotel has decided to honor the 1 cent reservations, which means a loss of $129,000 by the hotel. From the article:'The hotel first thought the offer was posted by a hacker, sales manager Fulvio Danesin said Friday. But it turned out to be human error at the Atlanta, Georgia, offices of Intercontinental Hotels Group, the hotel's mother company, he said. The offer was supposed to be for a two-night stay at half price. A night at the 151-room hotel normally costs between $128 and $214.'"

Comments

This happens all the time.

[SOdhner]

Well, the mistake part, anyway. I used to work for a company that loaded hotel information to pretty much everywhere from a central source (so they could change something once and have it active on all the old airline reservation systems, all the expedia/hotwire/etc sites, and their own) and it was pretty easy to slip up and type the wrong thing - or to enter a rate, but forget to hit the button that copies it to the rest of the week. Sometimes the hotel honors the rate (and in those cases I'm sure they passed the loss back to us when it was one of our agents) but quite often they would just tell the person that booked that it was an error and they couldn't honor it. I'm not sure how that went but I suspect that the people who argued enough eventually got to stay at the absurdly redcued rate. Of course IANAL, so I don't know if there's any legal equivalent of "Dude, come on, you KNEW that wasn't the correct rate."