[Removed user]

24 February 2016 at 18:22:52 #808479

Hi

We are returning to home country from Geneva in August. I looked for hotels and settled on one near the airport. It is a large worldwide chain hotel. We are a family of four (2 children – ages 4 and 8 when we will travel)

I contacted the hotel directly over email and asked for their rates for such a configuration and they said they have family rooms (1 queen bed and 1 sofa bed for children) and quoted the price + tax. Their website also says that explicitly. However, the booking has to be done online. Unfortunately, it only allows for adding of 2 persons (2 adults or 1 adult + 1 child) for any room (even the family room). I contacted them again and they said to book with 2 adults + zero children, send them the booking number and then they will add two children.

There is a significant difference between non-refundable and fully-refundable rates; so I would prefer the non-refundable rate. However, I am a bit weary of moving forward, only to be told later on (or worse, on arrival) that this is not possible. Of course, I have an email trail to the exact nature of the query and their recommendations.

Does anyone else have experiences in this matter ? Have you done room reservations and then gotten the hotel to add children – of course based on their recommendations ?

Any pointers/ideas would be welcome.

Thanks

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[Arno]

25 February 2016 at 7:58:52 #848676

Hi Vikram,

I have no experience with this, but I can understand it works like that in some cases due to a limitation in their online booking system. Which hotel is it? There might be other options to book the same hotel.

[Removed user]

25 February 2016 at 22:50:55 #848677

Have you tried the site hotels.com? They have a drop down menu that shows how many children and ages of each. Very easy to make reservations.

[Removed user]

25 February 2016 at 23:15:09 #848678

Thanks for your replies.

Drop-downs with children ages don’t really help because they don’t have visibility into deeper policies (mostly textual – not codified into data that is used by the sites to search) of the hotels. However, if you go to the individual hotels that would not ordinarily come back with positive results for the search, you will see that they indeed do allow for 2 adults and 2 children in the same room (queen bed + 1 sofa bed – which is adequate for young children – ages 4 and 8).

I booked the hotel with 2 adults + zero children at their site and then sent them email with the booking number requesting such a room. They responded in the positive saying they had reserved one and added the children onto the reservation. I will only know in August if everything goes smoothly.

I had to do the same when we traveled to India. The website would not allow for reservations with 2 adults + 2 children. But I did reservations with them directly on the phone, and they did give us a room with a king bed for our family. It was the same chain.

Thanks

[Slowpoke]

12 March 2016 at 2:14:34 #848679

Hi Vikram-

Sounds like you have a good system.

Thanks for posting.

Slowpoke