Hello Everyone,
I felt that it would benefit other coaches if I shared my experience with the Hyatt Regency while at Vex IQ Worlds this past week. Upon booking my rooms through get travel (10 rooms, 30 people) I requested that they be in a block on the same floor as I have minors to look after. Get Travel told me this was no problem and that if I call the hotel and double check, they should be able to accommodate us. I called the hotel and asked and they said they could do it. I also asked about parking for our coach bus, wi-fi access, and breakfast. I was told all of these are included and would be no problem.
About a week before our trip I was contacted by the coach bus company asking about parking to which I responded, “The hotel told me they have free access to a parking garage that could fit our coach bus.” Upon calling the hotel to check I discovered that was not true. Therefore I had to scramble around to try to find parking for our bus and eventually received a call back from the Hyatt’s event planner who said she would take care of all of the parking problems and would leave the permits at the front desk.
Upon arriving at the hotel on the 22nd, I was told that my rooms were split up into five different floors, there is no included breakfasts, and the Wi-Fi is five dollars per room. They also did not have any parking passes nor did they know anything about them despite my calling about it the previous week.They also booked each room in the students names rather than my name which took about 20 minutes for them to find all of the reservations. I argued with the managers and front desk about the rooms and after about an hour they moved some of my rooms around and placed us on two adjacent floors. So now we were on two floors but 4 of my students were now sleeping on rollaway beds and my partner and I were in a room with a sofa bed and a rollaway to sleep on. They also charged us a $50 per room security deposit which was never discussed with us prior to arriving at the hotel. (this was not a huge deal but it still would have been nice to know)
We discovered that the Wi-Fi was not a huge issue as the five dollars was for an upgraded faster Wi-Fi. The problem here was that the attendant at the front desk gave us misinformation and was about to charge an additional $50 for Wi-Fi.
The hotel did not offer any kind of free breakfast. A buffet breakfast was available at a charge of $20 per person. The hotel knocked this down to $15 per person for us (which I still think is ridiculous) which ended up costing us about $1,500 for the three breakfasts we required for our team.
The first night our bus driver ended up parking at the fair grounds and taking a cab back to the hotel. He then took another cab in the morning to go back a retrieve the bus. (So here is another $50 we had to put out for cab fees) At this point the hotel finally came through and gave us a parking pass. We had to pay just over $200 for the pass which was ok with us as far as price but again it would have been nice to know this before hand rather than being told “We have a free parking garage for your bus.”
So I was debating with myself whether or not to share this experience as I know mistakes happen and I am not usually a person who complains about things but this just went too far. The deciding factor was when I received a call from my credit card company this morning telling me my account was overdrawn by about 1,000 dollars. Upon checking my statements I found about $5,000 dollars worth of random charges from the hotel. After calling the hotel they straightened everything out. Apparently they were charging 3 of our rooms for the breakfasts rather than just my room.(so we were triple charged)
This entire experience was a nightmare and reflected horribly upon my partner/me who are both teachers and had parents along with us on the trip. It ended up costing us an extra $2,000 over the $10,000 we paid for our rooms.(which apparently come with nothing) There were way too many issues to declare this a simple mistake. I would strongly suggest that coaches really look into the hotels they book for worlds. I have stayed in Hyatt’s before and they have been great but I strongly suggest avoiding this one.
Again I apologize for blasting a hotel, but I don’t want to see any other coaches have to go through the situation we did while at worlds.
-Ryan Bockelmann
South Side Spartans
Rockville Centre, NY