Fight Back

When unreasonable costs arise, it is always in your best interest to fight back.

On my recent trip to Boston, I faced this situation with some very unreasonable phone calls.

Given that I was coming in from out of the country, I had originally arranged for my cell phone to be mailed to the hotel I was scheduled to stay in for the finance conference in San Francisco that I was to speak at. Instead, with my delays getting out of Kabul, I never ended up making it to San Fran, and thus didn’t have my cell for the week I was in Boston.

This obviously was a pain (we wonder how we ever lived without the darn thing!), trying to connect with friends and so forth.

In the first couple of days that I was at the hotel I made a few thirty second phone calls to connect with family and let them know how to reach me. My thought that a couple of bucks would suffice as an unreasonable charge for a phone call. Little did I realize that they wanted to charge me $9.69 per call!

This meant that my phone calls would have been equivalent to a nights stay (at the priceline rate).

Obviously I wasn’t going to take those kind of charges. I protested and managed to get it reduced to a less than a quarter of what they originally wanted to charge. They tried to give me some crap about it being a service charge that they were charged. My response was that if they were getting charged that much, then they weren’t a competitive hotel, and if they were passing those charges on to their customers, then they weren’t servicing them either. In the end I felt like I won out, but what a pain over a couple of quick calls!

Just remember to fight back when anything like this happens to you.

Best,

Miel