Sydney Hotel Hopping

We checked out of the Hilton this morning. It's a great place and our room, while not that big, was modern and well equipped. We're hotel hopping to earn "stays" for our accounts, but also because Sydney hotels are really expensive at the moment. Our nights in the Hilton were paid by various account credits (a free night cert. and points).

We trundled our bags a couple of blocks over to the Sheraton On The Park, a stately and beautiful property. Fortunately, Kathy had found a very attractive rate here for two nights. The young man checking us in told us he was upgrading us to a suite (a perk available to SPG Platinums which we've already enjoyed in a couple of other properties).

We walked down to Circular Quay and wandered all the way around the Opera House before returning to the hotel a couple of hours later, where we found our lovely suite was ready.

We also received an e-mail from our credit card company telling us that the hotel had charged $1500 to our account, about five times as much as our rate. We then checked our SPG hotel account and found that somehow our excellent non-refundable and non-cancellable rate had been changed to a rate for this suite. Gulp!

We explained the problem to a manager in the magnificent Club Lounge, and he promised he would sort it out. He did. As we'd suspected, when we were checked in to this room, the computer automatically assigned the room rate for this suite, a fact that was overlooked by the employee who completed the transaction. It was all a completely innocent mistake, but it's yet another reminder that it's always worth bringing along your own records on paper. Now we can relax and enjoy our $700-a-night suite.