Ticked Hirp

So this weekend I had a trip to the lake with some friends planned. I’ve been pretty excited about the prospect of a nice relaxing long weekend. Just hanging out, grilling some burgers and steaks, maybe playing some cards, introducing my friends to a little movie called The Godfather. And if this were a baseball telecast, there would be a graphic on the bottom of the screen noting this as my first ever trip as part of a couple. Just for those scoring at home, or alone.

Well then a few random things have thrown the trip in the air, so we thought it would be best to cancel our reservation. And this is where it gets good. I didn’t make the reservation, but before letting my friend know that I thought it was best that we cancel the trip, I did check their website for the cancellation policy. It said that if you cancel and they can’t rebook the room, we’d lose our deposit, but if they could rebook it then we’d be charged just a charge of 25% of our deposit. Not a huge deal.

But when my friend made the reservation, he was told the resorts policy. And it just happens to differ more than a little bit from what they list on the website. See, if they can’t rebook the room, rather than lose our deposit, we actually have to pay the entire amount. Not the amount of the deposit, no, the whole damn three nights. All because we didn’t cancel with more than 30 days notice, mind you we didn’t book 30 days in advance.

Ironically enough, last night the classic “Seinfeld” episode in which Jerry reserves a mid-size car, only the car rental company doesn’t have any available when he goes to pick it up. Leading to the memorable, “you know how to take a reservation, but you don’t know how to “hold” a reservation, and that’s really the most important part to the reservation, the holding.”