Something Stolen From My Room
Something happened to me a few weeks ago when I was traveling through Europe. At my hotel in Brussels, the maid lost something that belonged to me in my room. I didn’t write about the situation when it happened, because I preferred to get a full resolution before posting about it. Here is what happened.
Keeping the Power On
Most hotel rooms in countries outside of the United States have slots to put the room key in to activate the power. At the Radisson Blu Royal hotel in Brussels, this slot works with any standard credit card/room key sized card. Since I was only given one room key, I decided to leave a personal card in the slot to keep the power on when leaving for the day.
While I respect that hotels want to save power when a guest isn’t in the room, sometimes it needs to be on. In this case I needed my laptop to charge and all of the outlets shut off when the key was removed. I made sure to turn off the heater before leaving, so that only my laptop was charging.
When looking through the few cards I had, I decided to leave my AAdvantage Platinum card in the slot. I figured it was the least valuable card I had with me, although I had planned to use it to access British Airways lounges later in the trip after hearing mixed reports about them requiring the physical card. (Thankfully that wasn’t the case.)
The Card Goes Missing
After leaving the hotel & spending the day out in Brussels, I returned to my room to find that my card was gone. Not only was the card gone, it had been replaced by a plain white room key. So the maid had purposely taken my card out and actually replaced it with something else. I searched high and low and the card was gone.
Upon discovering this, I went down to the front desk and spoke to the agent. She told me that she would contact the head of housekeeping and call the maid at home to find out what happened. I was told to check back and when I did, she said that the maid remembered my card, but didn’t know what happened to it. I was then told to speak to the manager in the morning.
The next morning after checking out I spoke to the manager on duty. She apologized, said it wasn’t their policy to take guest belongings (obviously) and told me she would investigate. She then asked for my email address and phone number to follow up. I was told I would hear back the same day. After leaving the hotel I traveled on to Amsterdam and then eventually Hong Kong and before long a week had passed.
Follow Up With Corporate
Finally I decided to contact Carlson Rezidor since the hotel had not contacted me. After explaining my situation in detail in an email, I received an automated response saying that the hotel would respond within 48 hours.
Three days later I received an email with a gift card for 100 Euros. The email was sent with boiler plate language. There was no apology and my situation wasn’t specifically addressed. Additionally, the gift card that was sent can only be used in select countries in Europe & the Middle East, making it a little difficult for me to redeem.
I know it was only a frequent flyer card, but it was really upsetting to have something that belonged to me taken from my room. Additionally, I was nice at the hotel and gave them time to investigate to figure out what happened. I am not sure why they never followed up, but I can only think that they were hoping I would just go away.
Conclusion
I don’t believe that the maid purposely stole my card, however she did remove it and replace it with a completely different one. Either way, the hotel could have tried to resolve the issue or at least follow up with me, but they chose not to.
I doubt I will pursue this matter any further, although the entire situation has left a bad taste in my mouth. Do you think I received fair compensation? Has anything like this ever happened to you? Should I get over it because it was just a card? Let me know! I’m genuinely interested to hear what you think.
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[…] few weeks ago I wrote about my recent experience at the Radisson Blu Royal Brussels. During that stay, a maid at the hotel took one of my items out of the […]
I have zero sympathy. You deliberately left a credit card unattended in a hotel room. What did you think would happen? Do you routinely leave your iPad on the sink in the airport restroom? Really, the hotel is hardly to blame for your stupidity.
First off it wasn’t a credit card and secondly I have a question.
If you leave a shirt in your hotel room and it is stolen by an employee would you be upset?
The fact is that an employee took my property. It could have been anything and it would still be wrong.
Sorry to hear about the troubles and aggravation you went through. From that posting, I learned to bring some useless plastic cards i case I need to leave in the light switch.
Next time, try brining along one of the phony cards that come unsolicited in the mail. I had one of these taken out of the light switch on a cruise ship- but the card taken was of no real use, so nothing lost.
Kristy – stayed here 2 nights in April No problems. Convenient location. Found a great café for breakfast – Sara’s ID – about 5-7 minutes walk from hotel. Had a 5 Euro steal of a deal – check review I posted on TripAdvisor.
Wow! I was going to use Gold Points to book that hotel for our upcoming trip, but I think I’ll try somewhere else instead.
I always have a couple of old room keys in my bag specifically for that purpose. They also work as an emergency ice scraper when your rental car company forgets to leave a scraper in the car.
I once had a problem at a Radisson in the states. They refunded all the points I used at the stay without question…100K points. I would explain to them that, although their offer was very generous, it is not usable because you have no plans to travel in the near future. If they give you 30K – 50K points, that would nice.
The maid probably made a very innocent mistake and you were not put out much by this, were you? If it was me, I would phrase my complaint as a lack of follow-up by management, rather than the probable) innocent mistake by the maid.
In any case, you *do* share (a small) part of the blame for obviously putting something where it didn’t belong.
I keep a couple of old hotels in my purse just for this kind of thing. For some reason I find that there are maids that remove the cards I leave. Last time this happened to me was at the Hyatt in Dusseldorf. I, like you, had left some electronics charging and of course, they were no not charged when I got to the room after a long day of sightseeing. I can imagine you feel so frustrated that not only did they take your key, they found no good solution for you. I hate it when they remove my old hotel key, and that is no loss to me! You handled it well, but did not get a good resolution, IMHO.
I generally agree with Mike. The pleasant-but-firm-and-persistent squeaky wheel typically gets the grease. I’m sure you’ve found the same. The frustrating part is when it eats up so much of your time that it becomes not worth the effort.
The compensation should be appropriate to the customer, and this compensation was less than useful for you. I would pursue something more versatile from them–since they do want you to return in the future, or at least use Carlson properties. Perhaps 50,000 Gold Points would work better for you–and provide you with a happy ending to publish in the future.
Sounds like you should start asking for 2 room keys.