Holiday booked but can we change hotel now?

[ranj]

Dear all

 

We have booked our honeymoon to florida this year and will be going late August. Its a multi trip. We are staying in Orlando for 10 days and then 6 days will be spent in Miami. We have received all our paperwork from the independent high street travel agent we booked from.

 

Everything in Orlando we are happy with but are now not too keen on the hotel in Miami (miami beach resort and spa), read a few reviews on it and it has sent alarm bells to us. When we booked holiday we didn't spend too long on investigating the miami hotel.

 

So I phoned up the travel agent and they not really giving us a straight answer on what our options are. We have left a few messages with them and they say they have to get in contact with the hotel to see if we can cancel, they told us we may have to pay a cancellation fee.

 

I just wanted to know what are options are? can we easily change hotel? (we would like to change it for a slightly higher rating hotel and are willing to pay extra for this), will we be charged a cancellation fee from that hotel?

 

your help on this is much appreciated

[srochford]

I'm not a lawyer but I suspect you've got very limited options - unless the booking specified that you would be able to change your mind later then you probably can't change unless the hotel is willing to let you cancel.

 

It's possible that the agent is trying to contact the hotel to see if they will allow a cancellation - this far in advance I think there's a good chance that they will (there's still time for them to re-let the room) but if the hotel is having a hard time letting rooms then they may not let you cancel without charging a fee. Try looking to see if the hotel has its own web site - that may give details of their cancellation policy.

 

It's also possible that there's nothing at all wrong with the hotel - I think that far more people post complaints on review web sites than post good comments and some people have very strange complaints (recently met someone who was unhappy about the noise in their hotel; sounds like a resonable complaint except this "noise" was the sea - not quite sure what they expected in a sea-side hotel!)