For those of you who have an upcoming stay at the Grand Hyatt Baha Mar in the Bahamas there is a good chance that you received an email yesterday stating that your reservation will be canceled. While I have three upcoming reservations at this hotel, I only received one blanket email:
“Thank you for choosing Grand Hyatt at Baha Mar. We certainly understand the importance of vacations and appreciate your choice of Grand Hyatt at Baha Mar. As you may be aware, the ownership entity of the Baha Mar resort in the Bahamas, Baha Mar Convention Hotel Company Ltd. (Owner), recently filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the United States bankruptcy code in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware. Unfortunately, this means that the opening of the Grand Hyatt at Baha Mar hotel will be delayed due to the bankruptcy filing. At this time, we have not received confirmation of the Hotel opening date, but we are hopeful the Owner of the resort will resolve the issues that resulted in the bankruptcy filing so the Grand Hyatt at Baha Mar hotel soon can be fully operational.
In the meantime, because we cannot predict the timing of the Owner’s bankruptcy resolution, we believe it would be in your best interest to re-schedule your upcoming reservation at an alternate location in order to minimize the inconvenience to you. We realize this situation may cause you airfare penalties for rescheduling and we will reimburse you up to $300.00 per person on your reservation for cancellation fees and non-refundable airfare.
You will receive a cancellation notice from us for your reservation in the upcoming days due to this situation. If you need assistance with alternate accommodation options or with the airfare compensation please contact Hyatt Guest Services at your earliest convenience at 888-848-9496.
Again, our sincere apologies for this inconvenience and on behalf of the entire Grand Hyatt at Baha Mar Team thank you for your understanding.”
I am personally extremely disappointed with their compensation for a few reasons:
- Hyatt has been very generous over the past few months for guest reservations that were canceled due to the push back of the opening date. These guests were offered a variety of options including 20,000 points per night or a discount at a nearby hotel. Now, they are not offering any points or option to stay at another hotel in the Bahamas. While this 20,000 point per night option might have been too generous (and I applaud them for going above and beyond for their previous guests), moving to no compensation is quite honestly just not fair.
- They are only reimbursing the $300 airline change fee for the number of guests that were stated on the room. For example, one of my reservations states that it is for 1 guest. When you go ahead and book a reservation at Hyatt online (and many other hotel chains) it auto default the number of guests to 1. You need to manually change it. I hardly ever even think to change the number of guests unless it is a package rate or I am looking for a room that will hold a particular number of guests. The reservation is for me, my husband, and my daughter (who will be in a pack ‘n play) and they will only reimburse for one guest even though I explained to them on the phone there will be three guests. This left a very sour taste in my mouth.
- I called Hyatt a week ago to inquire about my reservation (after the Bankruptcy notice came out) and was ensured that the hotel was still opening on September 1 and all reservations would be in tact. My gut knew there was no way this was happening but I went with it. They should have notified guests immediately and not given false information in the meantime.
- I booked my reservations back in January when the hotel was a category 4 (it is now a category 5 property). Now if the resort does open at a future date and I decide to go, chances of them honoring that category 4 points pricing is slim to none.
I am sure I could go on and on, but the above bullets are my main issues. While Hyatt is putting excuses elsewhere (which is totally fair), I booked through Hyatt and believe they should take care of their guests even if it means paying out of their own pocket. Also, to plan another vacation will ultimately cost me way more out of pocket. I personally think Hyatt should have stopped taking reservations come the Spring once they knew that the opening date was being pushed back. This would have alleviated a lot of issues on their end
What are your thoughts?
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You kind of only have yourself to blame, I’m aware of the 1 person default and I always make sure I key in 2 people even though I am alone, it just makes for good planning. If I have more than 2 ppl it would depend if they charge for extra bed or what I am trying to do. But this falls under things you should make a habit like locking your car and room doors immediately upon entry etc.
@Jay – Yes for the $300 reimbursement yes I agree. Oversight on my part. But when they are canceling a vacation that has been planned since January you’d think they’d be more accommodating.
you should read the flyertalk post on the hyatt Oubaai canceling reservations
Have you not read the Flyertalk thread on this. I had my June reservation cancelled and in addition to covering change fees they gave 20,000 points per night. There were several shall we say “savy” folks who saw the handwriting on the wall and booked reservations so they could wait for the inevitable cancelation and points bonus. I wasn’t one of them, I was happy with Hyatt paying my airfare to an outer island and giving me points which I applied to a suite at PH Wash DC. fyi, check out Grand Isle Resort.
side note – I had 2 rooms booked and did remember to call Hyatt when I made the reservation and adjust the occupancy to 2 people in each room. So the airfare RT to an out island was covered 100%, but I did have to pay out of my own pocket for the new hotel. Not the way I wanted it to go, but so be it.
Took my own advice and went back to read the flyertalk thread. I didn’t realize Hyatt has changed how they are dealing with this (no points reimbursement) That does seem unfair