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The hotel charged me twice on my credit card. But said that it is denied. In fact it is paid. I showed them the message that I received on my cell phone. Still I was denied check in. This causes physical and mental torture to infants and family because we have travelled in international flight for more than 30 hours. Room was reserved from Air Port hotel counters.

Can we ask for compensation and refund of 400 USD?

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    Are you sure you went to the right hotel?
    – user29788
    Sep 18, 2019 at 22:06
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    I must be missing something... you’re saying that after 30 hours of travel with infants you didn’t have a hotel booked and you booked one when arriving at the airport? You can forget about the “physical and mental torture” here. Can you specify what kind of message you got one your phone? Was it a confirmation message from the hotel? A notification of a charge from your bank? You can definitely file a chargeback with your card issuer, but beyond that we’re missing quite a few details.
    – jcaron
    Sep 19, 2019 at 20:06

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If you have evidence from your card supplier that the hotel has indeed charged you then you should be able to demand a refund and the hotel will have no defence.

If the hotel stands its ground and refuses, contact your card provider. They can reverse erroneous charges and start an investigation. It's sometimes useful to tell the hotel that you are about to do this. They don't like chargebacks, so they might just deal with the issue themselves first.

Compensation is a different issue. Even if there is some legal basis for awarding compensation, if the hotel refuses it will require legal action to resolve it. The amount of compensation is likely to be much less than the cost of mounting the case. Almost certainly, it won't be worth pursuing.

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    Social media can be useful for putting public pressure on companies to resolve situations like this, especially if it's part of a hotel chain, so legal action may not be required to resolve it. (Disclaimer: I've not done this personally, but I've seen it enough on my Twitter feed.) If you contact them privately, you're one person who might tell their friends and other relatively close acquaintances about the bad experience; if you've got a potentially "viral" tweet/Facebook post/etc. that thousands of people might see, that's much worse PR for them that they generally want to avoid.
    – Anthony Grist
    Sep 19, 2019 at 10:54
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If you paid using VISA then there is a guarantee that this will not happen. This is an old old guarantee VISA insist your bank make, to allow them to use their logo, which is "as old as time itself" and as such banks often do not realise it at first! You need to inform your bank that under VISA regulations they need to refund you as items not asked for.

It's nothing to do with the hotel as far as you need to be concerned.

Contrary to other popular belief, this guarantee also affects ANY card with the VISA logo, including debit cards. It is not restricted to credit cards.

The bank will then have to (in accordance with their contract with VISA) refund you. Not the hotel, the bank.

The hotel will then get a red warning block on their merchant account which is a serious issue for them and they will be charged a large handling fee by VISA or they will have their account suspended.

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  • Where in that link does it say that your bank has to refund you? The only relevant part I can see is this (emphasis mine): "you can get your money back (subject to your bank’s terms and conditions)."
    – Anthony Grist
    Sep 19, 2019 at 13:50
  • @AnthonyGrist that isn't the contract! Quite honestly, that is just some marketing blurb they give the card holders.. I hate to say it but you must realise there is a contract of pan national bank terms which they signed up to with VISA when they asked to use the VISA network?.. basically the best action is to make the bank recover the money not you.. they are much better at it here is another article if you are interested.. regardless I do this sort of thing for a living and I have to fathom all these laws and contracts moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/visa-mastercard-chargeback
    – Mr Heelis
    Sep 19, 2019 at 13:57
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    I'm aware that's not the contract, but you made that piece of text a link to that particular site, so I assumed it was useful and relevant. If Visa's agreement with the bank says they have to refund you, then I would expect Visa's marketing to also say that, rather than saying that it's subject to the bank's terms and conditions, because it's much better marketing to potential customers.
    – Anthony Grist
    Sep 19, 2019 at 14:04
  • @AnthonyGrist they don't advertise it mostly because it's a legacy term from the 1950's and they (the banks and the VISA people) don't want the hassle what with the volume these days.. you see under the hood there are a metric tonne of hassle factors for VISA/bank when you do this (that the consumer doesn't see) to put it mildly the Hotel is going to have it's backside ripped in two.. similarly the bank staff very often DO NOT KNOW this is the case.. When I have use this myself it took about 2 hours of convincing bank staff on the phone before I got a person who knew it was the rules...
    – Mr Heelis
    Sep 19, 2019 at 14:08
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    You must have missed all the regulatory and contractual changes of the last few decades. There are cases when this is true (it probably is the case here, depending on the country and how exactly the payment was made), others when it definitely isn’t true.
    – jcaron
    Sep 19, 2019 at 20:11

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