Update!
EVERYTHING hit my bank today and great news and kinda surprisingly everything happened the way it was supposed to.
Yay! Good for you.
Great! That makes it a whole lot easier. Good on ya for persisting and getting it all fixed.
I’ll just say- wow. I’ve stayed in hundreds of hotels, and never had an issue like this. And I’ve arrived a day late due to flight fuckups.
When I’ve worked at smaller places without a travel agent, I always make sure to book directly with the hotel, and not through a third party, and I always book paid in full but refundable. At larger companies I’ve been required to use the company travel agent, ie Carson Wagonlit
Glad for the good news.
Visa has been very helpful to me when I’ve disputed transactions.
My Chase Sapphire Visa has also been good for chargebacks, siding with me every single time I’ve had to do it (4 or 5 total, in about 10 years).
But it should be noted that in the case of Visa, it’s the issuing bank that handles the chargebacks, so your mileage will vary depending on which particular bank you use. With Amex-issued cards, the American Express company itself (not a separate bank) deals with the chargebacks. There are also bank-issued Amex cards, though, and I suppose those work more similarly to Visa?
My Chase Sapphire Visa was not so keen on helping me with a chargeback (and I think it was the only one I have tried in over a decade). My memory was a chargeback was pretty easy to do. Chase threw numerous roadblocks in my way (e.g making me wait one month before submitting a claim). Not impossible but it was an annoying process.
Maybe I pressed the wrong button. Probably would have been better to call and get a human to help (also harder than it should be).
Years ago we showed up at a boutique hotel in Brussels with our reservation in hand. Our room was still occupied as the person staying there decided to stay longer. When we arrived, they already had a room in a nearby hotel booked for us and even had the key for us. We even still had breakfast at the original hotel.
The substitute hotel was a corporate long stay hotel, and the original place was a B&B. Not quite the same, but at least we didn’t have to make any additional effort.
This was handled astonishingly badly.
When we walk we have everything set up ahead of time. You walk in*, we apologize, give you the bad news and then tell you where you are staying, what we are covering, and give you a cover letter to give to the other hotel.
And a prepaid is way down the list of who we’d walk (generally OTAs are first).
°assuming we haven’t been able to reach you by phone first. And that you haven’t shown up during the middle of our setting everything up - like when the storm took out all electricity in the neighborhood.
Does anyone else remember this powerpoint that was making the rounds of the internet many years ago, about being denied a room that had been reserved, paid for, and guaranteed? Yours is a Very Bad Hotel
The closest I’ve ever come to the situation is having my reservation disappear because the hotel was sold to another brand without bothering to let me know.
I had a room reserved a couple of months in advance at the downtown LA Holiday Inn on S. Figureoa for a concert right across the street at what used to be the Staples Center. A week or so before going down there I went to the Holiday Inn website to check on the reservation and discovered the hotel was no longer listed! WTF? I called and found the hotel was under new management.
I hadn’t pre-paid so I wasn’t out any money, but I was more than a little upset. The customer service agent was apologetic but didn’t offer any kind of compensation (I was hoping for a room at another Holiday Inn property nearby) Of course the reservation was not honored by the new management, so I ended up crashing at my brother’s place on the other side of town.
I wonder if their preparedness was born out of the desire to do the right thing or due to EU customer protection laws…
raises hand 
I thought of it the first time I saw the thread title. I’m not sure anything like that would be worth bothering trying to do today.
Years ago, my wife and I took an el cheapo Chinese bus tour from Toronto to Chicago. One night we were scheduled to spend the night in Indiana. The bus showed up at the hotel and they said “sorry folks, there’s a big Notre Dame game this weekend and there aren’t any hotel rooms available”. We got back on the bus and did laps around beautiful northern Indiana in the dark while the tour guide frantically worked with the overbooked hotel to find us some alternate accommodation. Over an hour later, we ended up at another motel literally across the street from the original one.
The motel we ended up in had seen better days, I think. My wife translated one guy’s comment that he was going to sleep fully clothed on top of the covers for fear of being contaminated by the bedsheets.
Someone somewhere dropped the ball on this one… I don’t see a DOS or a GM at a reputable hotel canceling a tour group like that just because of a game.
What gets me is that with hotel rooms and plane flights that you, as the consumer, can do everything right: pay in full ahead of time, confirm ahead of time (like I did) or advanced check-in and if an overbooking occurs that you are screwed because the hotel/airport wanted to make more cash. Those are situations where you make plans based on having a place to stay or getting to your destination on time and because of what the hotel/airline does YOUR plans get derailed, maybe at great expense, and they act like it’s a you problem. How dare you expect to get the room/flight you paid for. It’s your problem that you counted us to do our job you paid us for.
As said, hotels should make alternative arrangements for guests when overbooked, ideally at an equal or better hotel. And the airlines generally look for volunteers to take a later flight, with some compensation provided. There was a notorious case a decade or two ago when United Airlines forcibly removed a passenger from a flight and since then, they ask passengers in advance how much compensation they would accept for taking a later flight. That lets the airline choose the passengers asking smallest amount.
Plane flights are little bit different, in that they will essentially do an auction for people to decide whether or not to give up a seat on a flight in return for compensation. Hopefully, this would allow those people with more flexible travel plans to modify them slightly, while those who need that flight can sit tight. Airlines really don’t want to bump people off the flight involuntarily, and they will usually go to great lengths (e.g. compensation valued at more than the flight itself costs) before doing so.
But airlines are doing this with a single-time auction. Hotels are different because people arrive at different times and get put into their rooms at different times, and someone who might have been more amenable to be compensated and moved to a different property might already be in their room when someone who needs that room that night arrives. I think the airline way of doing things is a little more equitable, all in all.
But my point is that if not enough people choose to get bumped from the flight to a later one or a 10 room hotel sells 12 rooms for the night, then they can and ill choose people to bump and tell the last 2 check-in they don’t have a room. And there is no way for you as the consumer o protect yourself from being bumped. And what IMO makes it worse is that flights and hotels are things consumers plan on the most when planning (and paying) for vacation.
Hey we’re bumping you until the 9:45pm flight to Des Moines.
But my mom’s funeral is at 4pm
Sucks to be you.
We are out of rooms and there are no more available on the island anywhere.
But I paid for the room and confirmed my reservation yesterday.
I can offer you a refund, but that’s the best I can do.
I may have told this story before, but here it is regardless:
Some years back, I was going to a bike ride (Apple Cider Century in Three Oaks, MI) and booked a hotel room in a nearby town (New Buffalo, so I could take my bike on the train). I booked through a booking website (don’t recall which one) and had already been charged for the room well before the day.
I arrived just as the sun was setting, but the very apologetic desk clerk told me my reservation would not be honored because it was made with the previous owners. 
It didn’t matter that I had prepaid, not just made a reservation. After a few minutes, they offered me a room in the old-school motel next door, owned by the same people. But they wanted me to pay for that room!
I was too weary and unwilling to risk my life cycling in the pitch dark on a rural-ish highway to say no and go hunting for another room, where I’d have to pay again anyway. The room they stuck me in had seen better days! I Though the booking website had said my booking was nonrefundable, I called anyway. I was very polite – they weren’t the ones screwing me – and pointed out that I paid in advance and now was being double-charged just to have a room for the night. Luckily, the booking site refunded my prepayment! They must have had my money at that point rather than the hotel owner.
And when I posted a bad TripAdvisor review on the page for the hotel I had originally reserved, warning people that the hotel was not honoring prepaid reservations, they got my review dropped on the flimsy (and fairly ironic!) technicality that I hadn’t stayed at the hotel I reviewed. 