Compensation Clinic: Ritz-Carlton Cancun

When one stays at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, one would expect the service should to be nearly flawless, right? Wrong.

I stayed at the Ritz-Carlton Cancun two times while in Mexico in mid-September (2014) and the service left a lot to be desired.

You can access Ritz-Carlton Cancun’s website here.

Here’s the issues that I had:

Construction/Renovation:

It is low season in Cancun and hotels understandably will do maintenance during this period. The InterContinental was entirely closed for few weeks, but there was nothing on the Ritz-Carlton Cancun’s website indicating that they had any renovation or construction going on.

When I checked in for the first stay, there was no mention at the check in that drilling, jack hammering etc. would start at 10AM. There was no notices left in the rooms either.

How difficult would it had been to inform the guests that there will be some serious noise pollution starting at 10AM? Furthermore the rooms division should have perhaps blocked off the most affected sections of the hotel. Again this is a low season for the hotels here.

Late Checkout/Lobby bar:

The late check out that was both a Platinum benefit and a benefit of the rate that I booked was not available. This is my pet peeve on benefits that are available “based on availability”. When you actually need it, you won’t get it.

At 1PM or so I went to finish some work in the lobby bar area thinking that I would burn the $100 F&B credit that was included on the rate. I should have read the hotel’s website more carefully as the lobby bar area is not open before evening, although there were quite a few people in the area. I ended not not using any of the credit I had.

Feedback:

I left a note to the hotel using Marriott.com’s feedback and did the after the stay survey also. It took more than a week for the hotel get back to me and grant the 20,000 points for the inconveniences endured.

Conclusion

On my subsequent stay, there was some issues as well from the front desk unable to process a credit card issued in Europe that actually needed me to punch in a PIN number, “Sir your card is declined”. The property also forgot to deliver the fruit basket (which was actually very good at this property) and took more than 2 hours to deliver it after I reminded them about it. It turns out the front desk had to check that the rate included one after my reminder.

When you stay at the Marriott’s highest brand, you just expect things to work and work well. There is no excuse for the hotel to not to block the rooms around the area where they are doing construction work and have a note on their website that there will be a noise disturbance occurring during the day hours. It boils down to plain greed.

You would also expect the response from the hotel’s guest relations to reply in couple of days instead of a week after you leave feedback.