Extra payment for a prepaid rate at checkout

[Comrade Chag]

I booked and paid for an Autograph Collection hotel in Istanbul.

Booked an advance prepaid rate for 453.60 EUR. This is the hotel currency as per Marriott.

I was charged the next day for the equivalent in £.

I confirmed that the rate was prepaid upon checking in.

At checkout I was asked to pay (and paid as I had a taxi waiting outside) an extra ~500 Turkish liras as according to them there is a shortfall.

Does this sound right to you? Would you challenge it?

• This topic was modified 54 years, 4 months ago by .

[meta]

It might be local or city taxes which are always paid on departure even on prepaid rates. Did you get a receipt, what does it say? To challenge, you’ll need to have one anyway.

[tw33ty]

Turkish five star hotels have a tax of 18 lira per person per night

Four star is 12 lira pp pn

Three star 9 lira pp pn

But before paying anything, I’d have cleared up what the payment was for.

[ChrisC]

This does sound like taxes and fees only levied when you actually stay.

Have you checked your booking confirmation email? That would usually specify what you pay and when.

May also be something in your Bonvoy account folios.

[Comrade Chag]

I’m still waiting for the receipt.

What it seems that happened is that the hotel charged me in TRY (instead of EUR) at a different exchange rate creating a shortfall. Even though the hotel currency is listed as EUR.

Taxes were included in my rate.

[Lady London]

It’s a con.

Prepaid is prepaid.

Some countries do have local taxes paid only when staying – France is a case in point – and I am sure the 18 lire quoted above for Turkey is accurate. The amounts for such taxes are usually miniscule.

Hotel has to choose – either Turkish or Euro currency. In IST they price in Euros which is doubtless advantageous. Once it’s prepaid they can’t have their cake and eat it too and decide to change to whichever currency is most advantageous. Prepaid is prepaid.

Other than the 18 lira or so per night, tell them to take a funny run and complain to Marriott. Don’t pay it as you”ll never get it back even if they get told to pay it back.

[John]

I’ve never had a Turkish hotel charge in euros even when their rates are in euros. They always use their own exchange rate to convert to TRY which may be close to the interbank but sometimes is quite far.

If they do use a scam exchange rate you can’t even avoid it by paying in euros cash because they still insist that they have to convert to lira first.

This is why I decided I would only do prepaid via hotels.com or use points. Not been to Turkey since the exchange rate dropped below 7 lira per £

Can’t really comment on the OPs predicament unless more details are provided, namely the amount and currency charged to the card initially (from the original wording sounds like the hotel may have used DCC scam to convert to GBP themselves?), the amount of extra charges in TRY, and the dates so we can find the actual daily exchange rates.

As mentioned the daily tax is 18 lira for 5 star hotels, so a 500 lira overcharge is not for taxes, unless there were 3 adults in the room and the rate was 50 euros a night??