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Starwood Hotels & Resorts

777 Westchester Ave.
White Plains, NY

Never heard of Starwood? Maybe not, but it's a huge holding company whose brand names include Sheraton, Westin, St. Regis, W Hotels and the Luxury Collection. It owns 725 properties in 80 countries. It also operates a Web-based reservations service for its hotels, which is about the only time consumers actually come into contact with the Starwood name.

Lacey of Alexandria VA writes (8/2/01):
I used Starwood's online reservation service to make a number of reservations at the Sheraton New Orleans last summer; we were planning to meet family members there in November and weren’t certain who would be coming or when, or even where we’d be staying. As it turned out, I had to cancel all the reservations I’d made at the Sheraton, and I systematically went through and cancelled each one online. One reservation that I had a record of, though, did not show up when I searched for it. I looked for it by reservation number, by my name and Starwood account number, and by the other guests’ names; the site consistently informed me that there were no reservations listed. Thinking that I had cancelled the reservation earlier, when I had made other changes, without writing down the cancellation number, I believed that I had no existing Sheraton reservations. We were billed for those three reservations that the online site said did not exist, however. I sent a letter explaining the problem to Discover and to Starwood, and eventually someone from the Sheraton New Orleans called me. He clearly had no understanding of the problem I described, and even though I explained the situation multiple times, he kept asking me for a cancellation number. Since I couldn’t provide one, our request to not be billed was rejected, and we were charged for the three rooms. I then wrote a letter to Starwood customer service (the first letter went to Discover). We received a reply from Angeletta Anderson, again from the Sheraton New Orleans, who blamed the charges on the Starwood reservations website (just as I had done in my correspondence) and then proceeded to hide behind the User’s Agreement, claiming that problems with the website were in no way the responsibility of the company running the website. This latest reply was especially irritating, since it acknowledges that we were, in fact, charged for three rooms because of a problem with the reservations website, but then it claims that the company has no responsibility for those problems. I would imagine that any company truly interested in good customer relations would take responsibility for its own errors, instead of referring to deliberately vague legal language to shirk that responsibility. Worse, Ms. Anderson went on to encourage us to stay at the Sheraton New Orleans in the future — as if we would stay at any Sheraton Hotel again after the treatment we have received in this situation. After this letter, on March 5, I wrote to the president of Starwood, expressing my frustration, but I never heard back. Our charges for these rooms were $433.44. I find it absurd that a company would acknowledge problems with its technology and then refuse to take responsibility for the results of those problems.

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