How Hard Could it be to Book a Hotel Room?

As my regular readers know, I have a great dislike for Guest Posts, however, I do allow for a few, especially those offered up by someone I sleep with (yes Mrs. C8j). She ran into quite a quandary doing something she has done many times before, and assumed it would be quite simple, or maybe not?

It shouldn’t be this hard, should it??

I do consider myself savvy in the hotel booking process.  After 6 years of booking hotel rooms for many teams, for basketball tournaments, I thought I was ready for the process.  In my attempts to book a hotel online, I found many twists and turns in the road.

History: Lovely Cajun daughter (LCD) #2 sent us a text saying she has applied to graduate from school, and graduation “weekend” will be May 9th to 12th.  Her ceremony will be on Monday, May 12th but events are planned all weekend.  (Apparently, it’s a lovely way to spend Mother’s day).  Unfortunately, we missed the memo about booking some kind of lodging for that weekend long before you know you will graduate.

The simple steps to do this should be:

1.  Google “hotels near Wolfville, Nova Scotia, multiple websites and pages appear.  Hmmm, enter the dates you want.  I enter the seemingly famous weekend, “There are NO rooms available for those dates, do you want to expand your search.”  OK, let’s go outside of Wolfville.  Found some in Windsor, but don’t know how far that is……..Here’s one, HOW MUCH??  OH, by the way, that one weekend is HIGH season in the middle of mid-season.  After much back and forth between the BCM and myself, I relent and book a room with two double beds.  (for potentially 4 of us, but better than nothing)
2. Text LCD and tell her we have a room, by the way, “how far is Windsor?”  Oh, not far, maybe 20 min.  Hmm, time to look at rooms there again.
3. A different hotel in Windsor looks great, bigger room, bigger beds, breakfast, pool with water slide for Big Cajun Son (just in case he comes)
4. Expedia’s site gives me a reasonable price, that is cheaper than the first Inn.  I enter all pertinent info, press book and voila, print confirmation and cancel room at the first Hotel (see step 1).
5. HOLD ON, What do you mean I just paid IN FULL for 3 nights.  CRAP!
   Cancel reservation on Expedia for Super Pi Hotel  Print cancellation confirmation
6. Let’s try booking through the hotel, type Super Pi Hotel in Windsor NS into Google, find site.  OK, re-enter all info, find the same room, seems to be 1 dollar more per night, OK I guess.  Press book, wait for confirmation email…………….HOLD ON, what do you mean you are charging me in American funds, what is going on???  Turns out I’m not on the OFFICIAL Super Pi Hotel Web site, just one that looks like it…….
7. Cancel Booking (again!!!!)  print out cancellation confirmation.  Big Cajun Husband now believes I am incompetent (not really, I think I was actually chuckling and trying not to have a laptop computer hurled at me).
8. Google Super Pi Hotel again, after a few wrong turns find the OFFICIAL site.  Enter dates, info, CAA number, the room got even cheaper, yeah!  We even decided to book an extra night.  Re-enter credit card number totally expecting Master Card to freeze my card.  Press book, get confirmation, print out, put in “safe place”.

Now we have to decide and figure out how we are getting there, hopefully it’s not this exciting.

For those husbands reading this who are thinking, “I could do better”, I dare you to say that a loud to your wife after she has done something similar. Yes there is no such thing as the Super Pi Hotel chain, however if you replace Pi with say a number between 7 and 9 you might have the real Hotel Chain name.