Is this normal? Hotel charge

[OpenFires]

DH and I have just stayed for one night in a hotel. On arrival they asked for a card to take £150 charge to cover extras (I'd pre paid for the room online). We had dinner last night and the bill was £168. On checking out they still made me pay another £168 and said the £150 would be refunded to my card within a week and wouldn't allow me to pay the £18 balance. Is this normal practice now? I'm a bit put out by it- basically whoever stays here has to lend them £150 for a week?

Yes, normal and irritating. Why not knock it off the bill?

Is the card one for your current account (or an offset mortgage type account?). The practice autumn describes counts against your borrowing/spending limit but shouldn't be treated as leaving the account until it is completed. The fact that it has makes me wonder if the person processing the pre-authorisation screwed up and actually took the money.

In principle, the pre-authorised transaction should have been completed and the balance asked for. I'd definitely both complain to management and leave a review mentioning this on TripAdvisor. Ideally, of course, I'd have complained at the time (and only left a bad review if mistreated). .

Quite common. I guess in case of damage or theft from the room.

Was the money taken or blocked?

I have a specific credit card which I use for things like this and car hire. There's an extra layer of protection in case there's a problem and as the card isn't used for anything else you can easily see problems when you glance at the statement.

I'm certainly not that used to staying hotels but I have had this once, it HAD to be a credit card though, so made little difference. I stayed somewhere recently and they asked if I wanted to keep my card on file but I declined.

It is normal. Just make sure it goes back in! Last week I had £100 refunded back to my credit card from a stay I had in January. Stupidly, I’d not noticed the money was missing!

Its your check out was not normal.

Preauthorisation records should be held on the room and like you said when you departed they should have completed the authorisation and then charged the extra 18.

Theyve actually made more work for themselves as they will have to send your card details to the bank to cancel the auth and will have to pay two lots of credit card payments (roughly 3%) for putting through the two transactions.

The problem is that's it's very, very easy to make the authorisation through their card machine but really quite difficult to get it released, they should have completed the sale as pp have said.

They'll ask the bank to release it but then it's up to the bank how long it takes.

Nope this is unusual

Yes this is correct, you can ask them for a code to clear it then phone your bank up and they will clear it before.

Happened to me and hubby last year

Yes , this is completely normal with hotels

If what the OP is describing is an actual transaction for £150 followed by a refund of £150 (ie, it will appear on the statement as two items, cancelling each other out) then it's actually nothing like normal: I stay in about twenty hotels a year, and I see it perhaps once every few years and get very cross.

It's extremely anti-social, because it exposes the client to foreign exchange risk and, in almost all cases, to the bid/offer spread on foreign currency on a credit card, as well as any commission payable.

The hotel should take a pre-reservation, and then release it on checkout. Unless you are in the unfortunate position of travelling with a credit card which doesn't have a lot of headroom, that's invisible to the client, and free to the client. If they make a transaction and then refund it, that costs them money and, in many cases where the currencies aren't the same, costs the client money as well.

Yes, it's normal. It should just be a pre-authorisation though, which would then be released once you check out and settle the bill, should there have been an additional charges billed to your room. It takes about a week for the back to process it. I agree it's bloody annoying.