Hotel Charged Our Reader $566 Falsely Claiming They Caught Him Smoking

This past summer, we told you about a travel writer who was falsely accused of smoking in his hotel room and was charged $500 for doing so. The hotel used a supposedly sophisticated smoke detection system in guest rooms.

One of our readers posted a comment that the same thing had just happened to him and his wife at a big Las Vegas hotel:

Las Vegas Venetian Scam! Yeah don’t stay at the Venetian. Was there 4 days for our anniversary trip.

Everything was going perfect until checkout July, 17th. They charged us $566.90 for smoking in a room because they received an alert on their so called “100% accurate sensor Freshair. Funny thing is wife and I have never smoked a day in our life or smoked that one night they said it went off. Tried to be diplomatic upon check out only to be kicked down the road. What an insult. How stupid do they think people are? Being non smokers we support non smoking hotels and don’t even think about the sensors. But to accuse someone without any kind of investigation or show a print out of the alarm is unbelievable. Only a verbal time of approximately 11:52pm given. Tried to ask valid questions but they could not be answered.

We followed up with our reader to get more details. When he got home he did two things — he filed a dispute with his bank and he and his wife went to get a nicotine and drug test. They passed the tests which was no surprise because they are very careful in their home because their son was born with a lung disease.

I also directed him to Seth Kugel at the New York Times who writes the “Tripped Up” travel help column. Seth followed up with the hotel, but they refused to provide the proof that their monitoring system caught the Turners smoking.

All was not lost, however, because after a three-month investigation, the Turners’ bank, Hancock Whitney, sided with them, and reversed the hotel’s charge:

Congratulations to our consumer who fought hard and won. And hat’s off to his bank for taking an interest in his case. Unlike credit cards, debit cards like the one used by this consumer don’t have traditional chargeback rights by law, but the bank put through a claim anyway to Visa, perhaps as a fraudulent or unauthorized charge.