Hotel’s refunds taking longer than expected

Chris Bradbury said he was a regular visitor to Guernsey for both family and business reasons.

He had stayed at St Pierre Park three times previously and said it had always been pleasant.

The Guernsey establishment is one of 19 in the Hand Picked Hotel Group with others in England, Scotland and Jersey.

All are temporarily closed at present due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr Bradbury said he received an email from the hotel on 25 March saying that the holiday stay he had planned there for July was cancelled. When he asked when his £457.45 payment would be refunded he was told that the process had already started and he would get his money ‘in the next few days’.

When he did not receive anything he spoke to several people at the hotel.

While all were very polite, the last thing he had been told was that the hotel would refund him as soon as it could as payments were now in the hands of the bank and the hotel was unable to make them direct.

‘When I had a business trip to Egypt cancelled I had my money back from that hotel within two days,’ he said.

Hand Picked Hotels’ head of marketing and PR, Julia Gosling, said she was not in a position to disclose specific guest information or information relating to individual bookings.

‘Following the decision to temporarily close our hotels, we have experienced a high volume of enquiries and are working hard to ensure that refunds we have made across the business are being processed in a timely manner by our merchant service partners,’ she said.

‘In some cases we are aware that this is taking longer than expected.

‘These are challenging times, and we are hugely appreciative of the support from our guests and our team members and look forward to when we can indeed re-open.’