The Fontainebleau Hilton Hotel
I heard that the Fontainebleau Hilton Hotel had completed lots of renovations and had a new pool so I checked out the Hilton web site looking for a nice ocean view suite. My wife and I are frequent travelers, easy to please, who are happy staying at a Hampton Inn or Marriott Courtyard, but we mostly choose 4 and 5 star resorts now, like the Boca Resort, The Breakers, Registry Resort in Naples, FL., Ritz Carlton, La Playa Resort, Marriott Marco Island, Trump Sonesta, Four Seasons, Copley Hotel, etc. Hilton's Fontainebleau website showed a fabulous picture of one of their suites that looked awesome, with newly designed plush appointed furniture and a nice wood dining table. I then looked on Trip Advisor for reviews from other people who had recently visited the Fontainebleau Hilton Miami within a month of my desired date, and there was my early warning that I should have taken more seriously. I saw headlines that said this, and I quote:

"Terribly disappointed", June 22, 2003
"What a terrible experience", June 8, 2003
"Rude, rude, rude!", May 6, 2003
"This old lady needs a lot of help", May 5, 2003
"Don't Do it..", April 16, 2003

I dismissed most of them as anal nit pickers going online to vent their petty complaints. Boy was I wrong, why didn't I listen to their warnings?! I'm still kicking myself in the butt for it! For the money I spent there, I could have gone to the Biltmore a few miles south, which is a world class resort, where Al Capone used to visit frequently. But no, foolish me, I booked our 2 room oceanfront suite for gulp: $700 per night, expecting to get the suite that they show in the photo describing their suites. This is on the extremely high end of pricing in Florida at the time, especially for an off season summer rate. I’d hate to see the winter rates. Hilton’s price was way out of line compared to much better resorts we just came back from the month before. At Marco Island we had a 2 room corner oceanfront suite at the Marriott Marco Island for $455, and it was much nicer, more modern than Fontainebleau. The Marriott suite even had a kitchen with microwave, where Fontainebleau did not.

Our Arrival at the Fontainebleau Hilton Resort Miami
So we booked the Fontainebleau and put our first night stay on the credit card as required. We arrived at the Fontainebleau Hilton late in the afternoon Friday August 1, 2003. Coming off the causeway, we almost missed it because the Fontainebleau II was under construction so the hotel sign was missing. No temporary sign, no nothing, no brains. Having driven by it in the past, I sort of knew where it was and took a chance pulling into a driveway that was indeed the Fontainebleau. The valets were quick to unload our luggage, and one valet read our name off his clipboard and verified "ok, you have three rooms…" Uh oh, did you say “THREE rooms?” There was our first little problem. We only have one reservation, a dual room suite. I can see how you might list it as 2 rooms maybe, but not 3. I'll clear that up when I check in.

"Mark my words, this is going to be an early indication of bad things to come for us this weekend”
The small line at the check in moved slowly but I finally made it to the counter. I told the girl I don't have 3 rooms, just the suite. “No problem,” she said, she thinks the suite books as 3 rooms. That type of Enron math does not add up for me at all. After several minutes of typing in her computer, I finally asked what is going on, I saw other people who arrived at the counter AFTER me leave the counter with their keys already. She was having problems booking the suite because it is trying to book it as 3 rooms, or maybe it's only only one room, or may be it’s 2 rooms, she can’t make sense of it. Wait a minute, don’t you do this for a living? I remarked that they do this all day long everyday, why is it so hard to book a simple suite? Another clerk came over and the 2 of them negotiated with one another about how to book it for a several minutes and they both disappeared into the backroom. Hey girls, the computer is out here, not in the back! They came back 5 minutes later and worked some more, and I guess they finally got it. Wow, 15 minutes later! I timed our transaction by their own clock on the wall. My wife kept giving me the evil eye like it's my fault because our 2 year old and 6 month old baby were wining. Note to self: young ones don't like being stuck for 15 minutes in line in a hotel lobby. At this time, being a former Motorola engineer specializing in root causing failure, and with my keen eye for cause and effect, I turned to my wife and said, “Mark my words, this is going to be an early indication of bad things to come for us this weekend.”

Here a fee, There a fee, Everywhere a fee fee
The clerk handed me the keys and said the suite has 2 doors with their own locks, but all 4 card keys will operate all doors interchangeably. Not convinced at all about the validity of her claim, I asked “are you sure they will all work? Why did you mark them separately if they open all the doors? I don't want to get up there and find they don't work.” She said “absoutely positive, these 4 room keys will all work on both doors.” She also informed me there would be a $17 per night charge to valet my car. Damn, why was that not mentioned on the web site? Another rip-off fee. Most local Florida resorts charged $10-$12 to valet your car, as opposed to the more expensive New York and Boston hotels. Fontainebleau Miami was really getting greedy for sub standard valet service. More on that later. Then our front desk clerk said there is a $3.20 fee per day to use the safe in the closet of my hotel room! I thought that was the most ridiculously insulting, petty hotel fee I ever heard of in my life. Forget that I’m already paying $700 a night for what should be a $289 max rate Hilton room, they want to squeeze maximum money out of us. Wait a minute, the web site said the safe was an included in-room amenity! So why did Hilton's web site fail to mention the safe fee or the $17 valet fee? False advertising maybe? I’ll tell you why they did not disclose it. Same reason none of the other hotels that pull these stunts don’t disclose it. Because 75% of the consumers would have bailed at that point and moved on to a better hotel. That’s why they didn’t disclose the fees. There were also 2 other resort taxes added to our bill. Why do we need 3 taxes for a stupid hotel stay? This is a big problem with hotels these days, there is no disclosure of valet, safe, coffee, towel, convention center, and resort fees that ad up rapidly. Apparently there are no laws that enforce disclosure either. Then the hotels cry on your shoulder that the hotel industry is hurting. Looks like the customers are the ones doing the suffering. This place is way big for their britches aren’t they? They forget they are only just a Hilton, pretending to be in the same league with the other local high end Hotels. Wow, $3.20 per day just to close the door on the safe in my closet! We were paranoid after that the whole weekend. We did not eat any food out of the mini bar, watch any movies, we didn't move anything, or open any doors. We flushed the toilet sparingly to avoid excessive toilet flushing fees, used the toilet paper 1 square at a time, to avoid excessive toilet paper fees! Just kidding.... You'll see later that a whopping total of $111.20 in fees was added to our room.

“Absolutely positive, sir, these 4 room keys will all work on both doors.”
We got up to our suite, the clerks words “absolutely positive, all 4 cards will work” still ringing in my mind. Our Suite was 1062/1063 on the eastern most end of 10^th floor of the Versailles building overlooking the ocean with a good view. The Versailles building is separate from the better designed and curved Chateau building, and looks older than the main building, and appears to not have been renovated which immediately concerned me, because I was hoping to be in the suite that I was mislead into buying on the Hilton web site. Our suite was the strangest design of a hotel suite I had seen to date. First, our key opens a double door off the corridor, and we found ourselves in our private foyer area, that contained 2 more locked doors to our 2 room suite. Well that’s strange, why do I have to unlock one set of doors, then unlock 2 more doors when I get inside? With normal hotels, you open your door, you are in your suite, you live happily ever after. Ok, so now we have to unlock more doors to get into our room. And guess what, I was right, the card keys did not open both doors in our suite like the front desk clerk promised, we had to scan them all to figure which 2 cards went into which door, 1062, or 1063. Not only did Hilton's clerk's not know how to book our room, they could not program the card keys properly either.

First thoughts on our $700 per night suite
We get into our corner suite and we were immediately disappointed. It looked nothing at all like the misleading suite photo on the web site. It was an old ancient room, the furniture appeared to be from the 60's and looked very boring and looked like it was not updated since it was built. The ceiling paint was in bad shape. No problem, we got our 2 room suite, we are here to relax, no complaining, we'll roll with it. We joked that maybe Hilton stole the image of the suite off the Four Seasons web site! I still chuckle about that to this day, because the suite looks nothing at all like the picture. My wife looks for the fridge advertised on the web site to put the baby bottles in, guess what, it's not there! Now we are up to three items shown on the Hilton's web site that are not true. The web site specifically stated it was an in-room amenity, where the heck is our refrigerator? If they are going to charge me $3.20 to use my safe, they better have the fridge in the room like they promised online. I specifically chose this suite because the web site said it came with a refrigerator and my wife insisted we needed it for baby bottles. So no fridge. Damn, where is the baby crib, or rollaway bed that we requested for the kids, the one that was printed on our confirmation? Why can't most hotels ever have the baby crib in your room when you check in? Because they are not run by parents who travel with cranky kids that need a nap when they check in. That's always a sore spot for us causing many hotels to lose brownie points. We called the front desk to complain and very soon housekeeping brought us our promised rollaway bed, the crib, and the fridge. Now we have almost what we were sold on the web site.

About the Suite
One locked door of the suite takes you to 1063, which is not a bed room, it is a living room/dining room/mini bar/bathroom. There is no bed in the room, very strange. The bathroom was old and dingy with black moldy grout all over the bathtub area tiles. Completely unacceptable in any other Hotel we would have stayed in. Even the bathroom in the $53 a night Motel 6 in Iowa last year was cleaner. The bath tub in our suite was very tiny, my wife joked that maybe people back in the 1950’s were small. I never saw bath tubs so small. Through the air vent over the bath tub, I could hear conversations from other rooms and sound proofing was terrible. Being a student of architecture, I never thought sound proofing could be an issue in a hotel design until I witnessed it here. The other locked room of our suite, room 1062, contained the one bedroom and corresponding bath. Warning to parents, the balconies at this hotel are extremely unsafe for young kids. The railings were very low, below my belt line and a small kid could easily crawl over. I guess during the era this hotel was designed, child safety was not part of the design considerations like it is today. Also, the bolts on the railings were all rusted and with rust stains running down the white railings and walls of the balcony. Not what you would expect in a Hotel pricing themselves in the same league as the world class Boca Resort. We are accustomed to minor inconveniences at hotels so we don't let them bother us too much. I’m just reporting what we saw. But those issues would pale in comparison to what happened next.

Let’s try to get some sleep…not!
We put the baby crib in the suite’s private foyer area separating the 2 individual rooms, and the baby had finally stopped crying and fell asleep. I was sound asleep by eleven, expecting to get up at 6 AM, fully rested, and work out in their gym downstairs. Then exactly precisely at midnight I heard loud voices and banging sounds in the corridor right outside our private foyer area that woke up the baby who started to cry, and she settled down again a few minutes later. These voices waxed and waned over a few minutes time as I headed to the bathroom. While in the bathroom, I hear our main suite private foyer area door opening up, and I instantly panicked. Adrenalin shot through my body like volcanic eruption. My eyes were dry, I could barely see, but I instinctively darted out of the bathroom toward the door, my heart pounding a mile a minute, thinking “Oh my God, the baby is right there in the foyer, and someone is trying to steal her!” Now the baby is screaming. I rush out there to find 2 bellhops dragging in another family's luggage. There was maybe a half dozen people in tow from the other family, fresh off their late night flight. They were all making one hell of an inconsiderate racket in the hall at this midnight hour. Looks like they left their manners at home. I asked every one to get out, while our frightened baby wailed on. The bellhops and the family started demanding to know what I'm doing in their room, and I yelled at the bellhops that they should know better, we arrived this afternoon, we are checked into this room, our cardkeys open the door, please leave, you woke up our baby. They all grudgingly left us with our screaming baby, and it took about 10 minutes to settle her down. Then at 12:10AM, there was a loud knock at the door, and the baby started wailing again. Now what the hell? Now my wife is fuming. This time, extremely tired and irritable, I was not so diplomatic when I opened the door, with my very upset wife and now 2 screaming kids are awakened from REM sleep.

"Sorry to disturb you but...what are you Doing in this room?"
Two rent-a-cops start to interrogate me, wanting to know who am I, what am I doing in the room, can they see my ID. I abruptly cut them off and in a much louder voice than theirs, now that whole damn floor is already awake, I scolded them for ruining our stay in Fontainebleau Hilton Miami, waking us up, making my kids cry, we own this room, a deposit is already charged on my card, for $700 I don’t need this crap….blah, blah, blah...go deal with the intelligent folks at the front desk, now please leave. They apologized and said they would straighten it out. I told them there is nothing to straighten out, we booked the room a month ago, they charged my credit card a month ago for the first night already, and we own this room, here's my ID, bug off! Then I closed the door and spent the next 10 minutes calming the baby, and my 2 year old daughter.

Now what the $@#%&*$$?
The baby finally quieted down in her crib again by 12:20AM. I got back to bed, and at 12:30 AM ten minutes later, the un-frigging-thinkable happens; the phone rang in our second room! Now what the $@#%&*$$? The baby starts screaming again, the 2 year old starts screaming again because the phone is in her room and ringing. This CANNOT be happening, it’s got to be some kind of sick joke. I’m now expecting Alan Funt to come walking around the corner and laughing: “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!” Just then, I remembered Alan Funt is dead. The phone is still ringing, I better get to it. I run into the other room trying to get to the phone and it stopped after 4 rings. It was probably the idiots downstairs with more psycho babble, you know, like the sound the adults make on the Charlie Brown specials? The heck with them it can wait until morning, I have possession, and hence legal ownership of the room. This time it took almost until 1 AM to settle the baby. Then I had to lay with my 2 year old daughter until 1:30 AM until she stopped trying to get back out of bed. I was really fuming now because I knew my gym workout at 7 AM could not possibly happen now. I could not get back to sleep again until 4:30 AM, and woke up at 7 AM when the kids woke up. I was now exhausted, irritable and my whole Saturday was out of whack because I had zero energy. That’s what I call a relaxing vacation. Certainly not the “Bounce Back” vacation pictorial on their web site. At this point I really began to torture myself for not heading the warnings of the other Fontainebleau Hilton victims on Trip Advisor.

Ok, it's Saturday morning, pool cabana time, nothing can go wrong, right?
Ok, so now it's Saturday morning, things can only improve now, because we have a cabana rental today! Boy was I wrong. I went down to the front desk which handles the cabana rentals. This is a really bad idea bordering on shear stupidity for a hotel, because most hotels offload cabana rentals to the much more talented pool people to free up front desk bandwidth, so they can concentrate on making more suite guests wait for 15 minutes while they try to book their suite, with room keys that don't work. I inform the clerk we have a cabana reservation and he fumbles around in the system, sees our reservation, but can't figure out how to cash in our cabana reservation into an actual cabana rental. You have got to be kidding me! Before I knew it there are 2 clerks trying to figure out how to execute our cabana rental. I ask them, “you guys do this every day, 365, for 20 cabanas, what is the problem here? I saw people in your cabanas yesterday when we checked in, so I KNOW that you must know how to rent them out!” “We’ll get it, sir.” They disappear in the back for 10 minutes, what are they doing back there? They finally emerge with our cabana keys. Total time I spent at the counter: 15 minutes. This was completely inexcusable for something as trivial as a simple cabana rental that was already in the system. At this point I’m extremely upset that I spent $700 for the room, and expected a lot better caliber of talent at the front desk for the money we were spending. I'm not asking for the world, no over the top special requests, I just want to perform a standard everyday non-complicated function performed by the front desk 365 days a year. No one likes to wait around 15 minutes while people who should know their job cannot perform it. People in line behind me were getting pretty upset too, why are 2 clerks working on one customer? It blows my mind how in this big recession of 2000-2003, with thousands of qualified people out of jobs, why is it that the few remaining employed people are so inept at their jobs? A good reference point for you, when I rented a cabana at The Breakers in Palm Beach, we merely showed up at the pool, told them we have a cabana reservation, they checked off my name, and walked us personally to our cabana, total time 60 seconds. Fontainebleau could learn some valuable lessons in customer satisfaction from the People at The Breakers. Before I left the counter I demanded to know who it was that called my room and woke us up at 12:30 AM, and asked that they send the hotel manager to my cabana to explain what happened. The clerk said they have no way of telling who called. I’m an engineer, thinking that has got to be the most pathetic attempt at a lie, they know every time you pick up the phone, so they can bill you. They sure as heck know who called my room at 12:30 AM. If it was not the front desk, the only thing I can think of was that it was the other family prank calling us, angry that we were in “their room”. Of course the manager never made it to our cabana like I was promised. I was not surprised, either, apparently one of many promises broken.

Our plight greatly improved Saturday at the Fontainebleau Hilton
From then on, everything went pretty good at the pool Saturday. The Fontainebleau Hilton rebuilt the whole pool area on 4 acres of beautiful lawns, palm trees, waterfalls, and the cleverly designed Cookie’s Corner, a well thought out kid's pool area with a giant octopus presiding over a toddler's wading pool. There was also a 3 story tall water slide, and a lazy river raft ride. They could have taken water slide design points from the Registry Resort in Naples, because the Registry's water slide was much faster. I kept getting stuck on the Fontainebleau Hilton water slide, it was not steep enough. The pool attendants at Fontainebleau Hilton were all the best employees we encountered there, they worked hard to keep everyone happy. The funny thing is they are not even Fontainebleau Hilton employees, I think they are an outsourced company. They make you sign out every towel you take, but very strangely, they don’t make you sign them back in at the end of the day. Not very good accounting. That must have been an Arthur Anderson implementation for them to improve asset tracking, figuring it worked so well for Enron. The better pool chairs are gone by 9 AM so get there early if you want one. We had our reserved cabana so no problem for us. Fontainebleau dropped the ball for themselves financially by not building more cabanas by the newer adult pool, they could have easily sold them all out. That pool fills up rapidly. All the cabanas during our stay were located next to the kiddies pool in the Coolie’s Corner area and standard size, but disappointingly, the lounge chairs were not cushioned like they are in every single other cabana we have rented in other resorts. One differentiator with cabanas is that they should usually have upgraded comfort seating. We have become spoiled cabana connoisseurs, and could teach many a resort the proper way to do up a cabana right. In fact, we only try to book resorts that have cabanas now, because they are a much needed luxury when you have kids, and they can bring cribs to your cabana too. Since the year 2000, they have increased fiercely in popularity here in Florida. I got a massage in one of the cabanas since the spa was under construction. It was one of the better deep tissue massages that I've had, which relieved all the stress from the traumatic night before. Kudos to their massage therapist, 20% tip there. The restaurant employees were all quite friendly, and food was quickly delivered to our cabana by the beachside grill, after we phoned in our order from our in-cabana house phone. We wanted to go to Club Tropigala of the lobby to see the Cirque Du Monde, but the kids were too young, and we had no babysitter unfortunately.

Architecture of the Fontainebleau Hilton Miami
We took a stroll along the beach beneath the Versailles building and saw something that made me chuckle. One of the patios a few floors below ours facing the ocean has a huge bite taken out of the overhang. I thought it is a miracle they still have a certificate of occupancy. Also, the north side of the Versailles building has got to be one of the worst designed buildings I have ever seen. Imagine a 12 story building, with no windows on the side of it. Then you have two huge pipes coming off the roof and running down the middle of this building all the way to the ground. What the heck was this? I would sure hate to be staying at the Eden Roc next door and having to look out my balcony to see that nonsense. That's when we realized the place to be is in the curved Chateau building, which was a radical and controversial design in the 1950's. It was dismissed as a poor design by most critics and yet many architecture students to this day still study it. If I had it to do over, I would have chosen a much cheaper room in the Château building.

Second verse, same as the first! Only I didn't feel like Henry VIII!
Ok, we could not possibly have a duplication of Friday night's holocaust, so let's try to get a good night sleep on Saturday night. Forget it, it just was not in the cards for us. I should have called Miss Cleo for a free reading before we planned this weekend, I bet she saw it coming. Saturday night was just as bad as Friday night. We put the baby in her crib in the foyer again like we did on Friday night. In our private foyer area there was another door, a third door, leading to the room of the people next to us. I guess the door allows you to add yet another room to your suite. The only problem is, the poor design of this Versailles building only had 1 door between our suite and the room next door. Every other hotel I had been to always has a double door with an air gap, for maximum sound proofing and privacy. This paper thin acoustically transparent door was a poor design. It had no doorknobs on it, just a deadbolt lock with no key. Also, the door looked to be about 2" off the floor, so now bright yellow light was spilling from the Loud family's room into our suite when we were hoping to put the baby to bed. By 11:30 that Saturday night, the rude obnoxious people next door were loud, drunk and boisterous. Their noisy racket came pouring into room through that large gap at the bottom of the door. It sounded as loud as if they were in the same room with us. On top of that, one of them was smoking, on a non-smoking floor. They kept banging something, I could not figure out what it was, irritating the hell out of me. It went on for a half hour, and every time they banged, they all laughed. I'm surprised no one called security on them. I came damn close to calling the police until it finally stopped. We could not wait until the next day to get the heck out of there.

Another shot at the Cabana rental
On Sunday we had another cabana rental. I was already dreading another 10 minute cabana transaction and so I showed early just before the 9 AM cabana check in time at the front desk. This time it only took 5 minutes for the clerk to get my cabana key. Not exactly Six Sigma in transaction time, but better than Saturday. I got out to the cabana and the key did not work. That did not surprise me. Apparently these are old units and old worn down keys. The pool attendant people once again came to the rescue, getting on the phone to call security for another key. One of the pool attendants kept trying and finally got the key to open the cabana door. I laughed as I saw other cabana patrons struggling to open their cabana doors as well. Once a gain, the pool attendants were the shining stars of the hotel. I then had an excellent foot reflexology massage which was much needed after a night of poor sleep. At 11:30 AM we went to the Bleau View Sunday Brunch that everyone brags so much about. It was one of the better brunches and most expensive I've been to, both in the presentation and quality of the food. It ranks up there with the brunches we have been to at The Registry Resort and The Breakers. I was a bit surprised at the price, $45 per person, which is probably why it was not sold out like other brunches. In fact the dining room was only half full. The stations there were beautifully arranged and they had carved meats, crab and shrimp stations, a seafood raw bar, sushi, caviar, pastas, salad, breakfast items and desserts, fruits, ice creams, custom omelets. You could get your money's worth on the seafood station though.

“You can check out any time you like, but can never leave.”
Finally we checked out of the room... Or at least we tried to. I'm accustomed to automatic check out using the system on the TV. So I got onto their checkout menu system on the TV, reviewed my bill, and selected check out. I kept getting an error message stating the system could not process my request, please try again in a few minutes. I kept trying and it never worked. Great, we had a miserable $1800 weekend, now they won't let us check out. By now I’m thinking of the old haunting Eagles tune Hotel California: “You can check out any time you like, but can never leave.” So now I'm thinking, great we are now detainees of the Hilton Corporation. I tried to call the front desk twice, but got no answer. That did not surprise me either, I'm sure all the clerks were tied up spending 15 minutes trying to book suites and rent out cabanas. So we headed downstairs to check out of the Fontainebleau Hilton Miami via the good old fashioned manual method at the front desk. I sure hope they know how to check you out of the hotel!

The housekeeping staff and bellhops did an excellent job however. At least they knew what they were doing.

Whoa, what the heck are these fees? You never told us about these!
When the front desk printed out our bill, there was a few other surprises. On our bill was 2 other nasty fees they did not inform us about on the website, they just showed up on the bill when it was printed:

Fee #1: "Resort Rooms Tax-R" for $21. Not sure what that is, since we already paid a 7% sales tax of $49.

Fee #2: "Convention/Development Tax-R" also for $21. Not sure what this fee is either. Sounds like another "taxation without representation" fee the county charges.

The above "taxes" are something they are required to charge I guess, but again I ask, why was this not disclosed on the web site? Because virtually 100% of the customers would balk at the fees, and move on to another Hotel. I'm just glad there was no Oxygen breathing fee. Shhhh they'll here us. So in addition to the predictable 7% sales tax, how do all the hidden fees combine to launch your effective room rate into the stratosphere? Since the Fontainebleau Hilton Miami thinks it's not their responsibility to disclose all their hidden fees to you their paying customer, I thought I'd take the liberty to disclose these fees to you. This will give you a more accurate depiction of your actual cost to help you plan your vacation budget better. The fees are accurate as of September, 2003. You should always call the front desk to ask them what the current fees are that they are charging.

A Whopping total of $111.20 in fees added on to our Suite room rate!

From the above table it is now obvious why the Fontainebleau Hilton Miami did not disclose all the fees on the web site. The fees turn your $700 hotel room into an $811 hotel room. I can tell you if I knew those fees were there before I reserved a room there, I either would have skipped this hotel altogether, or chosen a much cheaper room. Hotels know this and that is why they don't give us consumers up front disclosure of all fees. Published room rates mean nothing anymore, you need to look at the entire package deal, and call the hotel to ask them all the different fees they charge. Many hotels also charge you $15 per day to even to self park. These are the same cash flow shell games that some car dealers play.

We are out of here!
We gave the valet our ticket and he was gone 15 minutes. That is completely unacceptable, and the longest we ever waited at any hotel for our car. They were not busy either, just us, and one other couple waiting for our cars. They must have parked the car in Key West, and were waiting for the next bus to take them to our car! Also, we ended up having to show the valets how to load up our trunk. These guys do this every day, how could they not figure out how to get 5 bags into a trunk? Ok, what do I do now, tip myself for a job well done? Finally we pulled out of the Fontainebleau Hilton forever, with big grins and cheers. Yeah, we are out of the grip of Hilton. The Fontainebleau Hilton can’t touch us now, we have our lives back. We drove on home, expecting to live happily ever after....or so we thought. We could not have been more wrong. I somehow knew the reign of terror was not over yet.

Come on, you saw it coming! Billing Errors
A month later my credit card statement arrived and immediately I saw 3 charges for $56.50 and one for $53.50 from the Fontainebleau Hilton Miami on my credit card, that were not on my checkout bill. What is this garbage now? Billing errors? Credit card fraud? What scams are they pulling now? On September 10, I called the hotel finance department and left a voicemail, as "all their finance agents were busy". I'll bet they were! I left all the information they requested on the voicemail, and asked them to call me back. They of course did not. I called them again on September 15, and again got no call back. By now I was totally furious, we drove out of that hotel a month ago and they are still ruining our lives! At this time. realizing I am the victim of another Hilton scam, I logged into the Better Business Bureau site to file a complaint and what I found there totally shocked me. I read the Better Business Bureau report on Fontainebleau Hilton, which you can read by clicking this BBB link below:

In the BBB report on the FONTAINEBLEAU HILTON RESORT I saw this very discouraging statement:

"Based on BBB files, this company has an unsatisfactory record with the Bureau due to unanswered complaint (s)."

"The Bureau has requested basic information from this company. The company has declined to provide this information. Without this information, the Bureau may not have current information concerning such things as the company's management or its nature of business."

The above information was accurate as of September 15, 2003. Now the BBB just shows an "F" rating. Why in the world did I not run the BBB report BEFORE I wasted my money at the Fontainebleau Hilton? I am a consumer advocate who always tells people to run BBB reports on a companies like car dealers, extended warranties, and escrow companies before they deal with them! I guess I never thought to check for hotels, thinking there were no reports for hotels. Because I never thought in a million years that all that bad karma would happen to us. Ok, so if the Fontainebleau Hilton won’t cooperate with the BBB, what makes you think they will cooperate with you when it hits the fan?
Finally on September 19, 2003, I developed a new strategy. I called the hotel, and instead of asking for the accounting voicemail line that never calls you back from the operator, I tricked them instead. I asked for the front desk, pretended to be a guest staying in the hotel today, and I need to talk to one of the girls in accounting. I got patched right through! My Jedi mind trick worked. After spending some time with me on the phone, the accountant offered to "call me back later". I refused, telling her "no, you will resolve this right now, with me on hold." She informed me that the $56.50 charge on my credit card is the cabana rental, she said it should have been only $53.50, and there should have only been 2 charges, not 4 of them. She said there is a known bug in the system that overcharges the cabana by $3.00. Aren't there laws about this? Think of all the other guests who don’t notice the extra charge on their credit card and get suckered by Hilton for this fee. Ok, so they know about it, why didn’t they adjust this for me when I checked out? Why did they not inform us that the system over bills us when we checked out? Why were the cabanas not even on our invoice at checkout? And how did the system get one of the cabanas priced correctly at $53.50, while the other three were incorrect at $56.50 if there is a known bug? Who knows, who cares, they said my credit card would be credited. There was also another bogus charge on my credit card for $1.13. They could not explain where it came from, so they removed it. At that point I explained to her that they should give some thought to removing the $1800 charge for my room too! I wonder how many thousands of guests see a $1.13 charge on their bill and don't question it. Time to call in the feds and the SEC.