Cuba. There's so much to say about this country and our experiences there that I have decided to break it up into two posts. We were only there for two days even though we planned on staying four days. So we will start with the story of our resort check in issues.
We booked our reservation with the Blau Costa Verde resort online. Our reservation was for the VIP (Plus) section with an Ocean View room. So it was one of the most expensive rooms the resort offered. The web reservation took our credit card information, our address and the total amount to be paid in US dollars. And then it said, "The total amount of the stay will be paid upon arrival. For payments made by credit card, the hotel, will charge a fee of 3% of the booking value as handling fee." We knew that you couldn't use credit cards in Cuba as the USA does not have a banking relationship there. But Blau is a Spanish owned company so we figured the credit cards would be processed in Spain.
So, we arrived in Holguin, Cuba. First stop was to go to the bank in the airport and change some of our US dollars to Pesos. Each Pesos is about $1.15 US Dollars. Next, we caught a cab to the resort, which is an hour drive and cost $45 pesos. (The resorts are in the countryside and a long way from the city.) We got to the resort and went straight to the check in desk. They told us how much our bill would be and we presented our Amex credit card. It didn't go through. We were confused....three credits later and the front desk clerk said with an attitude. You will have to pay cash. We started counting money and trying to figure out if we had enough for our stay. We would need enough money for the hotel and $40 to return to the airport.
This situation is new to us as we have never had this happen in all of our travels.
We were 34 pesos short for the resort and 40 pesos for the cab ride for a total of 74 pesos. We said, give us a cheaper room, downgrade us, we are fine with that. And they said, no, you will have to pay cash or leave we can't change your reservation. You will have to go to Holguin and stay there. We said where would we stay? And they said at someone's house. It was 3pm at this time and if we did go back it would be 4pm and we would be searching for a place to stay. The clock was ticking and we had no room. I asked to talk to a manager. So the front desk clerk said, "you can talk to customer service." And she pointed toward the Customer Service office. By this time a bus load of Canadian tour guests had arrived and we were getting nasty comments and looks from the people behind us.
We went to customer service, and someone was in the office with a complaint ahead of us. By this time the panic was setting in. We had no place to stay for the night and Blau was not being helpful. And the clock was ticking. (Customer service consists of one person for thousands of guests.) When we finally got to see her she was extremely nice. We said I think we need to speak with a manager. She said no, that is not possible, I can help you. She then recommended we purchase a internet card, go online and change our reservation that is the only thing we could do. Tick tock, $1.5 pesos for the 60 minute internet card and we were sitting down at an ancient computer trying to change our reservation. The computer was PAINFULLY SLOW. Tick tock. We finally get to the page 10 minutes had passed and the modify your reservation page errored out. We couldn't get to our reservation to change it. I went to find the customer service person while Gordon kept working on the reservation. I explained that the webpage wasn't working and she went to talk to the manager. She came back and said you will have to go to town there is nothing we can do. We said, this is a Spanish company can't you run the card from there. She went back to the manager. She came back and said no. I said can we just talk to the manager. She said no. There was A LOT of back and forth. During all of this our customer service gal disappeared. I went to office and a new person was sitting there. The first gal had gone home for the day. Luckily, the second gal was extremely helpful. We would suggest something, she would go back to the manager, and come back no. At one point I said, I don't think it will look good if you have guest sleeping on your couches in the lobby cause that's what we are down too. FINALLY, she came out and said, the front desk will change your reservation. I'm thinking, they could have done this all along. Checking in took awhile as we had to figure out how many days we had enough cash for considering we may have to find a place to stay in Holguin and pay for food. We settled on two nights. Finally, we were checked in and that nasty Tick Tock had stopped. We then made the trekked out to our room in the furthermost three story building and schlepped our luggage up the three flights of stairs as they don't have elevators. Mentally, we were in shock. At this point we had a room for two nights and nowhere else to go in a foreign country with very little money. Something we are not used too. We decided to deal with that issue tomorrow morning and headed to the bar.
The next day we weighed all of our options, which were, stay in someone's home (the hotels are all resorts so we would have the same issue at any other hotel) or see if we could change our flight to Tuesday and go home early. Fortunately, we were on JetBlue and they were able to work with us on changing our flights.
So the moral to this story is, if you from the USA and are going to Cuba take lots of cash!
So the moral to this story is, if you from the USA and are going to Cuba take lots of cash!
See the next post about our impressions of Cuba. :)
