This may be only a horror story to me, but I am going to write about it anyways. My girlfriend and I wanted to go to the Mall of American in Minnesota about 5 years ago. I went online and looked for hotels as close to the Mall as possible. As you can imagine most were full, but I finally settled with a hotel about 1 mile away. That's close enough for me. I booked the hotel, used my credit card to reserve and was going to pay with cash when I arrived. This seem to be a practice the hotel was ok with.

Finally the day arrives that we can go on our nice weekend together. After about a 5 hour drive across the state of Wisconsin (not a good time at all) we are in Minnesota and searching for the hotel. There it is, right near the highway, right near the Mall, perfect. Until we get inside the hotel of course. They wouldn't accept my cash payment. The credit card I used wouldn't cover the total cost, I only used it to reserve the hotel. Again, I was under the impression this practice was ok with them. Guess I was wrong. Now, what do we do? We try to contact my g/f's mother to see if they can pay for the hotel and I will reimburse them when we get back. No answer on the phone. The hotel clerk looks at us like we are going to drive home to get another credit card, or as if we can just drive 10 minutes away to get ahold of my g/f's mother. Ah, not going to happen. We plead with the manager to get us our room until we can get ahold of her mother to take care of the prepayment. After about 15 minutes and thoughts of a great weekend being ruined, he finally agrees to put us up in the room we reserved online. Which, by the way, was supposed to be a queen single on the second floor. We get walked down a long hall and towards the elevators to the second and third floors. Looks good, we must have been able to reserve a room and actually get that exact room. WRONG. We got a single, single room, RIGHT next to the swimming pool, stairs AND elevator. Plenty of noise to be had by all.

All in all, we got ahold of her mother and she agreed to help us out until we get back. Ok, that is taken care of and we can relax for now. The wrong room wasn't really any big deal (only a place to sleep is what we needed), but the noise was ridiculous, hence the reason I "reserved" a room away from the pool area. Oh yea, and the free breakfast left plenty to desire. The breakfast itself was good, BUT it was first come, first serve. Once it was gone it was gone. The early bird certainly got the bird on that one.

I am not going to mention the name of the hotel, because I am sure it's changed names by now. Thanks for letting me rant.

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