KOA Petaluma....A mild rant

kalynzoo wrote:
I understand your frustration. It bugs me to no end when employees challenge the customer. I was raised, and taught my employees, to know that the customer is always right until you can show that the customer is incorrect. When a product is mismarked at the grocery you expect to pay the marked price. With all this said, I do love Petaluma KOA, it is truly one of the gems in the KOA franchise.

Actually, a mistake in advertised pricing does not obligate the retailer to that price. As for the customer always being right, again that is a myth. Using your rules, if a customer says I was quoted a price over the phone of $20.00 a night for the site would you honor that price since there would be no way to show the customer was incorrect and the actual price is $65.00 a night? Having a policy of honoring whatever a customer tells you as the gospel truth is a recipe for disaster as far as I am concerned.
Customers get confused all the time. Many times they have made multiple reservations at multiple places for their trip and each one of those reservations was at a different price. We have multiple, redundant quoting and confirmation safeguards, yet we still have guests refuse to accept what we tell them. Among our safeguards is we store every email and send each confirmation out with a request for a read receipt. When the read receipt comes back to us, it is stored as part of their reservation.
It is easy to confuse the rate for Monday's reservation at Grand Teton with the rate for Tuesday's reservation at the Grand Canyon. Some customers will dispute the rate even though their copy of the confirmation which they hand to us shows the correct rate in black and white. We even have had customers who were adamant they had a reservation at our parks even though the confirmation they bring in has a different park at a different location printed on it. It really isn't anything nefarious, it is just people being people.