Guest User
August 11, 2022
🚫🚫🚫Stay at your own risk ❗️❗️❗️Exceptionally unreasonable hotel counter staff that screams and shouts at her hotel guests, threatening to call the police.
We had a misunderstanding on both ends with regards to the hotel’s laundry services. As laundry on-site was listed on the hotel’s description under amenities, we asked if we could use the laundry services upon checkin in. The counter lady informed us to pass us our clothing by 9am the next day, which will be returned to us in the evening. There was no mention that the laundry services was chargeable at any point in time.
On our 2nd night, we received our washed laundry - ironed and dry cleaned. We were puzzled as to why they have been dry cleaned when we wanted our laundry to be washed in their washing machines on-site.
On the 3rd night, we received a note stating that we have to make a payment of 60,000k won for our dry cleaning services. When we went down to explain the situation from our end (we were not informed that the service was chargeable, and we certainly did not asked for our clothing to be sent for dry cleaning), the counter lady went berserk and starting screaming and shouting at us. We were put on a phone to speak to the owner of Am Ort Hotel, he seemed pretty reasonable and suggested to split the bill by half between us since it was a misunderstanding on both parties. We should not have assumed. And they should have informed us upfront. However the counter lady refused and threatened to call the police.
We were in our rooms, showering and having our dinner and the counter lady rang up our room, each time threatening us with 경찰 (police in Korean). The owner also turned up at our hotel room door and rang our doorbell and asked us to go downstairs to settle.
It was unfair that it wasn’t made known to us the laundry services was chargeable. The owner shared that in Korea, laundry = dry cleaning services and asked why should they lose money as a result of this and fork out $ and we should not have assumed that laundry services would be foc. While we were trying to settle this, the counter lady shouted a whole slew of Korean words and repeatedly saying they’d call the police on us.
The police arrived. One of them was taking the owner’s statement, while the other one stood quietly by the side reading our translated version of our side of the story. It seemed to us that the police taking the statement was telling the owner to settle this amicably amongst ourselves (they did not speak to us foreigners at all). Thereafter the owner suggested that we pay 40,000k won while they cover 20,000k won. The counter lady kept her silence the entire duration when the police was around. But she started shouting at us the moment they left again.
We proposed to the owner to split half, 30,000k won each to which he agreed. But it was met by sniggers and the lady calling us crazy (in Korean which we understood). They had originally wanted one of us to stay at the reception counter while one of us go upstairs to bring the money down, which we refused as we both went up together instead.
The counter lady also printed out our passport details and she seemed to want to threaten us that she had our personal information.
This was an extremely unpleasant encounter with Am
Ort hotel. What could have been settled amicably due to our misunderstandings turned out to be a stressful incident involving the police. The hotel staff were unwilling to discuss with us from the start especially the lady. Even when we made a request to trip.com to get a supplier in Korea to contact and speak to them, they hung up the calls multiple times as it was in English and not in Korean.
We were worried for our safety at night too. Overall the situation put us in much anxiety and distraught, especially when we are foreigners not understanding the Korean language.
Btw, we asked to change the bedsheets as they were soiled, but they were changed to another dirty set 😂