An interesting story out of Florida:
ST. PETERSBURG — It was the glitch that kept on giving.
That’s how Choice Hotels International, one of the world’s largest hotel chains, portrays a flaw in its online reservations system in a lawsuit accusing a St. Petersburg man of fraudulently redeeming gift cards worth $48,500 in a rewards program for loyal customers.
Robert Chat, 38, discovered the Choice Hotels booking system didn’t erase his rewards points when he canceled a reservation, the suit said. So Chat began making, and quickly canceling, hundreds of reservations from October to January, then redeeming gift cards earned as a “reward,” Choice Hotel alleges. Chat denies wrongdoing.
The gift cards could be used at a wide variety of stores and restaurants, including Dunkin’ Donuts, Home Depot, Target and Applebee’s.
Chat defends himself thus:
Chat, 38, who said he had not been aware of the lawsuit until a reporter asked him about it, wrote in an email to the Tampa Bay Times that he received less than 10 percent of the $48,500 in gift cards alleged in the lawsuit.
“I’ll be hiring a lawyer tomorrow to fight the suit as there was nothing done illegal nor was anything done in malice,” Chat said late Tuesday. “I stayed at over 1,100 Choice hotels in the last five years … I worked with their bonus structure to obtain points.”
Fascinating stuff! I wonder who else knew about this? Chat couldn’t have been the only one. And it’s hard to say for sure, but from the way they’re describing the glitch I’m surprised this wasn’t discovered earlier. Or maybe it was and I just haven’t heard about it?
As for the question of who’s right and who’s wrong, here’s how Choice puts it:
The lawsuit said the rules of the program make it clear that customers earn the points for “actually staying in a Choice Hotel room and paying for the room in full.”
“Frequent stay programs are common throughout the industry and neither Choice nor its competitors offer rewards for frequent reservations,” the lawsuit said.
Regardless of who’s right and who’s wrong, I’m glad this is being settled with a civil suit rather than a federal criminal court case.
This statement is either poorly worded or incredible.
Yes. If true, they are suing their best customer. Would have been smarter to tell him to stop or fix the glitch.
I actually think the company is right in their legal position. It’s akin to as if you find $100,000 suddenly in your bank account and then withdraw it. When a reasonable person would know its a mistake and then appropriates it, it’s not yours (and may be a crime). PR and marketing wise, they should have stated they are letting him keep the money and giving him like 50 nights free in return for “reporting a bug in their system to them”, and will also offer rewards in the future to people who find “bugs” in their system. Even if he didn’t report it, make that deal with him and get good PR and also cheap QA from the public.
Yeah, I’m mostly sympathetic to Choice on this one. I think Gary Leff had a pretty good write-up today, btw.
This guy’s defense is an obvious one. Put the burden of evidence on Choice to show he actually received the gift cards and spent them. Same applies to showing which points came from what if he was indeed a heavy traveler. Given how poorly some of these programs are run and documented from a systems perspective, I wouldn’t be surprised if he beats it even if he was caught red handed. That’s not say he’s right in doing it either. There is a slippery slope folks tread between taking advantage of a gap in controls and outright exploiting a loophole. A few thousand dollars in would have been when I would have questioned the risk/morality in what I was doing. This guy’s greed, and apparent perception that it wasn’t his problem to obey the rules, kept him going to 40k+. That’s a lot of money and outliers like him are why normal folks trying to stack deals and make enough points for a nice yearly vacation get wrongly singled out as deadly parasites.
Robert Chat, Choices is a billion dollar company, now if they didn’t monitor they points, Fuck-em, they fuck over thousand’s of peoples’ and now they want to sue, because they ass got fuck, sue the peoples who put the website in for you big dummys, Oh I forgot thats’ yall company lol.