"We arrived at the hotel exhausted at 12:30 AM after a 14-hour drive. As always, my wife checked the bedding for bed bugs. This time, she actually found one — a live bedbug crawling on the box spring stitching under the mattress.
We immediately went to the front desk, showed them the bug, and asked to be moved. They said there were no other rooms available. So at 12:30 AM, we started calling other hotels in the area. After about an hour and a half, the front desk clerk found a room for us (a guest had not shown up). He moved us and promised they would refund the Saturday night stay plus the $10 service fee as a goodwill gesture because of the bedbug. He said the manager would process it on Monday.
Three days later, I followed up at the front desk before checkout. They assured me a note had been left for the manager. Two days after that, I called the hotel. A front desk supervisor rudely refused the refund. She was condescending and argumentative, claiming that because we had stayed in the other room, we no longer qualified for any refund. She showed zero empathy for the fact that we had found a bedbug literally the moment we arrived after an exhausting drive.
This experience is completely unacceptable. Discovering a bedbug upon arrival is bad enough — being lied to about a refund and then treated so poorly made it much worse. We will be disputing the charge with our credit card and reporting this to La Quinta corporate."