Unfairly treated by the Auxillou
Unfairly Treated by the Auxillou Beach Suites, Caye Caulker, Belize
Here is our story:
We made reservations in August for 7 nights at the Auxillou Beach Suites – arriving Nov. 30, and staying 7 nights, through the night of Dec. 6 and checking out the morning of Dec.7.
We arrived Nov 30 and checked into our suite. It was a nice unit - one of four suites that make up the hotel.
On the morning of Dec 6, the landlady, Wendy, asked me if we were about ready to move to the new location. I told her I didn’t know what she was talking about. She said we should have gotten an email telling us that we were going to be moved to another place on the island because of the noise and dirt that was going to be caused by construction on the adjoining place. I told her that we had received no notice and this was the first I had heard about it. There had been the starting of construction over the past few days and it did not cause any significant problem for us, so we were a bit confused about why we were being moved now, but went along with it. As we were preparing to move, we found out that the people in the suite immediately above us had been told the same thing. A taxi picked us all up and took us to another hotel further down the beach and away from the center of town, where we wanted to be. We were checked in and shown to our room, which was greatly inferior to the suite we had at Auxillou. It was one small room with a bathroom. We needed to go back by Auxillou to pick up something we had forgotten, and noticed they appeared to be cleaning our suite. We also saw someone that had been a customer of the adjoining place sitting outside the door of the suite immediately above ours. This was the suite from which the other people had been moved. We also had been told that all guests were going to be moved, but when my wife went by the Auxillou later that day she noticed that the guests in the suite next to “ours” were still there and she spoke with them. They said that they had not been asked to move and that new guests had checked into “our” suite after we left. After this discovery and speaking with the owner of the hotel we had been moved to, we found out that the owners of the Auxillou had lied to us.. The Auxillou had called the other hotel several days before the move and asked for two of their least expensive rooms for us and the other people. This hotel had suites comparable to the Auxillou and told the Auxillou they could put us in those units, but the Auxillou declined saying they just wanted the least expensive rooms. We also found out that the person we had seen sitting outside the Auxillou unit above ours had moved into that suite and that relatives of that person had moved into the suite we had and the other upstairs suite.
Construction noise was never the problem. The Auxillou had double booked the suite we were in and simply wanted us out of there, perhaps because we only had one night left to be there and they had another group of people coming in who would be there for more days, and probably because the new patrons were paying more. The Auxillou simply dumped us in the least expensive rooms they could find, and most probably made a profit out of moving us.
Obviously, in retrospect, we could have simply refused to move, but at the time we never dreamed that their motives could be any less than honorable. We feel we were unfairly treated and cheated by the owners/managers of the Auxillou Beach Suites and would warn others going to Caye Caulker to avoid doing business with them.
Jack and Betty Richardson
Grand Junction, Colorado