WORST EXPERIENCE all valuables stolen
This was for me, and my friends, the worst experience any of us have ever experienced at a hotel – and we were only there for 6 hours. I cannot advise people strongly enough to AVOID THE MECURY BEACH HOTEL AT ALL COSTS. On arrival the room was dirty, the pull-out bed was broken, the hotel was extremely noisy and the one member of staff available was terribly unhelpful, BUT this was nothing to what followed.
We unpacked our room, and went to eat at the restaurant below as we were tired from travelling and wanted an early night, we were gone for 1½ hours. We came back to our room, started to get ready for bed, it was only then we realised our safe had been cleared of all our valuables – between three girls we had a lot. We had our wallets, passports, cameras, sunglasses, and even worse, lots of precious jewellery taken from us.
At this point I went down to the reception to report the robbery and asked the young staff member sat behind the desk to call the Police – his response was flustered and proceeded to inform me that he could not as he was ‘un-allowed to dial out’, I told him this was ridiculous, that this was a serious incident and that it was the very least he could do. 5-minutes later he had STILL not called the Police. Eventually when the police turned up - Officer Fujita (Metro ID # 972), Crime ref 10-46826 – was helpful and requested a member of Crime Scene attend as so much was taken. At NO point did the manager, who was somewhere in the hotel, come to see us to ask if we were okay – bearing in mind we were three girls on our own, we were extremely shaken.
As suspected by the Police, the person who is responsible for this knew what they were doing, no lights were turned on – as a result the few valuables that were not in the safe were left behind – such as an Apple Mac laptop, iPods. They knew the lay-out of the room and headed to exactly where the safe was. There was no forced entry and the key system was a card you needed to swipe to get in.
Obviously we checked out at 1am that morning as we felt totally unsafe being there. Still no sign of the manager to see if we were ok, we even had to flag our own taxi to pick us up, to add insult the hotel charged us for that night of accommodation – we have spent the last TWO MONTHS fighting to get that back.
The next 5-days of our holiday were completely ruined, we had to find another hotel at 1am to stay for our duration, we had to spend a day at the British Embassy getting our emergency passports to get back to the UK, we spent hours on UK phones calling emergency lines, insurance companies etc, we kept calling the management from the Mercury Hotel to get answers we needed – they did not return our calls until the day we flew home – 5- days later!
The final insult has been the response from the management group who own the Mercury Beach Hotel. At no point have any of them been forthcoming in getting back to us or shown ANY sign of even empathy towards our situation, at times they have even implied (I have the emails to prove this) that we may have made this up, it’s a disgrace.
Nicholas Mavrikas, one of the hotel owners, asked us to send all out receipts for our stolen goods to him via email with a view of giving us some compensation, all three of us spent a long time doing this, nothing came of this, he simply said ‘he could not help any further’.
NEVER have we experienced such a shocking lapse in customer service, at no point were we shown empathy, understanding or a basic level of humanity. It was bad enough having my grandmother’s engagement ring, given to me before she passed away, taken from me but the worst thing to get over has been the disgusting treatment from this arrogant organisation who quite clearly are choosing to ignore that this was an internal job by their staff members.