The ScamWe have a son living in Baltimore and we had to visit him for family reasons. He had told us that Spirit Airlines tickets were extremely low, so we decided to travel with the aforementioned airline.
Via Internet we contacted what was advertised as the sales department of Spirit Airlines which phone number is (888) 855-0930. The cost of the round ticket they gave us was $ 214.98 which we paid in full.
In this regard, we received the following confirmation via email:
The 2-hour flight between Fort Lauderdale and Baltimore was not bad, although it was a bit uncomfortable. Upon arriving at the Baltimore airport, we decided to confirm our return, scheduled for Monday, October 28, as shown in the email received and published above.
However, at the Spirit counter, after checking the airline’s computerized system, we were told that we did not have tickets or any reservation to return to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. We showed the email received showing the price of the tickets and information for both the outbound and return flights.
There we found out that we had not did business directly with Spirit Airlines; that the price they gave us for supposedly round-trip tickets was hugely excessive and that it was clearly a scam. They recommended us that we report the scammers and dispute the charge with our bank.
We had no choice but to buy and reserve the two return tickets for Monday, October 28, and surprisingly, the cost of the two tickets was $ 72, that is: $ 142.98 above the real cost.
We attempted dozens of phone calls to speak to the individuals who sold us the tickets, but all attempts were unsuccessful. We began calling them from the Spirit counter on the evening of October 25. We then called several times from the hotel on the 26th, 27th, and 28th and continued trying to contact them on subsequent days between October 29th and 31st. They never answered our calls. It seemed as if our phone number was registered so that we would not be answered.
Following the advice of the Spirit counter attendant, we immediately called our bank and after explaining the situation, we asked them not to pay the $ 214.98. In the video below you can see my wife calling the bank as soon as we left the Baltimore airport building and before calling Lyft to come pick us up.
As it is understandable, we were already quite upset and terribly tired from the trip and its setbacks. In addition, André could not find the address of the hotel and when we arrived at the front desk of the Courtyard, another unfortunate incident broke out.
It is not possible to reserve a room at the Courtyard by speaking directly to a human being. We had to make the reservation online. We made it clear that we would spend the nights of October 25, 26 and 27 to return to Ft. Lauderdale at noon on Monday the 28th. The system informed us that the cost for those THREE NIGHTS would be $ 487.63, which we secured with our debit card.
We were correctly and properly attended to by Mr. Ellis Hutt (Front Desk Supervisor), who, seeing himself somewhat confused because on the computer we appeared with a reservation for only TWO nights, called Mrs. She’Ron McVay.
Mrs. McVay was not very surprised by the “virtual misunderstanding” and tried to calm us down by offering us two Corona beers, which she said were on the house. She then did some math that only she understood and “reduced” our stay from well over $ 600 to just over $500, making it clear that she had to charge a deposit of $ 600 and something, which would be credited upon our departure, minus the consumption we would make during our stay.
So, both my wife and I were happy that we would have no problem with our reservation, although a bit disappointed by the “misunderstanding” caused by the robot that made the reservation on behalf of the Courtyard Hotel. Mr. Hutt was a bit reserved, but Mrs. McVay was all Easter, spreading joy and good vibes.
Since we were pretty paranoid about the stories about Baltimore and its high crime rate, we decided to hire Lyft to get us everywhere. Every time we moved somewhere, whether far or near, we hired Lyft, warning that we needed an XL vehicle because we had to transport my scooter.
Every time we travel and need to get around by Lyft, we request XL vehicles but on the morning of October 27th we requested an XL vehicle, however: they sent us a “mini-car” in where my scooter did not fit.
Because of my line of work for over 30 years, I have had to operate in many Third-World countries, I told my wife that in Baltimore I felt like I was traveling through Africa or Afghanistan.
We took advantage of our stay to do some sightseeing. We went to the National Aquarium, nothing special (we’ve been to better ones, like the one in Atlanta, Georgia, and the one in Gatlinburg, Tennessee). We went to the obligatory place: Fort McHenry, to the restaurants, and hired a Lyft to take us around Baltimore.
We invited our Lyft driver who took us to Fort McHenry to stay with us for the rest of the afternoon. Then we treated him to lunch at a great restaurant, “The Twist.”
We paid our driver $ 100 and invited him to have a wonderful lunch. That night, October 26 and the next night, I was forced to sleep in a recliner chair. I have given up hope of ever sleeping in a bed with a decent mattress. When we reminded Mrs. McVay on the night of the 26th that the refrigerator had not been fixed, she hugged us and kissed us: an indication that the hotel would NOT fix the damn refrigerator!
On the evening of October 27th, upon returning to the hotel we ran into Mrs. McVay: happy and cheerful as always…!
We reminded her that she needed to fix the refrigerator in our room for the benefit of the next guest. She replied that she would “keep an eye on it.” She gave us hugs and kisses and asked if we had a ride to the airport the next day and we replied that we didn’t. She then told us that she would call a driver to take us to the airport. She did not clarify that we would have to pay for that service. We thought it was her way of apologizing for the TERRIBLE service we received at The Courtyard Hotel.
In that regard, on the morning of Monday, October 28, 2024, after breakfast, we received a text message from the driver who would take us to the Baltimore airport.
We were ready. We loaded my scooter into the vehicle, as I had done so many times before, and headed to the airport. The driver was very kind, an emigrant from Ethiopia, where I had previously operated. Where Castro’s troops had committed any number of genocides, and to my surprise, the driver Ms. McVay chose was a Castro sympathizer.
Anyway. We arrived at the airport about 20 minutes later and when we got out of the vehicle, he asked us to pay him a little over $60 for the ride. That’s when another chapter of our trip to Baltimore began.
We told him that to our knowledge, the ride to the airport had been a complimentary service by Mrs. McVay and that we did not have to pay anything at all. We were under the understanding that this was a “VIP service” offered by the Courtyard, as many hotels around the world do. If they had told us that we would have to pay $ 60 for the ride from downtown Baltimore to the airport, we would have called Lyft. Furthermore, we told him that a ride from the Courtyard Hotel in Downtown Baltimore to the airport cost with Lyft no more than $ 33.40 – excluding tip!
I have traveled extensively throughout the United States. In 2012, I was hired to speak in 48 of the 50 states of the Union, excluding Alaska and Hawaii.
No one can’t expect to encounter no mishaps while traveling, but this trip to Baltimore was one of the worst I can remember since I first started traveling across all the continents of this planet in 1961.
It is well known that tourists are victims of many scams and that is precisely what bothers me. It was not the fact of having to pay $ 60 for a taxi ride from Downtown Baltimore to the airport. It is the fact of the scam itself and of being charged unduly for poor services.
For example, on the night of October 25th we had the bad luck to have dinner at The Choptank. That poor dinner cost us $ 113.29 and we left a $ 10 tip (8.84%) as a protest against the poor quality of the service and food. However, the next day we had lunch at Twist Fells Point where the service and the food were great and we left a $ 20 tip (25%), as a sign of how satisfied we were.
Of course, we refused to pay the $ 60 (plus) that the driver was trying to collect from us for the transportation service that Ms. McVay arranged for us, and such action from our part generated a reaction from Ms. McVay, supposedly representing the Courtyard Hotel, which led us to believe, perhaps unduly, that there was some collusion between she and the company that took us to the airport. We thought that perhaps there was a commission involved that benefited Ms. McVay every time she recommended the VIP transportation services that Ms. McVay had hired on our behalf. It would not be the first time that a hotel representative receives a commission for recommending services for the hiring of a particular company or individual.
In this regard, on October 28, we had just gotten off the plane in Fort Lauderdale (Fl), when we received a phone call from the driver who had taken us to the Baltimore airport, who was with Mrs. McVay.
Mrs. McVay warned us that if we did not pay the driver the amount he was claiming, she would deduct the amount in question from the deposit I had with the Courtyard Hotel, which seemed irregular to me, because that amount, in any case, was not owed to the hotel and it was a matter between a company that supposedly had nothing to do with the hotel or Mrs. McVay and us.
Mrs. McVay even asked to speak to my wife, and my wife stressed that Mrs. McVay had never spoken to us about the price or that we had to pay for the service of taking us from the hotel to the airport.
In the phone conversation, Ms. McVay offered a discount of about $10 for the service she arranged for us, however, we told her that we were only willing to pay no more than $ 34, which was what we had paid three days earlier when we hired Lyft to take us from the Baltimore airport to the Courtyard Hotel.
On October 30, a $ 590.11 charge to the Courtyard Hotel appeared on our bank statement and we set out to find out the breakdown of that amount to see if it included the alleged scam by the company that transported us from that hotel to the Baltimore airport on the morning of October 28, which, apparently, had nothing to do with either the hotel or Mrs. McVay.
We began a series of emails directly to Mrs. McVay, but as with the company that had scammed us with the airline tickets, we received no response. We sent several emails to Mrs. McVay’s account:
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We did not receive a response from Ms. McVay; however, the Spirit ticket scammers did respond! They did respond when our bank – Wells Fargo – blocked the $ 214.98 amount they had improperly charged us.
On October 30th our bank debited us the $ 214.98 that the scammers were claiming for the tickets from Fort Lauderdale to Baltimore.
On October 31st (the next day), our bank temporarily credited us with the $214.98 that the scammers claimed to charge us for the tickets they claimed to have obtained from Spirit Airlines.
Now they DID respond! On October 2nd we received the following call from the scammers:
As you can see, the scammers caved and agreed to credit us $ 140, which we received in our bank account on November 4, 2024.
The vast majority of those who have been scammed do not realize that they have been scammed. Those who do realize that they have been scammed do not have the material or intellectual resources to make the necessary and appropriate claims.
I, in particular, have a long history of fighting against corruption, injustice, scammers, and those who repress the human and civil rights of humanity, and I have been able to prove this throughout my 74 years of life:
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Of course, we know perfectly well that this case cannot be brought to a court of law. However, through my web site, I will be able to divulge the events described here. I cannot guarantee the monetary consequences that the Courtyard hotel will face due to the malpractice of one or more of its employees, but it will surely be more than the $60 or so that the transportation company “recommended” by Mrs. McVay supposedly defrauded me.
The moral of this story is that you should stay far away from the Courtyard hotel in Downtown Baltimore. DO NOT BELIEVE WHAT YOU READ ON THE INTERNET…!
If you are going to travel with Spirit, go directly and in person to the counter of that airline to buy your tickets, and when making hotel reservations, talk directly with a human being, not with a robot equipped with “artificial intelligence.” Of course, in the near future that option of talking to human beings will no longer be available. We, the people of flesh and blood, will be fewer and fewer… thanks to “philanthropists” like Bill Gates, but while we have the opportunity let’s exercise our rights!
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Fort Lauderdale, November 03, 2024
