In another attempt to honor the French Open, I will share a story about playing tennis in France. A couple of years back there was a tournament in Getxo, Spain (that’s where the picture of the open window at the top of my blog comes from) and directly after I played a tournament in Mont-de-Marsan, France. Getxo, Spain is in the Northwest corner of Spain by the better-known town of Bilbao, and Mont-de-Marsan is in the Southwest area of France, and the closest bigger city is Bordeaux.
I made a reservation with the tournament hotel in France and I also wrote the tournament director to inquire about housing. I was in the final of the doubles event in Getxo, Spain so I did not arrive to the tournament in France early enough to honor the reservation I had made. I did not cancel when I knew I would be arriving later than the day for which I had made the reservation because the hotel did not ask me for a credit card number or mention any kind of a cancellation policy. Before I eventually arrived at Mont-de-Marsan I was notified by the tournament that I received housing.
I arrived at France quite late for qualifying singles and was lucky enough to be the first seed in qualifying so I had a bye in the first round and was able to arrive in time for my first singles match. At some point I got a voicemail or an email from the hotel stating that they wanted me to pay 55 Euros for the night when I did not arrive. When I met the tournament director and got set up with housing and transportation he also told me that I needed to pay the hotel for the night that I made the reservation and did not show up. He said I could pay him, and he would give the hotel the money. I did not have the cash at that time with me, and so he said we would just talk about it later after the tournament was over. I got to the doubles semifinal and I won a round in singles so it was a couple of days later when I finally finished the tournament and the tournament director came back to me for the money he wanted for the hotel.
I told him that, quite frankly, I should not have to pay that night at the hotel because they did not ask for my credit card in advance, and they did not tell me about any 24 hour cancellation policy, nor was that policy stated in any way on my reservation confirmation. I told him that, had they communicated this policy to me, I would have cancelled earlier, or not made the reservation at all when I knew all along that my schedule could change at the last minute and I could receive a charge.
The tournament director became furious with me and claimed that I was hurting all of the other players because the tournament hotel would refuse to house the players the following year all because of my actions. I found it hard to believe that the 55 Euros the hotel didn’t receive from me would make a difference in their decision to host the players the following year, besides maybe the deflation of an idea that they cannot just squeeze whatever profit they would like out of the players. The hotel claimed that they held the room for me when they could have put other players in it but I had no way of confirming this. Also, as I said earlier, they made no steps to protect their own interests by claiming a 24 hour cancellation notice. In my experience, you cannot simply dictate policy to people as they show up-you must communicate policy ahead of time before the customer agrees to enter into the transaction.
Besides my regular instinct and mistrust of the situation, another aspect I did not appreciate was the tournament director actively putting himself into the business between me and the hotel. It was not his place to enforce any rules, whether conveniently made up at the time or consistently implemented after the fact, and he took the situation as a personal affront in an effort to bully and intimidate me out of the 55 Euros. I had never been insulted by a tournament director over anything before. He claimed that the tournament did so much for me by connecting me with housing that I was obligated to pay the 55 Euros, which only served to deepen my mistrust. I would have paid my housing without question, but I was not going to pay him or the hotel. In Australia they require players to pay their housing a flat rate for food and other expenses and I have no problem with that. I had been to many different countries before France, and I had NEVER been asked to pay for a room when there was no solid cancellation policy, or when they did not take my credit card information for the reservation. I told the tournament director this and refused to give him the 55 Euros.
He began to rage and rant, and, in French, told the person at the club who gave me my prize money what had happened and the guy called me an ‘arrogant American’ in French and literally threw the money on the counter. At this point I was so angry at being singled out in this manner that I was literally shaking, and I did not back down. The other players there agreed that I was in the right. After getting my prize money I went to the transportation desk to ask for a ride back to my housing and the tournament director stormed up and said, ‘No, no—you don’t give anything to us, we don’t give anything to you,’ and refused to let the tournament volunteers give me a ride back to my housing. I called a taxi, booked my train that night and left Mont-de-Marsan.
It was like being in Italy and ordering the same thing for lunch at the tennis club every day, only to be told a different price that increases every day. Or being charged 25 Euros for a 3-block taxi drive in Rome because ‘the bags use more gas’ even though I was notified by the train station that 10 Euros is the maximum price for that distance. When I refused to pay 25 and demanded my change back, the taxi driver threw the money on the ground. The next day I walked the distance he drove me, with my bags, in 15 minutes.
The happy ending from Mont-de-Marsan is that I kept my money and afterwards I got to spend three days in Paris with my Dad who happened to be there on a business trip.
Story
