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| - The room at the Red Roof Inn--Tempe was paid for with grant money for an international guest speaker for Maricopa Community Colleges. On the second night of a five-night stay, her room was burglarized while she was sleeping. Her passport and over $2,500 were taken. As a foreign national traveling alone with a visual impairment, she made an easy mark and was most likely targeted by an employee, who would have known she had declined to use the room's safe, since her eyesight was too poor to see the buttons. The hotel lobby's surveillance camera shows her going to her room at 10:30 p.m. on Friday, March 16, 2018. The hotel claims the security system shows no one entering the room between 11:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. the next morning, at which time the theft was discovered. (I'm not making any of this up. The Tempe Police report number is: 18-31968.) Obviously, either the security system was defective or someone familiar with our speaker's situation knew how to by-pass the system and go in with razor-like precision. To our knowledge, no one else was burglarized that night at the hotel. We are looking into whether this incident is part of a larger pattern, perhaps targeting the money and passports of foreign visitors. After our speaker was robbed, she was so traumatized that she could no longer feel secure where she was. The hotel, after taking a report, turned the matter over to a Claims Consultant at the corporate office's "Risk Control and Claim Advocacy Practice." In the end, neither the hotel manager nor the consultant did so much as offer to reimburse the cost of the room, let alone accept any liability whatsoever for the theft of her honorarium and money (most of it from a federal grant, no less). A room had to be gotten at another hotel--and at the customer's expense, even after all the trauma she had undergone. That's lousy, lousy, lousy customer service. You can't call it anything else.
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