My fiance and I put a $1,500 deposit down for a wedding last spring for the Best Western Sterling Inn. We were supposed to get married this August. Unfortunately we had a ton of hardships and had to give all of our saved money to my fiance's parents so they wouldn't lose their house. My fiance was laid off last October, his dad lost his job and his mom was only working two days a week, if that. There are nine people living in our house and we still couldn't pay all of the bills. We tried to sell our car and anything else of value to come up with the money to pay for the wedding. Well, we couldn't come up with anything so we had to cancel. When I called, they told me there was a cancellation fee of $3,000. Now, if I had $3,000 to cancel the wedding, I would have just made the payment... Common sense! So the Sterling Inn had us come in and sit down to discuss the issue. They ended up waiving our cancellation fee like it was a huge favor (not like they should have taken the money from us anyway... They had ample time to find someone to book the site - about 8 months). But, I did understand that they waived it for us. In the original contract that we signed, it said our deposit was non-refundable. BUT, when we went in and cancelled, the lady told us that we would get our $1,500 deposit back if someone else booked the hall for the same amount of people. I had my mother-in-law to be call at the end of June to see if there was an opening for the 270 person room and they said that room was booked. They said the only room that was left was the smaller 100 person room. Well, we thought for sure we were going to get our deposit back at that point. We waited a couple of weeks and called back. The lady from the Sterling Inn then told my mother-in-law that the room was not booked and we could not get our deposit back. I then turned them into the BBB and she continued to LIE to them and tell them that she never even made a verbal commitment to us! Boy, do I ever wish I would have had a tape recorder with me that day. So basically she is screwing us out of our deposit and going on a nice cruise in the caribbean.
Leah
Marine City, Michigan
U.S.A.