Terrible service, booked a room that I couldn’t use last-minute thanks to franchise policy.

I booked a stay here at Hilton Cocoa Beach Oceanfront with my girlfriend for saturday/sunday overnight. We had planned a beach trip in advance.

I booked our stay online through Hilton’s official website. I added myself and my girlfriend as the two guests being booked (second guest info not required), and the website specifically confirmed that minimum age for unsupervised guests was 18+ ‘adults’. We’re 20 and 19. Given that my own mother has a history working with Hilton, we were aware that some Hilton locations were 21+ only. This is why we specifically verified legal adult age for this hotel that we booked on Hilton’s own website for this specific Cocoa Beach resort. We were able to fully book & provide payment information for our room on the official Hilton website for this specific location with no issues as well.

We were appalled to find that after all of this, we were asked for ID at the front desk just to be told that we weren’t able to ‘book a hotel room under 21’ (even though we already BOOKED the hotel room).

How is it possible, let alone acceptable, to simply reject fully booked customers over an age requirement at this particular location that you purposefully misrepresent on your own corporate website for your specific location? How is it remotely legal that we were able to reserve this room in the first place, let alone be told we’re above the age limit just to be rejected last minute over franchise policy?

Thankfully this was a small one-hour ordeal from home. But this could be absolutely unacceptable for others who may be fully booking hotel rooms in advance for long travels. What are you supposed to do, potentially thousands of miles away from home vacationing in Florida, when the hotel room you booked and supplied payment info for is suddenly inaccessible when you arrive in-person? Where are you supposed to sleep then? This is a disaster waiting to happen for the unknowing customers that Hilton is exploiting within the 18-21 age bracket. Insane!

We asked the front desk for a refund for our already booked room. All we were told by front desk staff is that they would cancel the reservation, refund the charge, and ‘it’s all good’. We never even got a singular receipt. They didn’t even ask for a card number for the refund!

I don’t trust companies when they’ve already exploited me, so we double checked by calling Hilton corporate and having an agent verify that we were to be fully refunded for our room that we could never even check into. Then the agent was the first representative to actually retrieve my card number to process the refund to. They also checked with head of management at this location and informed us that we wouldn’t be charged a ‘cancellation fee’ as if that had any benefit to us. HILTON cancelled our room, NOT US. Our EXPECTATION is that we receive NO fees because we never stayed or cancelled! Regardless, at least Hilton Corporate was able to ensure that we weren’t paying for a useless hotel.

You know what really pisses me off? I guarantee you 100% that the front desk staff that ensured us that ‘we’re all good’, and that we would not be charged at all, had ZERO intention of actually cancelling the room. They never even brought my name up on their systems after figuring out that we were under 21, they never asked for ANY card information relating to the booked hotel room, and they simply rushed us out of the hotel so that they could tend to the massive line of customers that they were barely managing.

I guarantee you that if we waited until as soon as tomorrow to call corporate, let alone took front desk’s word and nothing else to ensure our hotel would be cancelled, we would be charged by tomorrow for a hotel we never stayed in, and chances are we wouldn’t be able to get refunded for a hotel we already booked and ‘spent the night at’ (never did).

Ridiculous. I will not be visiting Hilton anytime regardless of age when they can’t even handle their own corporate age legality.