It started out with us wanting to take our Grandson for his 3rd birthday on his first overnight trip. When we got there for our reservation,, we had park access form 1pm on the day we start the room reservation. We go to check in at 12:45 and there was almost no line because they had quite a few "Pack members" manning the front desk. They let me know upon check in that our room is ready. Off to a great start.
Sadly, this is where the actual problems start to occur. Unbeknownst to me, the pack member at the front desk actually put a $10,000.00 hold on my credit card instead of a $100.00 hold per night of stay. Since the facility allows for your wristband to be charged all your discretionary purchases in the facility, I wouldn't find out until I was leaving and stopped to get gas and snacks for the ride home. I didn't have to sign anything with the amount indicated on it nor was notified so I would have had no chance to catch the mistake. I believe it was a honest mistake and understand how someone who is imputing the same or similar things all day could easily not hit the period key and then not notice the clerical error because they failed to review what they put in. Likely because they are actively engaging the guests as good customer service practices.
So when I finally get home and try to figure out why my credit card is locked, I notice the pending $10,000.00 charge (hold, but my cc doesn't care about the difference, the limit is completely locked up.) I call both coporate and the Garden Grove locations to ask them to rectify their mistake and they tell me its too late and no one who can do anything will be in until the next morning. They give me a complain number and tell me it should fall off in a few days if they caught it and changed it when I checked out and hopefully someone will respond to me before that.
The next morning, I again call corporate and they say someone will try and get back to me in a few days and that I should just try calling the Garden Grove branch. Mind you, at this point, my CC is locked up and I use my cc for my business purchases as well and at this point am having to halt my construction because I am late in the billing to payoff cycle and need to purchase materials to continue working. So I call the Garden Grove location and speak to a "Pack member" and they look at my account and realize and admit that they screwed up. She puts me on hold as she lets me know she is getting her manager. About ten mins later, she comes back on the line and apologies but her manager is in their daily group morning huddle but she will call me back in 10-15 mins. Three hours later, I haven't gotten a response and my cc is locked up still.
I call and ask to speak to the manager (Tatiana) and am put on hold for about 10 mins to which Tatiana finally answers. She immediately goes into the details of my situation to show she is aware of it and apologies for her employees mistake. She proceeds to tell me how she is going to have a stern meeting with the person and make sure this doesn't happen again. She says they fixed everything on there end and now its just the bank holding me hostage until they release everything. I point out that she never called me back and I was never notified that it had been fixed form anyone at Great Wolf. She responded with I expected you to be mad and I'm grateful your not yelling or acting angry towards us. She never acknowledged that she didn't respond to me and left me in limbo all day as to whether my situation was resolved on their end or not. As far as I can tell, it seems corporate and local management have no customer service etiquette once your out the door and they have already charged you when they make a mistake. Sad too, because overall, we really did enjoy the park but the amount of time, effort and calls it took to resolve an issue from their end resulted in a much more expensive and stressful "vacation" than it was worth.
Also to note, one of the main attractions was down for repairs for a few weeks and it probably is something they should note as my grandson was too big for the toddler section but too short for any of the main rides. He was perfectly sized for all the slides and features in the middle grouped attraction an it was closed for the entirety of our trip. If we would have known he would be excluded from almost 100% of the rides for his stay, we would have rescheduled, but instead we had no idea and nothing we could do about it. This wasn't a deal breaker to having fun, but it severely cut the value of what we received from our trip as well.
In conclusion, overall would love to go back and hopefully everything was working or at least we know to check and reschedule if it isn't now, but since the cost of them making a huge clerical error tripled the overall cost of our trip, it seems lackluster in value. Top that with the poor response form corporate and their in house management showing a obvious lack of care for their customers to even keep them up on what was done about the mistakes means they are on our "Not a good experience" and negative referral list. Wish it was otherwise but that was up to them and they chose that.
