Terrible and cruel

<p>What happened was, we told them we would be arriving between 8-10 pm. Their check in time ends at 8pm but on their booking forms they say if you will arrive after 8pm make arrangements, which we did on the booking form, after paying the deposit. My friend called them and told them again that we would arrive between 8-10pm. They said no problem we will leave the key for you if 9pm hits and you are not here. While doing pickups for all the people coming on the trip between 6pm and 8pm we start getting calls from a lady(whose name I think is Carol) who says she is the owner of the lodge enquiring on where we are as check in closes at 8pm. We tell her we are about to leave but also remind her of the arrangements that have been made. She tells us she knows nothing about these arrangements and tells us she is cross with us. She then says if we arrive a minute after ten we will not find her at the premises. (I must mention making this trip happen was such drama, from people pulling out to car troubles)<br /> <br />Anyhow, we leave Cape Town past 8pm. Trying to chase the time to get there before 10 pm. She continues to call and we tell her we are doing our best to get there on time. At about 9:50 pm we are just getting off the n2 into the road that leads to Herm****, she calls and says she is leaving and we will not find her at the premises.<br /> <br />Long story short we arrive at the premises at 10:30 pm<br /> <br />We try to call her and her phone is off. We try again, we send an sms, no response. So we reconcile ourselves to the fact that we are in Herm****, Friday night with no place to sleep. Mind you we have paid for this accommodation. So we circle around town and try and find a place to sleep. We call about five six places, go to hotels and backpackers, I must mention, there is someone who is 7 months pregnant in this car.<br /> <br />We were so confused about what to do<br /> <br />We would go to the garage then go back to the premises eventually we stuck to the garage and watched night owls get pies.<br /> <br />We parked there until 4:45 am the next morning. We then decided to go back to the lodge and parked outside so we could try check in in the morning because we were so tired.<br /> <br />At about 5am, this lady comes out of the house (where she had said she was not staying and would have left at 9:50 pm previous night) and asks us to leave and tells us she has called the police. She tells us she has cancelled our booking and will be refunding us the 50% deposit amount. She tells us our booking has been given to other people. At that time she has some security guy also there to enforce our removal.<br /> <br />( What is to upsetting to me is that the whole time we were calling the previous night, this lady was on the premises but chose to ignore us, points up for hospitality).<br /> <br />So we do not fight, i mean we are tired, we have been sleeping in the car at the Shell garage.<br /> <br />We make our way to leave, we go to another garage (I think Engine), pour fuel to make our way back to Cape Town. After which the lady calls and tells us to come back to check in. I do not know what changed her mind and how quickly the people who had received the booking would vacate the premises. However we went back. We even paid the full amount to her for the Friday we slept outside and the Saturday which we slept there. The booking by the way had not been given away. She did not apologize. I must tell you when she was chasing us away the first time she told us to come another weekend. Laughable. At checkout there was no apology from her. She just said we should come again, like nothing had happened.</p>