American Red Cross Statement Regarding Unused Hotel Rooms During California Wildfires

The American Red Cross has determined that an unusual number of hotel rooms were purchased but never occupied during the last year's wildfires. These rooms were intended to house volunteers sent to the area to assist with the relief effort.

Wildfires are always chaotic, unpredictable disaster events, making it difficult to gauge just how many volunteers and supplies will be needed in a certain area. In the midst of the uncertainty last fall, the Red Cross wanted to ensure that we were prepared to respond on a large scale if necessary. Part of that preparation meant acquiring adequate space to house our disaster workers, so we chose to reserve rooms at hotels in the San Diego area.

Red Cross disaster workers should have noticed the unused rooms and acted more quickly to cancel them. However, we believe other instances of unused rooms may be billing errors by hotels. In yet other instances, hotels billed the Red Cross multiple times for unused rooms without calling to ask about the absence of customers.

We have already asked several of the hotels to reimburse the Red Cross for the unused nights, in particular, those hotels who did not ask about the absence of customers. We are awaiting their response but we hope that the hotel community in San Diego will generously extend refunds for the unused nights.

We are now taking several actions to ensure that this does not happen again, including:

Rewriting the contract with the vendor who acquires hotel rooms on our behalf. It is important that rooms are cancelled before we incur charges. The revised contract will ensure that hotels inform the vendor of unused room nights and that the vendor, in turn, informs the Red Cross in a timely fashion.

Reviewing hotel invoices weekly during disaster operations.

Providing more detailed instruction to our disaster workers about how to better plan for the use of hotel accommodations and how to avoid a surplus of unused rooms.

Having an employee from the hotel vendor on site at Red Cross disaster relief operations to help volunteers manage hotel accommodations.

Laura Howe
Director, Disaster Public Affairs
American Red Cross National Headquarters