My husband and I wanted to go to New Orleans to celebrate our 20th anniversary, and our best friends, who live several hundred miles away, decided to come with us.  We made reservations and paid for our rooms on May 29.

When we got to the hotel Nov. 8, we were told there was a power outage on one of the floors and were "randomly selected" to be shuttled to a much less expensive hotel next to the airport -- a half hour away from where we wanted to be.

First of all, I thought it was a rather fantastic coincidence that two couples who reserved and paid for their rooms six months ago in separate transactions would both be selected at random to be moved to a cheaper hotel.

We asked them to find us a room of equal or greater value in town and they said they couldn't because there was a convention of 29,000 neuroscientists in town.

That’s when we knew the desk manager was lying to us. And he must have thought we were pretty stupid because he appeared to assume we would believe him, even as the story became more contrived and obvious.

We asked to see the floor where the power was out and of course the desk manager refused.  We asked to speak to his boss and he lied again, telling us his boss was out of the country.

The truth was that there was no power outage. We had booked our rooms at a discount rate through Hotels.com and they were hoping to get neuroscientists who would pay full rate while putting us up in a cut-rate room with airplanes flying overhead all night a half hour away from downtown.

Fortunately, we had our cell phones and called Hotels.com.  Its representative called the hotel and demanded they give us our rooms.  We got rooms, although ours wasn't what we had signed up for -- we asked for two beds and got one.

No one ever apologized for lying to us and trying to con us out of our rooms.

Leslie Boyd, lesboyd@charter.net