Help! The Hotel I Booked Online Became a Homeless Shelter and No One Told Me.

Dear Tripped Up,
Last month, I was to attend a friend’s Saturday wedding in Manhattan and then catch up with my husband at his family reunion on Sunday in Atlanta. So I booked a room at the Queens County Inn and Suites in Long Island City via Booking.com, not far from LaGuardia, where I would catch a 6 a.m. flight Sunday morning. But when I arrived at the hotel around 11:30 p.m., I found it had been converted into a homeless shelter. Alone and nearly five months pregnant, I felt very unsafe in the neighborhood and finally got an Uber so that I could wait at the airport as I contacted Booking.com. The representative did not seem to appreciate the gravity of the situation, and told me she needed to email the hotel and give them 30 minutes to respond before she could help. Over an hour later, the representative, who told me no supervisors were available, said I would receive an email with new lodging arrangements. I never did (and the hotels I tried were all booked because of the U.S. Open tennis tournament). Meanwhile, LaGuardia was closed, so I waited outside — in a wheelchair a kind maintenance worker provided — until the doors opened at 4 a.m. The hotel didn’t charge me, so money is not an issue. But I’d like Booking to take another look at their customer service and safety procedures. Can you help? Anna, Atlanta
Dear Anna,
Arriving to find the hotel you reserved doesn’t exist is a nightmare scenario for any traveler, let alone one who is pregnant and in an unfamiliar neighborhood late at night. I’m glad you’re OK. (Also, the next time someone complains to me about spending the night in the airport, I’m going to tell them they were lucky they weren’t locked out of it.)
Who is at fault here? I’m going with “pretty much everyone.” You get a partial pass, though the Booking.com reviews of your hotel — a 5.9 average that is among the worst in Queens and worse than all but one hotel in Manhattan, when I checked recently — should have raised some alarms. Still, even if you chose a place reviewers called “dirty,” “creepy” and “funky” and (as a quick Google News search revealed) had more bedbug reports in the 2010s than any other hotel in the city, it should have been open when you arrived.
It turns out the hotel’s problems run deeper than bedbug-stained mattresses: It was one of three Queens properties owned by Kaushki Patel and Chandresh Patel, who were accused in a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Labor in 2018 for not paying overtime and not keeping payroll records. In a consent judgment, they were ordered to pay more than $720,000 in back pay and damages to 83 employees.