A hotel pool burns a swimmer's eyes. Not true, the property says. Who's right?
To celebrate our first anniversary, my wife and I spent a week in Napa. Our trip was inspired by your "Iconic Itinerary" on California's wine country [April 2008]. We booked two nights at the Carneros Inn, one of the hotels included in the story. After swimming a few laps in the hotel pool, I felt an intense burning in my eyes. I immediately took a shower and rinsed my eyes thoroughly, but the pain persisted. In the end, I had to go to the emergency room. A doctor diagnosed me with chemical burns in both corneas and prescribed an eye rinse. A thick rubber contact lens was placed on my eyeballs and connected to a liter of saline solution, which was drip-fed into each eye. It was like medieval torture. Afterward, I was given prescriptions for antibiotic eyedrops and painkillers, and I returned to the hotel.
At the reception desk, I explained to the manager on duty what had happened, and he thought that the general manager would have no problem offering me a significant discount on the room as compensation. The next day, when I finally spoke with the general manager, he said that the chemical levels in the pool were fine and that I should get my eyes checked. That was all; no compensation. When I got home, I made an appointment with my ophthalmologist to make sure my eyes were okay—as the general manager had suggested. The doctor confirmed that there was nothing that would make my eyes more prone to a chemical burn, so to me it's obvious that the conditions at the pool caused the burns.
Our anniversary was ruined. While I agree that the Carneros Inn is a beautiful property, I think its management and its pool are not up to the standards of a $500-a-night hotel. Can you help us get some compensation?
F. Javier Neves
CINCINNATI, OHIO
Ombudsman is delighted that the pages of this magazine jump-started a reader's vacation. But we were disturbed by the photos that accompanied Neves's letter. In one, his eyes were closed as thin tubes administered saline into his eyes. These were not the images we would expect of a man celebrating his first wedding anniversary, and since we felt that the response could have been more sensitive, especially from a hotel on our Gold List, we contacted a Carneros Inn representative for a better understanding of what had happened.
We soon heard back from a vice president of the property, who acknowledged that the hospitality shown to Neves after the incident was not in keeping with the character of the Carneros Inn. A few days later, the hotel offered Neves a free night's stay, and Ombudsman commends the settlement.
Neves's experience might have been resolved more quickly if it hadn't fallen into the gray area of exactly who was to blame. It is impossible to pinpoint whether the chlorine in the pool was the culprit or whether something else triggered Neves's reaction. This same gray area arises with food poisoning, allergies to hotel fabrics, and so on. Without independent testing, one can't definitively prove or disprove anything. Most people don't have the time for such detective work, especially when they're on vacation, and the incident ends up going unresolved. Unlike obvious flaws such as exposed wiring or a swarm of ants, food-borne bacteria and high chlorine levels are invisible dangers. But this does not make complaints about them any less legitimate.
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