Based upon our experience, Holiday Inns places a charge on the credit card the entire length of stay booked on their reservation service. Our experience occured from a reservation erroneously made for 31 days instead of one resulted in a $4,000 charge to the credit card.

We think of this as a questionable billing practice since hotel chains generally charge for only the first night of a stay on an Internet reservation.

Moreover, the website's options for correcting errors (changing dates, etc.) was found to simply not work and days have passed since attempting to resolve the matter by email. A call to the reservations office was no more productive with someone clamining to be the highest authority available advising that only the hotel itself could authorize the credit.

In our case, the necessary credit was only issued after an unnecessarily long wait by the local hotel reservation manager, who was apparently the only person in the entire chain able to authorize the rather simple task of issuing a credit for days that would not be spent at the hotel.

Caution is recommended in dealing with Holiday Inn reservations web site.