A young family enjoying a weekend away at a new ritzy Sydney hotel were left furious after learning the valet staff had lost their car keys.
Claudia and her partner Blake paid $580 for one night at Darling Harbour’s W Hotel with their eight-month-old son on Friday, along with $90 to park their car in valet.
After checking out on Saturday morning, the couple were told it would be an hour’s wait to get their car from valet.
They waited for 30 minutes but after seeing other guests who’d arrived after them get their cars, the couple again asked how long the wait would be.
They were then told their car keys had been lost and were asked to keep waiting as staff desperately tried to find them.
Claudia and her partner Blake paid $580 for one night at Darling Harbour’s W Hotel with their eight-month-old son on Friday, along with $90 to park their car in valet
Claudia shared her ordeal on TikTok and said it was nearly two hours before their keys turned up.
‘When we got to the valet, the staff were looking around all confused but at the time I just thought it was because they were so busy,’ she said.
The family, from the NSW Central Coast, had planned to meet family for brunch just after 11am following check-out.
But because their keys were lost, they not only missed the brunch but also were unable to explore Sydney before returning home.
‘They were telling us ”we’re sorry, we are looking and we are trying to get on top of it”,’ Claudia said.
![Claudia said they waited nearly two hours before learning their keys had been found](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/12/04/02/78536975-12821467-Claudia_and_her_partner_Blake_paid_580_for_one_night_at_Darling_-a-2_1701655534478.jpg)
Claudia said they waited nearly two hours before learning their keys had been found
‘At this stage we’d been waiting for half-an-hour. We’re late to brunch and my partner and I skipped breakfast so neither of us have eaten all day.’
Claudia said the valet staff were behaving ‘weirdly’ and did not give her or her partner any information or updates about what was being done to find the keys.
‘They kept just saying ”give us time and wait”. You can see them literally so confused searching for these keys and they kept being like ”what’s the make of your car? what do the keys look like?”,’ she said.
Blake eventually wrote down on a piece of paper the car’s make and model and what the keys looked like, but staff weren’t any closer to finding them.
Frustrated with the lack of communication, Blake went upstairs to reception and asked a manager to deal with the situation.
‘This manager wastes our time taking all the information, she disappears around the corner, and we never saw her again,’ Claudia said.
‘She never came back, she never followed it up. Never checked back in with us, she literally disappeared.’
The pair eventually spoke to another manager who offered to put them up in a free room while they waited and gave them complimentary room service.
Claudia said they’d already been waiting for over an hour and their baby needed to be put down for a nap.
It wasn’t until the family were getting in the lift to go to their room when they were told their keys had been found.
![The family had travelled from the Central Coast to stay in Darling Harbour's new W Hotel](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/12/04/02/78536973-12821467-image-a-10_1701655289752.jpg)
The family had travelled from the Central Coast to stay in Darling Harbour’s new W Hotel
The mother said because they were so hungry and their son needed to sleep they stayed in the room for him to nap before getting their keys and leaving.
Claudia stressed that while she had no complaints with her stay at the hotel and praised the manager who put them up in a room, the family could have saved valuable time on their holiday if staff had been up front with them.
‘The whole ordeal from check-out to the baby sleeping was about two hours and we just had to wait for our baby to have his massive nap in the room so we’re just wasting our day sitting in this room quietly while the baby sleeps,’ she said.
‘We didn’t get to see any of Sydney, we didn’t get to see our family.
‘It wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d just been honest with us from the beginning because we could have walked to our lunch but we’d already chewed into 30 minutes of it by the time they admitted the car keys were missing.’
Claudia confirmed she was refunded for the valet parking in her video, which has been viewed more than 28,000 times, and said she had written an email to the hotel.
One TikTokker guessed the valet accidentally put their keys in his pocket or in another car.
Others have claimed they’re no longer interested in staying at the hotel.
‘Just cancelled my reservation I had in a couple of weeks. No thanks!!’ one commented.
‘I’m staying there this weekend.. definitely taking a pic of my odometer now,’ said another.
‘This just shows the inexperience of the staff, honesty is always the best policy,’ one person commented.
A spokesperson for W Hotel confirmed the keys were ‘misplaced for a short period of time’.
‘The car was secured at the time parked in the hotel’s internal car-park. The keys were subsequently located, the hotel’s General Manager reached out to the customer to apologise and the matter has been resolved.
‘W Sydney prides itself on its 24 hour service culture and its responsiveness to customer feedback.’
***
Read more at DailyMail.co.uk