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A woman was charged more than $600 after cancellng a booking at a fancy restaurant.
Australian Lorida Quiambao, 36, booked a table for six at Restaurant Navi in Yarraville, west of Melbourne on Saturday.
But on Thursday she started to feel ill so decided to cancel the dinner, which she had planned as an early birthday celebration.
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Quiambao said she then woke up on Friday to an email from the restaurant informing her she had been charged $1,020AUD ($681) for the cancellation.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, Quiambao said: “I saw that they'd charged my card with no additional information. They could have at least spoken to me first to explain.”
Quiambao said she appreciates that restaurants need to charge cancellation fees but thinks the one given to her by Navi was a little on the steep side - insisting that they had charged her ‘the absolute maximum they could have’.
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Navi serves a set menu that costs $170AUD ($113) and uses fresh, locally sourced ingredients.
The restaurant charged Quiambao for six of these set menus, as her booking had been for six people.
Navi chef and owner Julian Hills told the Daily Mail that for bookings of five people or more the restaurant requires at least five days' notice for cancellations.
He said: “Failure to do so may incur a cancellation/no show fee of the full menu price. In light of current circumstances with COVID19 this is not always feasible, but we do ask for as much notice as possible.”
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Hills said that some dishes started prep four days prior and that he also needed time to order ingredients from suppliers.
He also pointed out that a table of six would take up a quarter of the restaurant’s capacity.
“So to lose 25 percent of a night’s bookings means a big financial loss for us when margins are small,” he said.
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The chef said that people who are on the restaurant’s waiting list are sent a text message when a cancellation is made and that 'all efforts to fill the spot (and therefore offer a refund to the patron when/if the table is able to be filled as advised) were engaged'.
“Customers who cancel late are refunded when we are able to fill the cancellation in part (ie a table of four even if the booking was for a table of six) or in full,” he said.
“When customers call us we make all efforts to try and action this even faster.”
The restaurant has since told the Daily Mail that it was able to fill Quiambao’s booking and has since refunded her.
Claire Reid