Bad Customer Service
We recently had a tragic loss in our family and I decided to distract and cheer my wife up a bit by taking her to see some of the museums at Balboa Park, San Diego, yesterday. We booked the accommodation at Kings Inn on the same web site where we purchased the Balboa Park Stay-for-the-Day Passes. We prepaid the accommodation and Passes and received a confirmation email showing nothing was due at check in at the hotel (the email clearly showed $0 due at check-in in black and white). 
We arrived at approximately 4:45 p.m. after spending a very relaxing day at the museums and attempted to book in for our stay. The staff informed us that they would need to place a charge against our credit card for $25 as a security deposit. We told them that this particular card was “maxed out” and that we would prefer to pay the deposit in cash. They refused and said that they did not handle cash at all and that their policy is to charge a card. My wife pointed out to them that they had a sign up that said they accepted cash upon check out, presumably for outstanding balances. The assistant, Ana, said that they could not complete the check in without charging the card regardless of this fact. I asked to see the manager but was told that she was not available. When I asked why they then had a sign on the counter that said "Manager on Duty", they again just said she was unavailable; no explanation, no reasonable “she had to step out to deal with a family emergency” or something like that, just No.
When we showed them that our confirmation e-mail showed that nothing was due at check in at the hotel, she just said it is wrong and started reading through the fine print to find a loophole. When she could not find anything, she said that the booking agent was wrong and simply went back to her “I won’t budge on this” position.
I entirely understand that they wanted to charge a security deposit to ensure that they can cover minor, accidental damages to a room or property if something happened. I have stayed in a *lot* of hotels, both domestically and internationally and I have never, not once, had damage to a room or hotel property. Yet, I do not have a problem with them wanting to cover their bases just in case and we were entirely willing to pay the deposit, just in cold, hard cash not a charge to the card. Instead, because of their inflexibility and refusal to see reason on something this absurd, we decided to have them reverse the room charge back to our card and drive the hour and a bit back home and go out for dinner to our favorite sushi restaurant instead.
It amazes me how customer service has deteriorated to the point where someone would turn good business away because of a policy that nobody would dare to think logically about with sense and reason. Because of this, they lost a night's room revenue, as well as whatever we would have paid for dinner, for no good reason. To make it worse there was no manager that we could talk to and we were simply turned away point blank. No discussion, no reasonableness, no customer service, period.
Even the travel agent we booked the hotel and purchased the Balboa Passes through was shocked when we phoned them to confirm that the hotel reversed the room charges; the agent said she has never heard of something like this and would be taking it up with her manager as well because it may reflect badly on their services. Other reviewers have posted similar reviews at a different review site about being turned away last year, I cannot help but think this is something that has been happening for a while and they have not seen the need to change it.
We come to San Diego relatively frequently because we live about a 90 minutes' drive north and find it is a great place to go for impulsive, short notice breakaways for romantic or de-stressing weekend getaways. It is a downright shame how bad customers are treated these days because nobody is allowed to think anymore, especially in this economy. I wonder what their policy would have been had we been international travelers using just traveler’s checks. My advice to all travelers would be to look elsewhere and stay far away from bad customer service like this. I am sure that Kings Inn might possibly have lived up to the good reviews on several web sites that we saw, but we definitely did not see it or have the chance to experience it. 
Stay away and take your business elsewhere.