7 On Your Side talks to expert about price gouging fire victims
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. (KGO) -- The Valley Fire spread overnight and burned 67,000 acres. Sadly, some people try to take advantage in these situations. Authorities are finding evidence of price gouging by some hotels and motels by the fire.
This week 7 On Your Side asked everyone to contact us if they had any evidence of price gouging and many people responded.
We heard stories of people being charged double and even triple the usual rates. Lake Point Lodge, north of Clear Lake, apologized saying the high rates it charged were a mistake. The hotel says all of those customers overcharged have been refunded.
We spoke to Joey Luiz of the California Board of Equalization, who went to talk to hotel guests and clerks to investigate the problem.
At his first stop, the hotel admitted they overcharged people. At other hotels he stopped to talk to the hotel guests before talking to the clerks and found that many of them were paying twice what the usual rate should be.
Luiz said regardless if it is a mistake or not, it is still illegal to charge people that way.
Some hotel managers he spoke to were apologetic or said it was due to a computer fluke and that their staff didn't know. Luiz then pulled out the penal code to inform them that their staff members need to follow the law.
Still, some customers were a little suspicious because even if it was a computer fluke, they shouldn't have been charging, in some cases, the same rates you would pay for a hotel in downtown San Francisco.
Luiz said he only informed authorities about one hotel that didn't seem to be very sympathetic to the issue.
The law states during a disaster, hotel and motels are not allowed to raise the rates more than 10 percent. In some of the cases Luiz saw, it was clearly, much higher than that percentage.
The computers could be raising rates due to surge pricing, but that still doesn't make it legal to charge customers those high rates.
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