On July 12th, I checked-in with a group of 7 people at around 8pm. It turned out, the hotel's default is to assign smoking rooms, if no specific comment is made in the reservation. (Germany has a non-smoking ban since ~2008). This was not even mentioned to us during check-in, we had the pleasure of discovering the smokey rooms ourselves. No non-smoking rooms were available. When we asked whether the hotel could help us find alternative accomodation elsewhere, we were told "you won't find any accomodation for tonight anywhere in Bonn at this time".
After checking with our company's 24h travel support line, we were able to reserve 7 non-smoking rooms at the nearby Hilton Hotel. When mentioning our intention to leave, the hotel was suddenly able to identify 3 non-smoking rooms, which my colleagues took to avoid being charged a 90% penalty fee in case of late cancellation. However, they refused to let the remaining 4 people leave without charging them 90% of the room rate.
The next morning when resuming our meeting activities in the Maritim's conference room (booked and paid for 1.5 days), we were able to negotiate that only 2 people would be charged the 90% room rate. However at the same time we were notified that the hotel refused to cancel our lunch order, and charged us the full pice instead (45.- Euro/65.- USD p.P.).
While the hotel acted within its legal rights, I would have expected better service, especially as we had a whole package booked (conference room, dinner, lunch, rooms).
This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC