Man charged £55,000 for just one beer at a UK hotel

One man has been charged £55,000 for a single ale there, which he thinks could be ‘the most expensive beer in history’.

Peter Lalor, a cricket writer from Australia, still hasn’t had a refund for the bottle of Deuchars IPA which should have been £5.50. He was staying at a branch of Malmaison in Manchester ahead of the fourth Ashes Test match when he stopped for a drink at the hotel bar.

When he came to pay, it became apparent that something was not quite right.

Writing on Twitter, Mr Lalor said:

I didn’t have my reading glasses when she presented me with a bill for the beer and when she had some problems with the machine I didn’t think much of it, but it was eventually resolved, I said I didn’t want a receipt and she went to leave.

Something, however, made me ask: How much did I just pay for that beer? She checked, covered her mouth, started to giggle and refused to tell me, saying only there had been a mistake and she would fix it.

She kept giggling, I told her it needed to be fixed and fixed right now. She ran to get her manager who took the situation far more seriously and went about attempting to arrange a refund.

She told me somebody would be in contact.’

But Mr Lalor said nobody got in touch with him and he was unaware exactly how much had been taken from the account until he received a call from home. 

The sum of 99,983.64 (£55,300) had been removed from our account, he said.

And, there’d been a transaction fee of 2,499.59 (£1,380) to add to the pain. The fee has been refunded but not the larger amount.

Mr Lalor said it was ‘baffling’ that the transaction had been gone through ‘unquestioned’, and while he had been promised a refund in nine working days ‘in the meantime there’s a massive hole in my finances’. 

Around an hour and a half after tweeting about the incident, Mr Lalor said the hotel had been in touch and were ‘being very helpful now’.