NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF — When you fly out of the Nashville airport, you know parking can be difficult and expensive.
Several businesses near the airport offer special deals to folks who are looking for a place to park their car and maybe save a little money.
But a couple from Kentucky says their park-and-fly experience was anything but easy or cheap.
Before flying to Florida, Al and Bev Amstutz spent the night at the Cambria Hotel near the airport as part of the hotel's park sleep and fly package, which gave them a one night stay plus up to 10 days of free parking at the hotel while they were traveling.
But when they returned to Nashville this past Saturday night, their car was nowhere to be found.
"I said, 'The car was parked right there,'" Al Amstutz recalled.
"And I said, 'I’m starting to get a really, really funny feeling about this,'" he said. "I assumed it probably had been stolen."
So the couple went inside the hotel to the front desk, looking for answers.
"And she said, 'Your car has been towed,'" Al said.
And the Amstutzes then learned they weren't the only ones. They and 15 other hotel guests' vehicles had been hauled away.
"Was there anything that told you you shouldn’t be parking there? Were there any signs that said you could be towed?" we asked the couple.
"No," they replied.
Al and Bev were in shock. Then came the sticker shock.
The tow company said it was going cost more than $640 to get their car back.
The couple figured the hotel manager would help get it all straightened out.
But they said they were told, "'Well, I’m sorry the manager is out of town. I can’t do anything about it,'" by the front desk clerk.
They said the hotel was no help at all.
Bev Amstutz remembered, "I said, 'Call the manager. Call the manager."
But Al Amstutz chimed in to explain, "He (the hotel manager) wouldn’t talk with us. He (the manager) said, 'Tell them I’ll talk to them on Monday morning.'"
The manager would talk to them on Monday and this conversation was on Saturday night.
"It’s not like you live in Nashville and you could just go home for the night, right?" we asked.
"No, right," they told us.
They live in Central Kentucky, nearly three hours away.
So the couple asked for a room but were told the hotel was full and the clerk, they say, suggested they just "hang out there in the lobby."
"They didn’t care that we didn’t have a place to go. We stayed in the hotel lobby overnight. Yeah, she’s got a walker, and I’m 78 years old and she’s 75 years old. We are without a car and they’re unwilling to put us up anywhere," Al Amstutz told us.
"It’s the most ridiculous, absurd thing I’ve ever heard of," their daughter, Michele, said.
She didn't learn what had happened until the next morning.
"I mean, I can’t even imagine you’ve got these two elders in sitting in lobby all night long and you’re just OK that they’re sitting right in front of the desk guy," Michele said.
She insisted her parents pay to get their car back and come back home.
"No one ever apologized to us," Al Amstutz recalled.
When we talked with them, they were finally back in Kentucky.
But Al agreed to show us where he'd parked, and using Facetime, he directed us past a series of Park and Fly signs with arrows to the back of the parking lot until he he spotted where he said the hotel told him to park.
The Cambria and the Avid Hotel next door are owned by the same company and both use this area for Park and Fly guests.
The problem is a lot of those guests apparently were parking beyond the Park and Fly area in a lot connected to the Park and Fly area, but owned by the building next door. The owners of that building told NewsChannel 5 Investigates they'd been asking the hotel managers for months to have their guests park elsewhere. And when that didn't happen, the building owners say they'd warned the hotel managers a month ago that they were going to start having cars towed.
"I just feel like the hotel should be accountable for this and they haven’t even at least offered an apology. Nothing," Michele Amstutz said.
By Monday afternoon, Bev and Al still hadn't heard from anyone at the Cambria.
So we went to find General Manager John Johnson.
"The neighbors decided all of a sudden to tow without telling anybody that they were going to tow," he told us.
Johnson insisted he was as surprised as anyone about the cars being towed.
Then he apologized.
"I’m sorry it happened. I really am," he said.
But then we asked about what happened to the Amstutzes Saturday night.
"If we weren’t sold out, we would’ve given them a room here but being sold out we didn’t have any. They were welcome to get their car and go somewhere else," Johnson suggested.
"They couldn’t get their car. It was in the tow lot," we reminded him.
"The tow lot is open 24 hours a day," he countered.
"Right," we agreed, but then pointed out, "And they were told they had to pay $650."
"Yeah, that’s unfortunate," he replied.
Johnson then showed us the new chain barrier he just had installed to prevent guests from parking in the neighboring lot going forward.
And as for the guests whose cars were towed?
"I’m dealing with each one case by case to try to make it right with every single one of the people because the worst thing we want is bad press and for somebody to not come back," Johnson said.
I asked Johnson if he was going to pay the tow charges for all of the guests. And he just wouldn't agree to that. He said he was offering them things like a free night's stay coupon or that he would cover the cost of the guests' original stay, which is what he did with the Amstutzes. The thing is they paid $181 for their room and their tow bill was more than three times that.
