Reviews & Testimonials
Dream Wedding Ruined, then Rescued.
Daily News - by Joy Blackburn. Mary Besser and Josh Dugan were married in the gazebo at Marriott's Frenchman's Reef Beach Resort on Friday. The resort picked up the tab for the couple's wedding - from the hairdresser to flowers, champagne and dinner. It had all the makings of a dream wedding in paradise. But the dream came crashing down when the bride and groom to-be arrived last week to check in at their St. Thomas hotel, only to discover that they'd been bilked - and the resort package they thought they'd purchased in an online auction was part of a suspected internet scam.
"I just started crying," said Mary Besser, 31. "I was bawling my eyes out." Mary and her fiancé, Josh Dugan, 31, a U.S. Air Force navigator stationed at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, initially had planned to marry in the summer. But when they learned Dugan was to be deployed on a counter-drug operation in South America in April - and would be gone for months - they pushed the date up.
It is a second marriage for both, and both brought children to the union. Wanting to make their wedding day as special as possible - but still trying to economize - Mary said she cashed in her airline miles for tickets to fly here and turned to eBay for a reasonably priced hotel package.
"We thought, 'Let's just run away to St. Thomas,'" Mary said. The couple won an online auction for a five-night stay at the Marriott's Frenchman's Reef Beach Resort for $1,380, Mary said.
They were under the impression they were dealing with a woman running a reputable business - a travel agent who offered travel packages online. The couple sent a check to the woman and received a confirmation number for their reservation.
Although they became concerned when their reservation paperwork showed a price tag that was double what they'd paid, they said they were reassured after calling the woman.
Mary said the woman indicated that her company did a high volume of business with the hotel chain and that the discount would show up on the paperwork when the date of travel grew nearer.
"She just made us feel like everything was going to be OK," Mary said. But then they arrived on island Wednesday and learned they had the reservation in name only. The money they'd paid the woman had not been used to pay for the room, Mary said.
"Mary and Josh came bouncing into the hotel with their bride and groom T-shirts on. In their minds, they had paid for the vacation on eBay," said Lisa Hamilton, director of marketing for the resort. "It's just heartbreaking. They're a young couple trying to start over. He's in the Air Force. They're on a budget. They each have children and they're building a house."
When it gradually became clear that the problem was not just a mix-up, Mary wound up in tears. Enter the Marriott staff. The registration clerk did what she could Wednesday afternoon, providing them with the lowest rate possible and comping their dinner.
Even so, the cost of the room took all the spending money they had brought with them. "Now, all the money they had had to go toward the room," Hamilton said. "She was canceling her hair appointment to have her hair done for the wedding."
The clerk took the problem to her manager in the morning. Marriott staff did some investigating online and found that the woman Mary and Josh had paid, Karen Damian, apparently had been arrested in San Diego on March 1, charged with grand theft.
Douglas Mooney, a deputy district attorney for San Diego County, said Friday that the charge stems from an internet scheme in which the victims were hotels and two national hotel reservation agencies. Mooney said the District Attorney's Office is conducting a separate investigation into Damian's other internet activities.
Back on St. Thomas, Frenchman's Reef picked up the tab for Mary and Josh's entire hotel stay - along with their wedding.
"Everybody's come together for this poor couple that was stranded and would have really had a poor start to their marriage," Hamilton said. "We saw it as an opportunity to kind of turn it around for them."
Although Mary and Josh originally had planned to have the ceremony at Emerald Beach, with only a photographer and their wedding planner present, the Marriott staff pulled out all the stops, adorning the resort's gazebo with local flowers, hiring a videographer to record the event and serving up champagne and a wedding night dinner after the nuptials.
"They've totally turned this week around for us," Mary said. "I was so excited. They're calling us the 'marriage babies' now because they've taken us under their wing."