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Even Giant Banks Aren't Safe From Hotel Cancellation Fees

Wells Fargo & Co., who received $25 billion in taxpayer bailout money, was all set to send a sizable chunk of employees to Vegas for a corporate retreat that included a four-day employee sales conference. They'd booked 12 nights at Wynn Las Vegas and Encore Las Vegas (what? Was the Excalibur not good enough for them?) — but, unsurprisingly, they announced that they'd canceled the whole trip Tuesday night.

After the whole St. Regis ultra-luxe AIG outing disaster last year, financially-struggling corporations have been coming under fire — not unfairly — for continuing to send employees on lavish and somewhat unnecessary retreats the way they used to do. Wells Fargo made a smart move by canceling this Vegas vacay.

But...not so fast.

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Tags: Hotel News / St. Regis Hotels / Corporate Retreats / → All Tags

AIG Execs Show Us How to Blow 500K at The St. Regis

Where: One Monarch Beach Resort [map], Monarch Beach, CA, United States, 92629

Whoops! Looks like someone was a little careless with the spending!

We don't want to get too political here, so we'll try our best to deliver this news without any sort of...slant.

Days after the government spent $85 billion to prevent AIG from collapsing, the execs of the company took themselves on a special little retreat at the ritzy St. Regis Monarch Beach. And they blew $500K.

USA Today has a rundown on how AIG proved it possible to spend such an absurd amount of money at one hotel:

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., described what investigators found during a hearing this morning on Capitol Hill:

AIG spent $200,000 for hotel rooms, and almost $150,000 for catered banquets. AIG spent -- listen to this one -- $23,000 at the hotel spa and another $1,400 at the salon. They were getting their manicures, their facials, their pedicures and their massages while the American people were -- were footing the bill.

...And they spent another $10,000 for -- I don't know what this is -- leisure dining.

...Another member of the panel explained that "leisure dining" means they drank at a bar.

Well, folks: now you know. And we're guessing it's not so hard to run up a $23K bill at the spa with $350 treatments like the Mediterranean Harmony Massage, which involves two therapists doing double duty on your bod and ends with a fig-and-cassis backrub. Musta been nice.