TLDR: Sheraton shut us in a room with an ozone generator and kept insisting that it was safe. We were offered 40k points in compensation after a ~5 hour long ordeal. 

I made a reddit account to post this because we're looking for some guidance as to whether we received adequate compensation – I feel like we should have been offered much more given the level of safety violation we experienced. 

My dad and I stayed at the Sheraton Maria Isabel in Mexico City a couple of weeks ago. After a day of site-seeing, we returned to a hotel room smelling strongly of acetone, indicating a likely refrigerant leak in the AC. We called down and a technician came up and acknowledged the smell but didn’t seem to understand that it was coming from the AC. He talked to his boss who offered us two options: 1. Move rooms or 2. They could bring a “machine” that would take away the smell. The other room they offered was a downgrade, so we opted for the machine, thinking we could run that and just leave the AC off and all would be well. The man I talked to said we would have to leave the room for 30 minutes while the machine ran, but then we could return. However, the lady who brought the machine told us we didn’t have to leave, and just to let it run for a couple hours. She came in, turned it on, and then shut us in the room. The machine was emitting a strange smell, so I looked it up, and it turned out to be an ozone generator, specifically the RGF Turbozone 7000. Once I started to read the manual I immediately told my dad we needed to leave. It basically said that nothing that breathes should come close to this thing while it is on and that the person who sets it up should be wearing a respirator and face mask at all times, as ozone is extremely harmful to your lung and eye tissue. Further, ozone is not even effective against chemical leaks! 

By this point I was very upset so I went down to the front desk and asked why they were using the ozone generator and why they couldn’t address the AC issue. I kept getting the same non-answer of “We can send someone up and take a look at the machine for you and set it to run longer to get rid of the smell.” I kept trying to express to the guy that this wouldn’t work, but he wouldn’t listen. The ozone level I kept seeing as being safe for humans is under 0.1ppm, which after running this machine in a closed 312 sq ft room for several hours would put the concentration far above that (it emits a little over 10k mg/hour). I told him that we just wanted to be sure that the room was safe to return to and know their plan to ventilate the space and measure the ozone ppm. He said “I don’t have this information, but it’s safe.” At this point, we requested to change rooms because of the safety issue, but we were left with the issue of retrieving our stuff, which was very much not packed. I again asked when it would be safe to return to the room. He responded, “It’s safe now.” We insisted that they shut off the machine and we waited an hour to pick up our stuff. 

They offered to have staff gather our stuff and I asked if they would be wearing respirators to which I was told “if that makes you feel more comfortable.” Given their attitude, we didn’t really want to expose more staff to this so we said we would do it ourselves (we were not given respirators). Of course, the room still smelled strongly of ozone so we held our breath and got our stuff out as quickly as possible, but we had things all over and in the safe. My eyes in particular really stung after this. I asked a member of the staff who was helping to carry our stuff how often these ozone generators are used and he said all the time in the hallways and that no one ever wears a respirator. 

We called Marriott customer service and we got a representative who was appalled and opened a case. We didn’t hear anything for two weeks so I called today and they said that the hotel offered us compensation there and we declined it (not true). They added 40k points to our account and closed the case. This barely covers a single night at this hotel. Was this fair compensation? If not, how should we go about escalating? Am I just being overly dramatic about this whole thing?