Mum’s fury as $580-per-night W Hotel in Darling Harbour loses her car keys in valet parking fail – and Aussies say they will cancel their bookings

A young family enjoying a weekend away at a new swanky Sydney hotel were left furious after hearing parking staff had lost their car keys.

Claudia and her partner Blake paid $580 for a night at Darling Harbour's W Hotel with their eight-month-old son on Friday, along with $90 to valet their car.

After checking out on Saturday morning, the couple was told it would be an hour before they could pick up their car from the valet.

They waited 30 minutes, but after seeing other guests arriving after picking up their car, the couple asked again how long the wait would be.

They were then told their car keys were lost and asked to wait while staff desperately tried to find them.

Claudia shared her ordeal on TikTok, saying it took almost two hours for their keys to show up.

“When we got to the valet, the staff looked around confused, but at the time I thought it was because they were so busy,” she said.

The family, from the NSW Central Coast, planned to meet family for brunch just after 11am after checking out.

But because their keys were lost, not only did they miss brunch, but they also couldn't explore Sydney before returning home.

“They said to us, 'We're sorry, we're looking and we're trying to get over it,'” Claudia said.

'At this point we had been waiting for half an hour. We're late for brunch and my partner and I skipped breakfast, so neither of us have eaten all day.”

Claudia said the parking staff behaved 'strangely' and did not provide her or her partner with any information or updates on what was being done to find the keys.

“They kept saying, 'Give us time and wait.' You can literally see them looking so confused for these keys and they kept thinking, 'What's the make of your car?' what do the keys look like?'” she said.

Blake eventually wrote down the make and model of the car and what the keys looked like on a piece of paper, but the staff couldn't find them any closer.

Frustrated by the lack of communication, Blake went upstairs to the front desk and asked a manager to resolve the situation.

'This manager is wasting our time gathering all the information. She disappears around the corner and we never see her again,” Claudia said.

'She never came back, she never did anything about it. She never checked in with us again, she literally disappeared.”

The couple eventually spoke to another manager who offered to put them in an available room while they waited and gave them free room service.

Claudia said they had been waiting for over an hour and their baby had to be put down for a nap.

It wasn't until the family got into the elevator to go to their room that they were told their keys had been found.

The mother said that because they were so hungry and their son needed to sleep, they stayed in the room so he could take a nap before they got their keys and left.

Claudia stressed that while she had no complaints about her stay at the hotel and praised the manager for putting them in a room, the family could have saved valuable time during their holiday if the staff had been honest with them.

'The whole ordeal from check-out to baby's bedtime took about two hours and we just had to wait for our baby to take his huge nap in the room, so we waste our day sitting quietly in this room while the baby sleeps ,' she said.

“We haven't seen anything of Sydney, we haven't seen our family.

'It wouldn't have been so bad if they had been honest with us from the start because we could have walked to our lunch but we had already chewed 30 minutes of it by the time they admitted the car keys were missing. .'

Claudia confirmed she had received a refund for the valet parking service in her video, which has been viewed more than 28,000 times, and said she had written an email to the hotel.

One TikTokker suspected the clerk had accidentally put their keys in his pocket or in another car.

Others have claimed that they are no longer interested in staying at the hotel.

'I just canceled my reservation that I had for a few weeks. No thanks!!' one commented.

'I'm staying there this weekend. I'm definitely taking a picture of my odometer now,” said another.

'This just shows the inexperience of the staff. Honesty is always the best policy,” one person noted.

A spokesperson for W Hotel confirmed that the keys had been 'lost for a short period of time'.

'The car was parked securely in the hotel's internal car park at the time. The keys were subsequently found, the hotel's general manager contacted the customer to apologize and the matter was resolved.

'W Sydney prides itself on its 24-hour service culture and its responsiveness to customer feedback.'