Jay Honeck wrote:

I've twice been on the reverse side of this situation where a hotel
gave me a guaranteed reservation and then failed to hold a room
available. Once the room had been reserved with either Visa or
Mastercard and the hotel basically told us that we were on our own
but could use the pay phone in the lobby to search for another place
to stay. Complaining later to the credit card company got us
nowhere. The other time an AMEX card had been used to hold the
reservation and the treatment was quite different. They
apologized for having overbooked, arranged transportation to
another hotel and paid for my first night's stay there plus a few
free phone calls so I could let others know where I was staying.
I heard similar stories from others and apparently AMEX had a
much stricter policy of making both the hotels and customers
adhere to the guaranteed reservation policies.


Amex had nothing to do with it. You just found a hotel that unscrupulously
overbooks, but still has a conscience about doing so.

This was at least a couple decades ago and I believe that
AMEX had everything to do with it. At that time AMEX was
in a very strong position in the hotel industry and was
reported to revoke their arrangements with hotels that
didn't honor their reservations. No idea what the current
policies are since the relative influence of AMEX vs. other
card providers has changed rather dramatically.