...is there any consumer recourse for this? I understand the occasional restaurant that also serves as a marina not coding as "food and drink." But lately i've been encountering airport shuttles that dont code as travel and even a hotel that categorized itself as "business services" when booking roomblocks AND conference space through their Group Sales dept. In both cases, I complained to their managers. The hotel actually fixed this by running my credit card through their front desk..but the airport shuttle told me to basically pound sand.
MCC codes are set by merchant processors (and by Amex and Discover themselves in the case of merchants who process directly with them for their respective card networks; direct Amex processing is becoming less common for small businesses doing less than $1 MM annually in Amex transactions with the introduction of the OptBlue program, and Discover has essentially shed its direct processing model with all but the largest of merchants). It's very common for them to be misclassified (see frequent discussions of "my Walmart codes as grocery") and isn't the fault of the merchant unless they specifically mischaracterized the nature of their business in order to get more favorable processing rates (i.e. a restaurant rather than a bar which would typically pose a higher risk and incur higher rates).
Your recourse would be limited to asking the ownership of an establishment to contact their credit card merchant processor(s) to have their MCC corrected, but there is no legal statute stating that it much be correct, other than those that covered when obvious fraud has been committed. Business services for a group sales department with a hotel is likely the correct MCC, as while they may also offer room blocks their primary business model is typically renting meeting and event spaces and providing related services. You lucked out that they agreed to run it through their other merchant processing account.
