When is a confirmed hotel reservation not confirmed? When the hotel has sold your room to someone else, as Linda and Michael Morgan learned over the Thanksgiving holiday.

The hotel, in this case, was the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan, and according to Mrs. Morgan and some other would-be guests who were turned away over Thanksgiving, the “someone else” was a contingent of Saudi princes and officials who accompanied King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. The king, who is 86 years old, was in town for surgery at New York Presbyterian Hospital on Nov. 24.

The Morgans had planned for a festive family gathering in New York, making their reservations last summer for four rooms, including three suites, starting two days before Thanksgiving, on Nov. 23. Mrs. Morgan, who lives in Seattle, said that she and her husband learned only by chance that the rooms were not available when her husband called to make a last-minute change.

“My husband called to cancel one room after my mother decided not to travel. That was when he was told that none of the rooms was available,” she said. “If he hadn’t called, we would have all shown up at the Waldorf and effectively gotten kicked out.”