News and notes from around the interweb:
- 15,000 bonus miles for renting a car in Italy.
- Should inflight movies be ‘edited for content’? which reminds me that no, Delta isn’t actually censoring lesbian kissing out of inflight entertainment. They just take the edited version that’s given to them..
- Trevor of Tagging Miles sends a breakup letter to American Airlines. Since he acknowledges one of his issues is minimum spend requirements for elite status, I don’t expect American will much care.
- Park Hyatt Maldives to become family-friendly?!
- Silver Airways is giving the middle finger to Hurricane Irma with a new sale
- Hilton disses Airbnb as a ‘lodging company’ while claiming they’re a hospitality company. Maybe that’s true of their Conrad brand…
The huge advantage that Hilton (and other major hotel companies) have over airbnb is predictability, professionalism and privacy. The sharing economy doesn’t produce those things. They have no advantage with regard to hospitality. Many airbnbs offer hospitality better than Hilton’s.
@ Iahphx – “Predictability, professionalism and privacy” at Hilton, you say?
You can safely predict that you will get a measely extra half hour or hour late check out at most of their properties, elite status or not. LACK of professionalism is more like it as staff at one Hilton hotel I recently stayed at complained that I overstayed my visit when I had already checked in for an additional day, as well as had the charge for that day authorized on my card. The clerk in question was incompetent (he couldn’t find my reservation in his system without me repeating the confirmation number) and rude (the line went dead in the middle of the call and he just left the conversation at that). As for privacy, I paid one Hilton an additional half day for a two hour late checkout and their housekeeping staff still banged on the door well before those two hours were up.
@chancer – you can get a good look at a t-bone by sticking…doh!
I’m always confused about movie editing and why it’s only offered to certain outlets, like airlines. A recent one, which was fantastic, called VidAngel was shut down last year. I’d be a much larger movie consumer if I could view edited content…
And speaking of edited content, when it was new the movie Fargo was shown on a flight my mother-in-law was on. She recommended the movie to all her older friends and even bought some copies for them. Every one of them questioned her about why she enjoyed it so much…
@ Robert – Another Hilton fanboy, are we? At least DCS has a modicum of style that makes his comments somewhat interesting.
@chancer —> EVERY hotel, period, has an “off day,” or an “off employee.” They are not unique in that, however, as the same thing can be said about every restaurant, every drug store, every airline, every . . . everything! It’s the OVERALL experience that one looks to, not the outlying individual experience/individual. Overwhelmingly, my experiences with Hilton have been very good. Not as good as, say, Starwood or Hyatt on the whole, but then I’ve had poor experiences at each of those, too.
As for Airbnb, some hosts are more hospitable than others. I, for example, always make sure there are fresh flowers, milk, freshly roasted coffee, etc. in my place when we rent it out. That hasn’t stopped two of our parties from trashing our place and causing damages to our home . . . which is why we’ve stopped making our place available through Airbnb.
Airbnb can be good for some but bad for others. Late night check in does not work. Hold my luggage until my 9pm flight does not work. Accept delivery of my FedEx, UPS etc does not work.