Category Archives for Hotels.
I hate tipping because of the frictions. You don’t know what you’re supposed to tip, it’s ambiguous. You’re supposed to have cash? It’s so much better when employees are compensated by their employers and listed prices are the amounts you actually pay.
If tipping is supposed to ensure better service, why is it such a bad customer experience?
One of baseball’s greatest hitters of all time was Wee Willie Keeler, who introduced the ‘hit and run’ play to the game when he was a member of the Baltimore Orioles. It was his 44-game hitting streak that Joe DiMaggio broke. It was his record of 8 consecutive seasons with 200 hits or more than Ichiro Suzuki broke.
And his batting advice is exactly how you maximize your chances of an upgrade for both airlines and hotels.
A Marriott general manager responded to an Ambassador member by sneering, “You are just a number, not royalty,” and the comment is revealing for reasons bigger than one employee’s attitude. Marriott’s only real asset is the Bonvoy loyalty program, and when franchise owners treat top elites as a nuisance instead of a profit center, they quietly erode the very thing that delivers customers to their hotels.
A New Orleans Marriott put up a sign that reads “Benches Are For Employees Only,” and guests are reading it as a pretty blunt message. The real story is a clumsy attempt at loitering control that manages to insult guests while failing to solve the underlying problem.
“We’ll text you when your room’s ready”—but luxury hotels rarely follow through. These common “luxury lies” don’t just frustrate, they steal your time. From fake upgrades to eco-friendly cost cuts, here’s how high-end hotels consistently fail at delivering genuine hospitality.
A hotel guest went viral after exploding at the front desk when asked to lower his TV volume at 4 a.m., insisting that his Diamond status exempted him from hotel quiet rules. Plus, watch the classic “Diamond Member Check-In” parody and more.
A Hyatt elite member says two properties recently offered a blunt tradeoff: keep a suite, or keep the guaranteed 4 p.m. late checkout. At the Park Hyatt Saigon and Grand Hyatt Erawan Bangkok, they were told to pack up at noon and move into a “courtesy room” to stay until 4 p.m.—raising the question of whether Hyatt is honoring the benefit, or quietly redefining what “4 p.m. checkout” is supposed to mean.
A TikTok from a Hilton in Cancun shows red and green LEDs above guest room doors—lights that appear to indicate whether someone is inside. These systems can combine door sensors, motion, and timing rules to infer occupancy. That data belongs on a staff dashboard, not displayed in the hallway for anyone walking by.
A Marriott hotel got so tired of elite guests demanding free bottled water that it put up a blunt sign: you are not entitled to it. And while the message is rude, it is also basically correct—pointing to what’s wrong with how Bonvoy works.
Marriott has added in-app tipping, routing payments through a third-party processor—an escalation beyond the QR-code tip prompts that have spread through hotels since the pandemic. This isn’t really about guest convenience; it’s about shifting more of employee compensation onto customers so hotels can staff up while keeping wage costs (and owner expenses) down.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
