Category Archives for Hotels.
The Asahi Ryokan hotel in Fukuoka, Japan rents two of its rooms for just $1 each per night. The catch is that cameras live stream the rooms to YouTube. The hotel plans to make its money monetizing the video feed called “One Dollar Hotel.”
There’s an incredible redemption opportunity at Calala Island which is an SLH Hotel property in Nicaragua. Through Hyatt’s alliance with SLH you can redeem 40,000 Hyatt points per night there.
That’s a lot of points, however it goes from $2300 and up per night with cash; it’s all-inclusive, including flight and boat to and from the Managua airport and not just meals but alcoholic beverages too; and there are just 4 rooms on the private island, 3 of which are redeemable with points.
A couple was having work done on their home so they needed a one night hotel stay and booked the Hampton Inn nearby. When they handed over their ID and credit card at check-in they were told they couldn’t stay a the property.
The Hampton Inn Bourbonnais Kankakee in Illinois had a policy against staycations by Kankakee residents. The property owner decided not to welcome anyone with a Kankakee address, though after publicity from a recent incident they’ve backed off of the rule.
First we had deceptive resort fees – part of the room rate is hidden, called a fee, and you don’t see it included in the total cost of a room when you’re comparing hotel rates on a website. Resort fees spread to hotels that aren’t resorts. In cities they started to call resort fees urban destination fees.
I thought we had reached peak absurdity with the spread in Las Vegas of ‘venue fees’.
When I covered this new type of fee back in September I asked, ‘Karl Marx said history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce. If venue fees is hotels repeating the resort fee as tragedy, can the farce be far behind?” Apparently we’ve already reached farce.
Expedia is about the last travel company to do anything pro-consumer and yet with its muscle it could come late into the game and make a real difference.
They’ve tried to grow through strategic partnerships with MGM and SLH hotels, and through acquisitions such as Two Roads Hospitality which has given them Alila, Destination Hotels, Joie de Vivre and Thompson Hotels (as well as the nascent tommie brand).
Hyatt has actually tried and failed at other acquisitions. They were in the running for Starwood, probably even offering more money than Marriott, but their complicated stock structure (the Pritzker family retains outsized control) got in the way. Hyatt tried at the last minute to acquire NH Hotels but that door was already shut. They were also a bidder for Kimpton, but IHG beat them out by $100 million. (Hyatt was right not to overpay the way IHG did.)
IHG hotels – Kimpton, Holiday Inn, Intercontinental, and related brands – has launched a Cyber Sale running through December 17th, with extra discounts for Black Friday and Cyber Monday coming up.
These rates stack with IHG’s bonus offer up to quadruple points.
We’re all familiar with lies, damn lies, and statistics. The new program has higher redemption prices than Marriott Rewards. It has weaker elite recognition than Starwood Preferred Guest. There is virtually no enforcement of elite benefits at the property level, at best paying our rewards to hotels for elite satisfaction scores.
Do you like Marriott Bonvoy more than both Marriott Rewards and Starwood Preferred Guest? I’d love to see if we’ve got an 8-to-1 margin here… or if this is just Sorenson being Sorenson.
Spending less than $300 for simulator time with an instructor is a great deal – a reason that some people may force an overnight for themselves at Haneda airport even. For an aviation geek there’s nothing like flight simulator time.
But what if I told you there’s an airport hotel where you can spend points to stay the night, that has a Boeing 787 simulator and where sim time is even cheaper?
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 »
