Hotels

Category Archives for Hotels.

Soon Your Social Media Posts Could Keep You From Booking An Airbnb

airbnb mobile
Jan 12 2020

The U.S. government scans the social media accounts of foreign visitors who want to enter the country. Employers scour social media posts before offering candidates a job. And what you post in social media gets scooped up and analyzed in order to advertise to you.

Soon our digital footprint may be used to determine whether or not we can travel. In particular Airbnb may use this information to determine how likely you are to trash the home you want to rent.

Continue Reading »

Hyatt Regency San Francisco Offers Free Night Awards Again, Can We Win Over Andaz Maui Too?

Jan 09 2020

The Hyatt Regency San Francisco has been a long-time, repeat scofflaw of Hyatt’s loyalty program. They have played games to avoid offering rooms to program members for points. However they are once again making award nights available.

Back in 2015 their strategy was to only make standard rooms available as part of ‘packages’ (such as with breakfast or parking included) and thus those rooms were not available for points stays. I pushed and got that fixed, but it’s a game of whack-a-mole and they were back to their old tricks.

Continue Reading »

The Hyatt Regency San Francisco Has Turned Hallways Into 185 Square Foot Rooms

Dec 27 2019

The highlights of the Hyatt Regency San Francisco are its Guinness world record-setting lobby, the largest in the world, and its club lounge which is the hotel’s former revolving top floor restaurant.

Less appealing, perhaps, are the new 185 square foot rooms that the hotel has constructed out of hallway space on the east end of each guest room floor.

Continue Reading »

Hilton About To Unveil a New Chain For New Affluents That Hate Tiny Rooms

Dec 24 2019

Tired: Hotels ‘for millennials’ featuring tiny rooms that lack desks, where hopefully guests escape claustrophobia to ‘social spaces’ spending money on food and beverage. However millennials as a class don’t have as much disposable income as older generations, and their digital life includes ordering in more interesting food and beverage than the hotel provides.

Wired: Hotels catering to the ‘new affluent’ who prefer experiences over things, so don’t mind small rooms and are sufficiently lacking in experience that they’ll allow the hotel to curate their food and beverage choices in those same ‘social spaces’.

Continue Reading »

Buy IHG Points For Just Half a Cent Each (Matches Lowest Price Ever Offered)

drink
Dec 23 2019

IHG Rewards Club – the loyalty program for Intercontinental, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn and related brands — is offering a 100% bonus on purchased points through December 31. This applies to purchases of 7000 or more points.

At a 100% bonus purchases of 26,000 points or more cost just $0.005 apiece which is the lowest price I see them sell points for. Oddly purchases of 26,000 points is cheaper than 25,000 points because the cost per point drops. I believe the points are worth slightly more than this.

Continue Reading »

Leaked Marriott Memo: The End of Annual 10 Elite Nights For Meetings

outside marriott hotel
Dec 19 2019

Several days ago I flagged the possibility that Marriott would be eliminating the great annual offer of 10 elite nights for booking a meeting at a hotel. Before the Marriott and Starwood programs were combined Marriott used to let you earn 10 elite nights per meeting with no annual cap.

Word on the street was that this offer would be going away entirely. And indeed a leaked internal communication from Marriott bears this out.

Continue Reading »