Category Archives for Hotels.
Many Marriott Platinums see their suite night awards expire unused. Nonetheless, when they work they’re great.
Marriott has made two changes to Suite Night Awards, each reflecting problems with Marriott’s own internal systems that they’ve been unable to solve.
IHG Rewards Club – the program that includes Intercontinental, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, Kimpton and related brands – is offering progressively bigger bonuses with each stay booked by December 15 and completed by January 31, 2020.
De Blasio is proposing to eliminate the ability for new hotels to be built ‘by right’ as long as they conform to zoning laws, and instead require a special permit in “a process that would effectively grant the local City Council member veto power over any new hotel room.”
The largest hotel owners in the city say “they’ll rest easier if the city severely restricts the construction of competing accommodations.”
Marriott has a new global promotion (registration required by December 31) and it’s a secret promotion. What we know about it so far is incredibly weak. You don’t find out full details of the promotion until after your second stay.
The under construction Hard Rock hotel New Orleans collapsed this morning leaving one person dead and 18 people hospitalized. “[C]onstruction workers ran to safety” before “[u]pper floors began to fall on top of each other before one side of the building fell to the ground below.”
The collapse at the construction site was captured on video.
Marriott and IHG have already announced that they’re getting rid of single use toiletries and replacing them with wall mounted bulk shampoo, bath gel, and conditioner.
Now customers in California won’t be able to vote with their feet looking for a more hygienic or luxurious alternative.
The Hyatt Centric Waikiki says they have ‘fewer than 20’ standard rooms, which means that less than 9% of their rooms are standard rooms and eligible for World of Hyatt redemption. However I couldn’t find a single date where they were making rooms available at all.
I reached out to Hyatt to see whether the property was in compliance with program rules for making standard rooms available on points whenever they were offered on cash. I also asked whether Hyatt has rules for any minimum percentage of rooms that must be considered standard?
Hyatt launched their earning and redemption partnership with Small Luxury Hotels of the World a year ago. Initially they only brought about 10% of SLH’s 500+ properties into their portfolio.
Now they’re up to 250 of the roughly 500 SLH Hotels participating in World of Hyatt, including some amazing places to spend your Hyatt (or Chase) points.
MGM and Caesars seem to be Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumber. In August MGM announced resort fees over $50 a night at 4 hotels. The CEO of Caesars declared that resort fees could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for Las Vegas lodging. So what is Caesars doing? Raising resort fees, natch.
I don’t know what the substance was in the bulk toiletry and it really doesn’t matter. That these get tampered with in practice should be enough to stop the project in its tracks. And 5000 Marriott points as an apology for this is genuinely offensive.
How can the hotel expect to charge for a room that is so poorly cared for by housekeeping, and that jeopardizes a guest’s health by allowing the toiletries to be compromised in this way?
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 »
