Category Archives for Hotels.
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?
When Hilton eliminated award charts they promised hotels wouldn’t get more expensive. At the time the most expensive property was 95,000 points per night. In February they introduced a new 120,000 point level.
At the time it was only for one new property.
Rewards Network has seemed to me mostly in the business of lending money to trouble restaurants and exorbitant rates. Expect to find troubled spots in the program, places that aren’t attractive business on their own. From what I’ve heard volume in these programs is lower than you’d expect. Still, more points is better than fewer points and more programs in which to earn points is a positive development too.
Rebranding a loyalty program just doesn’t make sense when you start with both a recognizable name and a good reputation. You wind up spending nine figures on advertising, merchandising, printing, and education — all to get back to where you started, at best, which is that the median consumer doesn’t even identify which brands are part of the program.
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 »
