Category Archives for Hotels.
Priceline’s Booking.com, the major competitor to the Expedia group’s behemoth of online travel booking sites, will start charging hotels commission on resort fees.
They believe the shift away from selling consumers a total rate, and moving money into the resort or destination fee bucket, cheats them of revenue. And of course it has reduced commissions that hotels pay.
When things go wrong, either because a hotel doesn’t deliver promised benefits or because something doesn’t work right on the back end with an account, it’s almost impossible to get swift any resolution from Marriott Bonvoy. Customer service is a problem.
When things go smoothly – as they do the majority of the time – Marriott has, in my opinion, a better program than Hilton or IHG. But when they fail the issues are magnified because these failures are primarily happening to their highest volume most loyal members and because there’s no mechanism to fix the issue. That’s a problem, but it’s one that can be fixed.
Taco Bell is opening a resort hotel in Palm Springs August 9th. It’s “meant for 18+ superfans” and will have “exclusive Taco Bell menu items and plenty of surprises” and the resort will only last a short time.
Reservations will open in June. The fast food chain claims this “isn’t a stunt, but instead part of Taco Bell’s wider strategy of moving the brand beyond the traditional fast-food experience.”
When Marriott acquired Starwood hotels they beat out Hyatt, which may have offered a more financially attractive package but whose complicated stock structure (the Pritzker family has outsized voting rights) created complications, and Chinese conglomerate Anbang Insurance.
Arne Sorenson, CEO of Marriott, says he was surprised that they won the bidding and were able to make the deal.
It was only just October that I broke the news that Hyatt would acquire Two Roads Hospitality and the Thompson, Destination, Joie de Vivre, Alila and tommie hotel brands.
Already Hyatt has been integrating properties. Most of Thompson Hotels joined World of Hyatt March 28th. Hyatt has just announced that the previously excluded Thompson Playa del Carmen and Thompson Beach House in Mexico will join effective May 15, 2019.
Today Hyatt integrates a second of the acquired brands — Joie de Vivre — into the World of Hyatt portfolio.
A roundup of the most important stories of the day. I keep you up to date on the most interesting writings I find on other sites – the latest news and tips.
Hyatt launched their earning and redemption partnership with Small Luxury Hotels of the World at the end of 2018. Initially they only brought about 10% of SLH’s 500+ properties into their portfolio.
They followed two months later with another 56 properties or 10% and then 57 more a month after that. Now they’ve added another tranche of hotels where you can earn and redeem Hyatt points, bringing them to over 200 (or roughly 40% of) SLH properties in the portfolio.
Wyndham Rewards members receive waived DoorDash delivery fees when ordering food to any Wyndham Rewards hotel with promo code WRD. In addition they’re offering 250 Wyndham Rewards points per order, whether delivery is to a hotel or not by starting the order through Wyndham’s site.
It’s an interesting partnership and if you order via DoorDash anyway, you might as well collect Wyndham points when you do.
Hyatt used to offer lucrative property-specific bonuses of 500 to 2000 points per night. These were colloquially referred to as ‘G bonuses’ because of the bonus codes attached to them. Combined with whatever promotion Hyatt was running (Faster Free Nights) and the fact that Hyatt used to give 2500 bonus points per night at properties whose club lounges were closed on the weekend meant that the old Gold Passport program was super lucrative, indeed.
We haven’t seen much in the way of property-specific bonuses in the past 8 years, but those are back for hotels that are brand new to Hyatt. And there’s a new 50% rebate on Hyatt’s most expensive redemptions.
I think that Marriott has done a better job with their program than many give them credit for. Marriott Rewards never offered suite upgrades. They’ve increased the number of brands that have a breakfast benefit. Since the Starwood merger late checkout became a guarantee. And they’ve introduced 24 hour check-in and Ambassador services at the top end of the program.
At the same time they’ve had incredible challenges over the past year. There are still IT challenges, even booking rooms at times at Marriott.com. There are huge challenges getting a sprawling network of 7000 hotels to consistently deliver on points and benefits promised by 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 »
