Hotels

Category Archives for Hotels.

An Updated Simple Model Ranks the Best Hotel Programs

building overlooking water
May 10 2018

Loyalty has two primary components: recognition and reward. That’s your elite program and your earn and burn proposition.

Hotel programs are tough to compare because you earn a different number of points per dollar spent, and redemptions vary wildly as well — the most expensive Hyatt redemption is 30,000 points while the most expensive Hilton redemption costs 95,000. We can normalize that by looking at the number of points earned, and the value of each point.

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3 Black Women Detained By Police for Checking Out of Airbnb With Luggage

police car out side neighborhood
May 08 2018

We see people checking out of a hotel and that’s normal. We need to get more used to people checking out of homes in our neighborhoods. Because that means getting used to more types of people, more people who ‘look different’, and that happens by making it more commonplace.

It’s a reminder that anti-Airbnb ordinances are often cover for deplorable motives. And hotels spending money on front groups to lobby against Airbnb should be ashamed of themselves too.

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Marriott’s Timeshare Business Buys Hyatt Timeshares and the Starwood Timeshares Marriott Didn’t Want

aerial beach ocean shot
Apr 30 2018

Shortly before Starwood announced a deal to be acquired by Marriott it agreed to spin off its timeshare business into a separate company, Vistana, which it sold to Interactive Leisure Group or ILG. ILG now holds the vacation ownership businesses of Hyatt, Sheraton and Westin.

Marriott Vacations is now buying Interactive Leisure Group for $4.7 billion. So an affiliate of Marriott will wind up owning the Starwood timeshare business Marriott itself was believed not to want two and a half years ago as well as Hyatt’s timeshare business.

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Hyatt is Stuck in the Mud

exhale store
Apr 25 2018

Hyatt has a little over 600 hotels. That’s one-tenth the size of Marriott. There’s Marriott, Hilton, IHG, and Accor as players and there just aren’t chains in Hyatt’s peer group anymore.

They did try to buy Starwood themselves but their complex stock structure (two tiered stock giving outsized control to the Pritzker family) was a stopper and Marriott bested them. They tried to buy Kimpton but IHG was willing to pay far more.

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Starwood Lifetime Elites Petition Marriott for Better Treatment

hotel room
Apr 24 2018

One of the aspects of Marriott’s announced new program that seems to annoy Starwood’s most loyal customers the most isn’t even where something is being taken away from them.

Under the new program all current lifetime elites keep their current lifetime status, even though the new program is going to have tougher requirements than the Starwood program did to earn that status.

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Marriott Releases New Program Award Pricing for Hotels in Several Cities

hotel stairs
Apr 23 2018

In the new Marriott loyalty program they’ve largely taken the better Starwood elite program and the better Marriott earn and burn proposition — however Starwood members won’t see exactly what they’ve come to expect on the Marriott side and and Marriott members have seemed likely to experience some devaluation of points.

Marriott’s CEO says they’re making the program less expensive for hotels. That’s created a pretty strong starting point to assume that earning and redeeming points couldn’t offer quite as good a value as before.

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