Category Archives for Hotels.
There’s a great video of the owner of the Sheraton Suites Fort Lauderdale, Ben Mallah, complaining about what Marriott required him to spend on his Sheraton property. He talks about how Marriott was telling him to bring back food and beverage after the pandemic and he threatened to pull the Sheraton flag over it. It’s a clear articulation of how owners believe Marriott will cave to them, and that they don’t need to deliver to customers.
Baymont Inns seems to have a new take on the labor-saving strategy. They’ve got an outsourced front desk. Instead of having to hire American staffers to work on property, they supplement their employees with kiosks that give you a live person in India. The agent will interact with you just like they were across the desk.
Perhaps nobody enjoyed the perks of using donated campaign cash on travel as much as the former one-term Senator from Arizona. Halfway through her term she became an independent. The expectation was she’d avoid a Democratic primary this way, since the once-liberal firebrand had moved to the center while in office. She had plenty of money on hands in her campaign coffers, and she kept spending it on travel – even as she was no longer campaigning.
Hotels are nickel and diming guests for things I never used to hear of their charging extra for. The Aloft hotel in McAllen, Texas reportedly billed a guest $80.50 for washcloths because she used them to remove makeup.
A housekeeper at a Marriott hotel is complaining that all of her tips are being stolen. Guests are asked to tip, but the tips aren’t making it to the person who cleans their room. Instead, this employee says, their manager keeps going room to room to pick up the money before housekeepers enter, “she would race to get in my rooms before me to check if they were “vacant.”
The nearly 800-room Crowne Plaza Times Square closed several weeks ago, and is expected to re-open over the summer as Hyatt Regency Times Square. They are currently accepting reservations starting September 1.
While Marriott eliminated its award charts, that doesn’t mean the Bonvoy program can’t give members advance notice that they’ll be making major changes to the points price of a free night at its hotels, or at least communicate with members at all about their decision to gut the value of points. Yet they chose not to respect their members this way. That leaves us to analyze the data ourselves.
Marriott no longer publishes award charts or tells members when they alter their pricing models. They just increase the cost of award nights at their hotels whenever they choose, with no notice. This appears to be one of those times.
Hotels have been squeezing how long you can stay in the room when paying for a stay. It might seem logical that each day you pay for gets you 24 hours, but that isn’t true at all. Flexible check-in times, though, are both an opportunity for great customer service and also increased revenue.
Barry Sternlicht, who founded Starwood, reacquired the name that Marriott retired and plans to re-launch next month, with 52 hotels already open or in the pipeline.
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 »
