Category Archives for Hotels.
The Army-Navy game will be held December 9 at Gillette Stadium – the first time in its 133 year history that it will be held in the Northeast. And people that have booked rooms for it are seeing their reservations cancelled.
California’s Governor signed SB 478 on Saturday. It bans hidden fees, though airlines and car rentals are excluded from the ban. That leaves hotels as the major offender in the travel space which will feel the brunt of the impact – and online travel agencies which sell hotel rooms, too.
A hotel clerk wrote about taking sweet revenge on an abusive guest. They were an elite member of the chain, staying at a hotel that had recently been reflagged to become a part of it. And they’d made front desk staff cry, with two women working in the morning leaving with smeared makeup.
A California dentist put his home’s ‘in-law suite’ on Airbnb and lived to regret it. Their guest booked a six month stay at $105 per night for $20,793. They’ve been there for about two years, rent free for 18 months. And they’re demanding $100,000 to leave – with California law on their side. She even wants a refund of her twenty grand for the first six months of her stay, too!
Back in April, Jaelynn Chaney started a petition demanding additional free seats for plus-sized passengers which, she acknowledged, would mean that everyone else would have to pay more to accommodate her.
Now she’s back with demands for hotels. She wants wider hallways; larger elevators; and retrofits to bathroom toilet seat, shower heads, and sturdier beds. And she thinks it’s discriminatory for hotels not to stock bathrobes up to size 6XL.
The IRS audited Hyatt for the tax years 2009 – 2011 and found that it wasn’t paying tax on loyalty program revenue. It didn’t include the revenue received for what was then Gold Passport (now World of Hyatt) in income, and didn’t include payments from the program as expenses. It just ignored the program, even though it collected money and invested it earning a return.
The IRS wanted Hyatt to not only pay up for those years but to go all the way back to the beginning of the program in 1987, with a quarter of a billion dollars of income at issue and a tax deficiency of $65 million.
A chain’s most valuable customers are its elite members, who deliver an outsized portion of room nights to hotels. To entice them, they’re promised benefits like upgrades and free breakfast.
Knowing that hotels are going to try to cheat, Hyatt spells out in its terms and conditions what the breakfast benefit is for Globalist members when no club lounge breakfast is offered.
The ultimate takeaway from Hilton’s announcement, and Marriott’s need to do something here, is that hotels see being prepared for EV’s – whether for road tripping guests or those renting the vehicles – as an important must-have in the future.
Hotels are ignoring chain rules. Guests book properties assuming they’ll get what the brand promises, and then the individual property doesn’t deliver, choosing to cut costs instead. That devalues the brand, while helping the bottom line of the individual hotel.
This often manifests in properties skimping on or ignoring elite benefits like breakfast. But it also covers housekeeping. And it’s certainly not limited to the best-known offender, Marriott.
Three guests staying at a La Quinta in Nashville found themselves running the hotel when staff abandoned the front desk. They answered the phones and even set up the hotel’s free breakfast for the rest of the guests.
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 »
