Category Archives for Hotels.
World of Hyatt is a better program than peers, but it needs to be, because Hyatt still has a smaller footprint than similar efforts at Marriott, IHG, and Hilton. A customer has to choose Hyatt, and that takes effort, so they need to give customers a reason to do so. And that means finding ways to reduce pain points and deliver on promises. So I think it makes sense to prioritize items like these. What would be on your list?
If you want Hyatt status, you normally have to earn it from scratch. They don’t offer the same kinds of shortcuts that Hilton and Marriott do. Except for the next 5 days. Hyatt is offering 90 days of free mid-tier Explorist status and a fast track to achieve Globalist through February 2025.
The hotel doesn’t seem to really follow standard Hilton rules for award availability. Instead they seem to dump a lot of inventory all at once all of a sudden. That just happened, and now there’s availability starting in November 2023, getting really good in December 2023, and wide open for January – March 2024.
The Marriott Key Bridge was the second Marriott hotel ever, and was the oldest Marriott hotel when it closed in July 2021.
Originally opened in 1959 as the Key Bridge Motor Inn, it was located in Rosslyn just across the river from Washington D.C. It featured a fantastic view, as a result, and in its history hosted both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. In recent times it played host to the homeless.
When Marriott launched the Bonvoy program in 2018 the most expensive redemption for any hotel was 60,000 points. Then they introduced ‘high and low season’ pricing and a new more expensive category 8, pushing up the most expensive reward to 100,000 points.
A year ago they abolished award charts altogether and promised only that price increases would be muted in the first year of the new system. Now that the first year has passed, gloves and constraints are off, and properties can cost up to 150,000 points per night.
Early in the pandemic there was concern about people entering hotel rooms. If you were traveling you either weren’t concerned about Covid-19, or you wanted to isolate yourself as much as possible from others.
Hotels stick with the line that guests want choice in whether or not to have daily servicing of their room, so they ask guests to request it if they want it.
The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was recently held at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, and one conference goer reported on TripAdvisor that they failed to pay a bar tab. Oops!
How they report the hotel handled it, though, is concerning.
Governor Ron DeSantis and his administration says they will revoke the alcohol license of the Hyatt Regency Miami over a “‘sexually explicit’ show with children” held on the premises.
Hotels want guests to give tips to workers, so they can pay lower wages. The CEO of one hotel ownership group actually said the quiet part out loud.
In 2019 Hilton’s CEO said that even he didn’t tip housekeeping. But now hotels are pushing it, and we face a collective action problem. The practice pushes down housekeeper wages, but if an individual guest doesn’t do it that’s less money in a given housekeeper’s pocket on that given day.
In the fall former President Donald Trump had dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. Several Republicans denounced the meeting. The white supemacist views of Fuentes are so outside the mainstream of conservatism that he was denied a platform at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), so he set up his own meeting around the corner… at the Residence Inn by Marriott National Harbor.
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 »
