Category Archives for Hotels.
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.
Price aside (and price matters..) I’ll always pick the property connected to the terminal if there is one, followed by the most recently renovated hotel near the airport. Airport hotels get a lot of one night stays and see faster wear and tear than regular properties.
If a hotel in France advertises a gourmet experience, and they cannot deliver passable croissants, that is fraud and they should be held liable.
Every year for the past several years, Marriott has run a double elite nights offer along with bonus points. Here’s last year’s which was 1,000 bonus points per night and double elite qualifying nights on paid stays February 13 – April 29. They ran something similar in 2022 and 2023.
The Trump family stayed at St. Regis D.C. for the inauguration, based on video shared by President Trump’s granddaughter Kai who took on a much larger profile this past summer at the Republican Convention.
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 »
