Category Archives for Hotels.
The hotel industry is practicing “shrinkflation.” That’s like when Doritos cost the same as before, but come in a bag with fewer chips. The price of a bag of Doritos hasn’t gone up, but you get less for your money anyway.
Fairfield Inns in Japan will offer breakfast boxes instead of hot breakfast.
Gratuity is part of the cost of breakfast so for a breakfast to be considered complimentary guests must not be expected to pay cash out of pocket when they eat it. But the Delta Hotel Daytona Beach Oceanfront has figured out a way to charge elite guests a cash co-pay for their ‘free’ breakfast.
Seagulls have become a nuisance along the Grand Canal in Venice, and hotels have adopted a variety of strategies to ward them off. Two in particular – Marriott’s excellent Gritti Palace and Preferred Hotels’ Hotel Monaco – have started issuing water pistols to guests.
IHG is running a 20% discount on hotel night redemptions, initially for co-brand cardmembers but other members should become eligible too. And they’re updating on when we’ll see new points-earning and elite benefits, too.
A reader made a points advance reservation at the Sheraton Kauai 34 days prior to check-in. They were quoted 200,000 points for a 5 night stay. They transferred points into their account, and more points were earned so that there were a total of 234,000 in their account. They were confident everything was in place.
However 11 days prior to check-in they receive a notice that their booking would be cancelled if they didn’t move more points into the account. They weren’t told how many they needed, and Marriott cancelled their Hawaii vacation.
I’ve never realized that Marriott Bonvoy has a set of ‘supplemental’ terms and conditions and that benefits are completely different at all-inclusive properties. In typical Marriott fashion they’re complicated, because they do not apply to all all-inclusives. Instead these ‘special’ terms apply to new all-inclusives that are not part of a legacy brand, and not to Westins and Marriotts et al that happen to be all-inclusive.
The U.K. has strong laws that taxes and charges must be shown in the headline rate for hotels. They cannot advertise a price plus resort fee or service charges. The price cannot even be advertised excluding VAT (tax).
Yet many hotels in London and the surrounding area have a workaround for this. They’re adding a 5% ‘service charge’ to bills on top of the room rate which isn’t advertised or even disclosed during the booking process. The trick is that it’s a discretionary (optional) fee, which is to say that the guest can ask to have the charge removed.
Marriott is getting heat for eliminating award charts at the end of this month, but Hilton already did this in 2017 while claiming award prices wouldn’t go up. And every time a program has dropped published price lists, that’s meant an irresistible temptation to raise the cost of awards. They don’t even have to tell members that they’re doing it.
Hilton has just increased pricing at some of their best properties, though it will take a comprehensive review to identify just how many and how much.
Surely they won’t be able to ‘stand alone’ continuing to develop in Russia, even if the moves competitors made are mostly symbolic. On the other hand perhaps their press release was delayed having to check first to make sure it didn’t list Taiwan as a country.
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 »
