Category Archives for Hotels.
IHG will be bringing back a generous offer for joining or renewing its Ambassador program, which is the chain’s paid status program for Intercontinental hotels..
IHG Rewards devalued their points without notice and in the middle of the pandemic, when hotel properties have been suffering. Those hotels, for the most part, should want award guests filling rooms more than ever before. And with room rates in most places down, points should go farther than before not be worth far less.
So why would IHG do this?
With the greatest drop in travel demand in history, hotels in many parts of the world have struggled mightily – although in the U.S. and some other regions business has been coming back – especially in popular leisure destinations that have been largely open during the pandemic like Florida and Cancun.
Hotel chains have relaxed the rules that their properties have to follow, limiting how much each has to spend on forward-looking investments and during each guest stay. Hilton recently updated its brand standard waivers, including outlining when some services have to return.
Radisson Hotels was purchased from Carlson by Chinese conglomerate collapsing HNA Group, and then sold to Jinjiang International.
Come June Radisson in the Americas (United States, Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean) will be separate from Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia. And they’re splitting the rewards program in two. This satisfies a U.S. government demand to separate U.S. customer data and firewall it off from its Chinese ownership.
IHG Rewards has always been a weak program for elite benefits, but made up for that shortcoming with decent earn-and-burn. But they hid their award charts and started raising prices, and now they appear to have done it again without notice – like an Intercontinental for 120,000 points and even a Holiday Inn for 70,000.
Marriott’s late CEO Arne Sorenson worried all the cuts would make recovery harder. Hilton’s CEO says hold my beer.
Sadly they’re just driving guests to outside venues and delivery services, while diminishing the difference between what a hotel has to offer and what you can get from Airbnb.
There’s a partially-built out resort community in Branson, Missouri, sitting abandoned for years, with well over a billion dollars left behind to decay since the Great Recession. It’s called Indian Ridge and it was supposed to “have one of the country’s largest water parks, golf courses, hotels conference centers and shopping.”
Developers went to prison over fraudulent financing for the project and it was never completed. A visitor to the ghost resort has gone viral on TikTok showing her visit.
The Andaz Bali was originally slated to open in 2016. It’s finally on the cusp of becoming available to guests – in just a week. Right next to the Hyatt Regency, it’s a smaller and more boutique property. The hotel features low rise buildings, as is common in Bali, meaning ocean views are somewhat obscured. The main pool is an infinity pool facing the beach.
Plenty of photos have been made available by those that have toured the property. It looks gorgeous.
The Renaissance La Concha Resort in Puerto Rico charges a resort fee that’s a percentage (18%) of the room rate. For award guests, then, the resort fee should be zero – since 18% of zero is zero.
Not wanting to lose out on hidden fee revenue from points guests, they charge Marriott Bonvoy members redeeming points a $30 resort fee for each night of their stay. There are two problems with this.
The hotel industry is asking for a $15 – $29 billion bailout, with 40% earmarked for hotel investors to make mortgage payments to big lenders. This is being pitched as something that ‘goes well with infrastructure’ which the federal government is preparing to spend $3 trillion on. Of course, the hotel buildings already exist and aren’t new infrastructure.
The American Hotel and Lodging Association’s chief lobbyist complains, “You have whole segments of our industry that did not receive any financial assistance whatsoever.” It’s not fair that everyone else has been taking your money and hotels haven’t been able to do so yet.
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 »
