Category Archives for Hotels.
The Hyatt Regency Sonoma Wine Country has been playing games with free room night award availability. Most of the time you’ve been able to use Hyatt points for free nights there. However there’s a trick they’ve been using at peak times, like Memorial Day Weekend, to stop people from redeeming. They’ve been pulling a fast one on program members – and Hyatt. Fortunately after I pinged someone at Hyatt, they cracked down in less than 24 hours.
The five star Grand Josun resort in Jeju, South Korea is apologizing for a ‘mistake’ that allowed honeymooners to be seen honeymoooning in their sauna.
The sauna’s windows are coated to prevent seeing in during the day, but that doesn’t prevent people inside from being in full view at night – so blinds are supposed to come down when it’s dark. But they didn’t – and guests didn’t know this needed to happen.
I was sad to learn of the passing of Marriott’s long-time CEO Arne Sorenson, the first non-Marriott to hold the post. My sympathies go out to his family who lost him to pancreatic cancer way too early at 62. I wasn’t going to write about it because the news is well-covered. My reactions though center largely around what’s been said about him since his untimely passing.
His public legacy, I think, is more complicated than the tributes I’ve seen generally recognize. And that flows naturally from the role he filled at the helm of a global business in a very political industry.
Texas is experiencing a weather event it hasn’t seen in a generation. We don’t do single digit temperatures, negative wind chills, and significant snow. The problem compounded when the state’s electric grid couldn’t handle demand. Freezing temperatures took some power generation offline (due to frozen natural gas pipes) at a time when everyone cranked up their heat.
Local residents without power are complaining about hotel price gouging.
A hotel guests faces 6 counts of assaulting a police officer after calling the cops to his hotel room, saying he wanted to kill them “since his world was ending.” The cops didn’t end his world but did taser him several times.
The man, staying at the Plaza Resort on Atlantic Avenue in Daytona Beach, Florida, “threw knives, a trash can and other items at officers as they tried to get him to surrender.”
The Sheraton Atlanta Airport was liquidated, with all its furnishings sold off. Now the Sheraton Atlanta Downtown has been ransacked as well by a man driving through the hotel’s lobby. He parked in front of the elevators.
The hotel business can be strange in many ways. But timeshare brands are far, far stranger.
How about Marriott Vacations controlling Hyatt’s timeshare portfolio? That’s something not a lot of people realize but gets a big exclamation point from Marriott Vacations Worldwide spending $430 million to acquire Welk Resorts to turn them into Hyatt Residenes properties. And wait – there are Lawrence Welk hotels?
Any time Marriott doesn’t devalue its program that’s a good thing. Annual category creep has worked against you for many years, not just under Bonvoy but years earlier too. However as a result of the pandemic and how long it’s lasted we should see a majority of hotels dropping in category.
Marriott has around 7500 hotels in its portfolio. Only about 100 hotels are dropping in category – after the biggest drop in average daily room rate we’ve seen in history. Rooms cost less and Marriott’s revenue-based program should charge you fewer points. They shouldn’t just be offering ‘low season’ rates as a promotion, they should be offering those year round. And the base category of most hotels should be lower than when the hotel business was at its peak in 2019.
IHG has rebranded as IHG Hotels & Resorts. And they’ve changed the name of their loyalty program from IHG Rewards Club to IHG Rewards.
Sunday morning an employee was assaulted at the Red Lion Suites Governor Hotel as at least a dozen armed people entered the property carrying axes, knives and batons. The rest of the hotel’s staff fled for the basement.
The coordinated assault was done by hotel guests with reservations. The group, Oly Housing Now, booked 17 rooms at the property and put homeless individuals into them – and physically occupied the 4th and 5th floors.
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 »
