Hotel loyalty programs like Marriott Bonvoy promise upgrades to their frequent guests, if rooms are available at check-in, but getting those upgrades can be tough. There are too many elites – anyone with their premium credit card is a Platinum – but hotels play games also.

I recently walked through how some hotel general managers refuse to upgrade guests for business reasons.

• They’d rather leave a suite empty than a regular room, because larger rooms are more expensive to clean – they want to save on housekeepers.

• And late check-out benefits are tough to manage with suites. There are fewer suites, and a guest checking out at 4 p.m. means that room won’t be available to the next customer by 4 p.m. for check-in.

So I walked through one tactic that hotels use to avoid offering upgrades, when they want to both save money on housekeeping and remain compliant with program rules (some hotels don’t worry about following the rules, but those that do can use this dirty trick). They don’t clean the suites until they’re booked. A suite is only considered ‘available’ for a guest upgrade if it isn’t booked for the entire length of the stay, and it is ready (including being cleaned and inspected) at the time of check-in.

A housekeeping manager describes the tactic of not cleaning rooms until and unless they’re booked by paying guests.

I’m a housekeeping manager in NYC. Right now we are under 50% occupancy. A lot of our housekeepers are on layoff. We clean as many rooms are we can with the Room attendant we have. Being under 50% we don’t have to rush to clean the whole hotel and we just bring enough RA to clean what we need to cover arrivals and a bit more. Whatever dirty rooms are left are rolled over to the following day. Front desk always let’s us know if there specific suites/rooms needed so we can assign to have clean.

Suites that haven’t been booked by paying guests get skipped for cleaning, thus are not ‘available’ at check-in for upgrades. If a paying guest books a suite, then “[f]ront desk would let us know they need the suites and we have them cleaned.”

And this is why suites are available for paid bookings, but not available for upgrade, even though they’re standard suites that aren’t occupied by other guests and thus supposed to be part of the upgrade pool.

A Hyatt guest shares,

This just happened to me last month at Grand Hyatt Washington DC. Claimed no upgrades available while still selling the suites online. Front desk manager finally admitted it wasn’t available because it was not cleaned yet. I was checking in after 6pm.

I frequently check if I can make a paid booking for a suite right as I’m about to check into a hotel. That way I know if a suite is ‘available’. And it’s usually worked for me, to push back when the front desk inevitably tells me that no suites are available.

However, technically the hotel is correct that they can sell a room (it isn’t occupied) but also that the same room is not available for upgrade (it hasn’t been marked as inspected clean at the time I’m checking in). Some hotels have figured this out as a strategy to avoid offering upgrades, while some hotels just don’t clean the rooms – and as a consequence they aren’t available for upgrade – in order to cut down on housekeeping costs.