Tag Archives for destination hotels.
I had reserved a points stay with confirmed suite upgrade at Alila Marea, but that hotel shut down for a private event and moved me to the Seabird Resort. It turns out that this was a lucky break because the suite I had at the Seabird was truly magnificent. Service and food on property were excellent, too. And I might never have stayed here otherwise!
First we had deceptive resort fees – part of the room rate is hidden, called a fee, and you don’t see it included in the total cost of a room when you’re comparing hotel rates on a website. Resort fees spread to hotels that aren’t resorts. In cities they started to call resort fees urban destination fees.
I thought we had reached peak absurdity with the spread in Las Vegas of ‘venue fees’.
When I covered this new type of fee back in September I asked, ‘Karl Marx said history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce. If venue fees is hotels repeating the resort fee as tragedy, can the farce be far behind?” Apparently we’ve already reached farce.
I don’t have an issue with limited-participation hotels, and it makes sense for timeshare hotels not to offer complimentary breakfast as an elite benefit. However it’s not really fair to say that Hyatt is growing and delivering more value to members by adding hotels where redemption is not possible.
And I think we can assume that moving five Destination Hotels into category 8 is just the beginning. We’ll eventually see more at the inflated 40,000 points per night level.
Last month we learned Hyatt would begin adding Destination Hotels properties to the Hyatt portfolio August 20.
At the time we learned which 8 out of three dozen Destination Hotels would join early on. Now Hyatt has shared the new redemption categories for each of those.
So far only 8 out of three dozen Destination Hotels have dates set for joining, and there’s no list of properties which won’t become part of Hyatt. Of course some Destination Hotels will become part of other Hyatt brands.
HABITAS hotel and hospitality management group co-founder Oliver Ripley was charged with “grand larceny, criminal possession of stolen property and falsifying business records” over what appears to have been alleged as a fraudulent charge back on his American Express card. He has pled to a mere misdemeanor and claims it was all a misunderstanding.
He says that his then-girlfriend Victoria’s Secret model Sara Sampaio refinanced her Manhattan condo and was left “with a $48,000 tax bill” which he put on his American Express card. Then she left him.
In December I wrote about a woman suing Hilton claiming a hotel employee videotaped her in the shower and used the photos to blackmail her. I’ve written about plenty of cases of video surreptitiously hidden in hotel rooms and also inside of Airbnb accommodations.
Now there’s any case being reported of a paid subcription website where viewers could watch hotel guests being secretly taped in South Korean hotel rooms.
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 »
