This Professor Booked A London Airbnb, And The Bedroom Was In The Bathroom [Roundup]

by Gary Leff

News and notes from around the interweb:

  • You do not book Airbnbs that don’t have any reviews! This U.C. Berkeley professor made a booking in London and learned that lesson (HT: H.G.):

  • New pay rates in the American Airlines pilot contract union members will be voting on.

  • Minimum order to earn Marriott points with UberEats increased from $25 to $50. Pretty low not to email people that have linked their Uber and Marriott accounts to notify them of this change, IMHO.

  • Ashford Hospitality Trust, which reports 101 hotels in its portfolio, will turn 19 properties over to lenders, mostly “Residence Inn, SpringHill Suites, and Marriott” properties. “Ashford Trust worked out deals to extend debt on 15 other hotels in the portfolio by providing a total of $129 million in paydowns, according to the statement.”

    Dallas-based Ashford Hospitality Trust Inc. expects to return 19 hotels to lenders in cities including Plano, Las Vegas and Atlanta, declining to pour more cash into the properties, which are part of a $982 million mortgage pool that missed a repayment deadline in June.

    Keeping the hotels would have required a paydown of about $255 million to extend the financing and $80 million in capital expenditures through 2025, Ashford Trust said in a statement Friday. The equity in the properties is already negative, based on comparable sales and brokers’ opinion of value, according to the statement.

  • Deutsche Bank wins Lufthansa Miles & More co-brand deal with Mastercard which earns 1 mile per €2 spent. (FT)

    Deutsche will from 2025 run the German credit card business of Lufthansa’s frequent-flyer loyalty programme, known as Miles & More. The deal is expected to more than double the bank’s annual volume of credit card transactions.

    …Industry experts estimate that Deutsche will make about €100mn in annual revenue from the deal…Miles & More members spend “five times more than the average German credit card user”

  • Tourist died after no one noticed he’d been knocked out going down water slide at hotel

  • The Raffles Hotel in Singapore generates $30,000 a day for 1,000 Singapore Slings at its Long Bar.

  • Lawsuit against American Airlines plays gotcha with New York labor law arguing that cabin crew are manual laborers and therefore the carrier violates the state’s pay frequency rules.

    Long shot perhaps but that could be a reason, with the loss of their Northeast Alliance, that they might no longer want a New York flight attendant base (like they’ve dropped their San Francisco base).

About Gary Leff

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 »

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Comments

  1. There has to be hundreds of mediocre branded hotels in suburban office parks and big city downtown cores that will never revert back to pre-pandemic profitability. And not just Marriott.

  2. @FNT Delta Diamond, you’ve asserted this point repeatedly without evidence. Certainly, some forms of profitable travel have been wiped out permanently with advancements in telecommuting. What’s to say the remaining forms will not fill the void? Or that net-new forms will not emerge?

    Office park hotels tend to have several enduring advantages, such as free parking and quieter surroundings. They are boring, to be sure. They were no less boring before the pandemic. Boring is what some travelers, on some trips, are looking for.

  3. With your bed inside a bathroom, it was good to learn that Airbnb features international properties for guests with diarrhea or dyssynergic defecation.

  5. @FNT Delta Diamond, these hotels have great weekend rates, We were at one in MI this year and CA in 2022. Both of these “office park” hotels were fully booked. We were at one in MI and expected it to be dead, came back late at night and the parking lot was packed.

  6. RE Lawsuit against American Airlines and New York labor law

    States are over reaching . what the FA does not realize is that he is in a union and and the union has agreed to certain things. He may want to be paid weekly for actual time but then puts a BURDEN on him now to log in and report his wages each week in a timely manner and accurately.

    I advise my clients that if an employee does not record his time worked for a day’s pay then he does not get paid. Even if the employer knows the employee worked, it is the responsibility of the employee to submit a complete and accurate time card in a timely manner.

    So if this guy’s time card is due Sunday 12 noon Eastern time and he is on a flight NY to Japan then he may be late.

    He is an adult not a child. Grow up.

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