Marriott appears to be testing a requirement that guests give up housekeeping during their stay in order to get the cheapest room rates.
Before the pandemic, hotels might compensate guests for giving up housekeeping on a multi-night stay. Starwood, since acquired by Marriott, was a pioneer at this with their ‘Make a Green Choice’ program. Marriott dropped compensation of guests who give up housekeeping during the pandemic in 2020, since hotels weren’t providing much housekeeping during stays anyway. In total, hotels eliminated over 100,000 housekeeping jobs.
However, guests want their trash picked up, rooms tidied and beds made – at a minimum. And full service brands have had to restore at least some housekeeping. Now, there’s a new effort effort to save on hotel labor labor costs, and it’s being trialed at at least one Marriott property.
The Westin Wall Centre, Vancouver Airport‘s cheapest room rate is called Stay Green Save More and requires the guest to give up housekeeping during their stay as part of the rate.
Thank you for choosing to travel Green — This rate gives an extra discount for travelers to decline any housekeeping or overnight service — This helps Wall Centre Hotels attain our ambitious environmental targets — Declining overnight service allows us to reduce our water consumption and energy use in a very meaningful way — For your safety and comfort, we will enter your room for a wellness-check and a modest refresh every 3 days
A ‘wellness-check’ ostensibly means they’re checking to see if you died in the room. In reality, housekeeping service doesn’t just clean the room it also identifies significant damage to the property. And after three days of accumulated Chinese takeout, wet towels on the floor, and trash in the bathroom they may need to take cleanup action to preserve the property rather than for the guest’s enjoyment.
Westin is a Marriott “full service brand” and that brand requires daily housekeeping. This rate allows them to employ fewer housekeepers. And it’s an interesting test to see if customers will book it, once the lowest rate (on a longer stay) requires it.
Put another way, this hotel charges guests an extra fee in the form of a higher room rate if they want a basic service that’s part of the Westin brand standard, turning a basic Westin service into an optional add-on.
Is that something that could spread, perhaps to other highly-unionized cities where housekeeping is most expensive to provide?
(HT: Loyalty Lobby)
People aren’t going to pay for housekeeping and as a result it will take far longer to clean a room once the guest checks out. Stupidity by the MBA class, as usual.
So, they’re charging guests more money for what used to be included. What next: special rates with no TV or non-en suite bathrooms?
I donno about you, but I feel Bonvoy’d. This plan is both infuriating yet not surprising. As with ‘inflation,’ these greedy companies will inevitably raise prices, blame some boogeyman (‘it’s the supply chain!’), while offering customers less. At this rate, Marriott is becoming AirBnB, where you get charged extra for the privilege of doing their laundry for them before you leave or you get penalized. The enshitification continues.
Oh, yay, more trash in the halls.
I read this situation differently. If this is a discounted rate for those who don’t want/need housekeeping during their stay, like my wife and me, then I’ll take it. If the other rates have not been increased, they aren’t ‘charging’ for housekeeping. If they are, different story, of course.
When will Marriott require guests to bring their own linens?
Why can’t the hotel provide a trashcan that is more than 1 gallon? Are they just stupid? Do they think that we are hoarding trash? Why is there not in room or recycle bin? You may not think that trash should be recycled. If they provide it larger trash bins they’ll be less need For Housekeeping.
Real room cleaning takes time and effort. With a few cities having a eager greater than$20/hour, it could cost the hotel$27 to clean the room. Tack on other labor cost, rent, maintenance, etc. and it gets expensive.
For all the people who say they don’t need daily housekeeping, I don’t think you realize that rooms are dirtier because you skip housekeeping. The vast majority of hotels do not give a housekeeper more time to clean a room after a guest who skipped housekeeping checks out from the property.
Most hotels, across all brands, expect a housekeeper to flip a room in under 30 minutes. Sure, they will deep-clean a room at a regular or semi-regular interval but you would be surprised what can accumulate if two or three guests in a row skip daily housekeeping.
The kind of cleanliness-related issues that I’ve experienced at about 60% of my stays since the pandemic almost never happened before the pandemic, when daily housekeeping was the standard at even relatively low-end brands like a Fairfield or Holiday Inn Express.
So @gary.
It all unions problem. Also caused by the lowly compensated house keepers and not because Marriott is greedy and try to squeeze every dollar out.
And Marriott continues to sink deeper into the trash bin of history.
Wait until there is a breakout of a serious spate of illnesses in a hotel due to the fact that the property is dirty and disease ridden.
I already bring my own toilet paper
the thin sandpaper is awful at their hotels.Sometimes the tissues are crap too
What happens when you arrive at the hotel and the room smells and the bed lines have stains?
It’s happened a number of times.
Remember when Marriott hotels were a trusted premium brand(s)
Want a bed with that room? That’s extra
To the editor who wrote this article, why is it so specific to say ‘Chinese food take out”?. Why not just write “take out food”?.
Looks like I won’t be staying at one of their hotels. Cutting staff and charging patrons is bad business and shows how viral corporate greed has become.
I stayed at an independent 3* in Japan once. They gave me a laundry bag in the room, and every day I’d put my dirty towels in the bag, place it the hall, and they’d replace them with clean towels. That’s all the service I require.
As long as it is not a mandatory charge, I’m not sure it is a problem. But, if I do pay for housekeeping, they will not receive a tip for simply doing their job.
@M – because Chinese food is likely to smell a bit more than, say, a sandwich
The issue here is that over the past year or two, hotel profitability growth has stalled as costs have increased and revenue growth has slowed. The reasons revenue growth has slowed (despite recovery in business travel) are interesting, but the fact is most hotels aren’t growing profits at the hotel level right now. Combined with higher interest rates, and hotel owners are seeing their values decline and are panicking. Their instinctual reaction is to ask Marriott and others to do stuff like this to reduce housekeeping hours and costs. The real problem is that these hotels actually need higher occupancy in order to make more money and to increase room rates further – these initiatives don’t do much to create more demand.
And yet….people continue to patronize Marriott.
There’s a sucker born every minute.
@Anthony: If that’s true it’s a reflection that there are probably too many hotels in many markets, especially all the suburban office park hotels or generic downtown business or convention center hotels. It’s hard to see remote work ever ending. Yes, some markets don’t have enough hotels. But there’s so much saturation in many markets. It’s likely why nobody is building a new Hyatt Regency. The markets without a Hyatt Regency already have multiple Westins, Sheratons, Marriotts, Hiltons or whatever.
FNT – I agree 100%. Yet Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt and others insist on trying to add as many hotels as they can everywhere. Gary is right to point out that brand CEOs only care about net rooms growth, often to the detriment of everything else
Good ECON 101 lesson hear. The hotel doesn’t charge for something that used to be included in the base rate. Rather, that is what they would like to do. Instead, taking cleaning out of the base service will reduce the base rate by the value of the cleaning. It unbundles two things previously only sold together. Room rates don’t rise. The reason is competition forcing the hotel’s attempt to raise the room rate back to what consumers value it at.
Oh Gary, I was totally thinking “what a snowflake” when M was offended by your Chinese food comment but then you went and made it racist:
“because Chinese food is likely to smell a bit more than, say, a sandwich”
Would you be okay with someone talking about how stinky takeout gefilte fish would be?