‘Worms In The Bed, Broken Locks On The Door’: Passengers Expose the Horrors Of ‘Free’ Hotel Rooms During Airline Delays

by Gary Leff

When your flight is cancelled and you’re stuck somewhere overnight, the airline might give you a hotel room for the night. It frequently depends on whether the delay is ‘their fault’ – for instance, the plane had a mechanical problem, or they didn’t have pilots or flight attendants available to work the flight – or whether they consider the issue beyond their control such as weather or air traffic control issues.

In summer 2022, the Department of Transportation strong-armed airlines into covering hotels and meals during delays that are their fault. But there are problems.

  • If they give you a room, it’s often after a long wait, eating into the time you’re able to sleep.

  • Even airlines that will provide you a room automatically through their app may not have any rooms available (at their discount rate) to provide you.

  • And the room you get may not be the kind of place you want to sleep. The commitment is to offer a hotel, it says nothing about the quality of that room. And we consistently see airlines sticking only to the letter of that commitment, providing barely-habitable conditions at best.

Have a look at this, which is a passenger says is the condition of a room they were provided after their flight crew timed out in Charlotte at 2 a.m. It’s so horrible, can it even be real?

This is hardly a one-off. You regularly would not want to spend the night in the sort of hotel that American Airlines will provide for you when they cancel a flight or delay it overnight and you’re unexpectedly forced to stay in a city away from home. They promise accommodations, but do not make promises about the quality of those accommodations.

If you are in a position to do so, consider taking matters into your own hands even at your potential expense (though there are ways of minimizing the expense). If you rely on the airline for accommodation, you’re likely to wind up somewhere that you really do not want to stay. And it may take a significant amount of time to get even that – taking away from the limited time you may have for rest before returning to the airport for an early flight the next day. So what do you do instead?

  1. Rely on your credit card coverage. Pay for your ticket with a credit card that offers trip delay coverage, book your own room and save receipts for it, along with ground transportation and meals. IYou’re assured the property you are comfortable staying in. You won’t wait. And you can look farther afield if need be. Sure, airport hotels might well all be booked. But if you aren’t spending an hour in line to get the room is a 20 minute drive away from the airport (also billed to trip delay coverage) so bad?

    Some readers might say that ‘you’re obligated to minimize the insurer’s loss, and foregoing a room offered by the airline fails to do that and obviates coverage’. I do not believe you are obligated to take any room, of any quality offered. And I have never seen coverage denied for this when claimed properly.

  2. Request a distressed passenger rate. If you don’t have credit card trip delay coverage, and you can’t find a good rate on your own that you’re willing to pay, one alternative to the long line may be the baggage office. Ask there about distressed passenger rates for hotels. If the line is long at your airline’s baggage office, or it isn’t staffed, be friendly and ask at another airline’s baggage office.

  3. Use points. Airline hotels often are great deals on points, with reward costs based on a hotel’s average daily rate which tends to be brought down by large airline contracts for housing crew. A few thousand points from your stash can get you a far better night’s sleep, more quickly, than relying on the airline.

The quality of overnight delay accommodations is not just an American Airlines or even U.S. airline issue. Air Canada has sent a man and a woman, who didn’t know each other, to a hotel to share a room. And in China, Hainan Airlines put passengers up in an S&M-themed hotel.

Airlines may give you a free room when you’re faced with a controllable overnight delay. But you get what you pay for – you probably don’t want to sleep in the room they’re going to give you. There are exceptions, but it can be very much worth venturing off on your own rather than rolling the dice on free.

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

  2. United gave me a room at the Hilton across the roadway from Terminal 2 at O’Hare. Very comfortable.

    Alaska gave me a decent room at SFO not far away. It was just before the Hyatt connected to the airport opened.

  3. After seeing this “room” fair compensation would be to fly first class for free for life, the room looks that bad.

  4. Asking at the baggage service office is a good tip… maybe not exactly for the reason you state.

    At many airports (as you may or may not expect) there’s usually a “fixer” of sorts operating…. they do a little baggage delivery, a little perhaps off the books ground transportation, maybe have a contract to take an airline’s pilots by limo to a hotel that doesn’t have a shuttle for a long layover, etc. At a couple airports where I’ve worked, there’s been such a person. At my last one, it was a very enterprising Nigerian man who owned a ground transportation business. But he also had in his pocket hotel rooms maybe 20 miles away that didn’t have a shuttle. If we as the airline couldn’t get rooms through the official means, one call and he could find us rooms usually somewhere better and for less money, but he would be there with a square reader ready to swipe my company-issued-interrupted-trip card with a $500k credit limit. He also used to pay a commission to airline agents who sent people his way.

    So ask in the bag office, or maybe even the rental car desks. They probably have another number or a business card or something that can help you out. I once made a sort of deal traveling as a member of the public when I got stranded at a hub… I found a hotel (a new Country Inn & Suites) that was not an airport hotel but had plenty of open rooms. Told them if they could arrange transportation at least once to the hotel and back to airport in the morning, and strike a good rate, I’d get them 20 people. 15 minutes later they’d arranged a party bus charter and two dozen of us were no longer facing extortion rates or a 2 hour airline counter line.

  5. Nasty. If only we had actual air passengers protections like EU261 or Canada’s APPR, which provided a baseline of compensation for excessively delayed or cancelled flights under the airlines’ control. Then, we could receive a couple hundred dollars anytime they are at fault, covering the costs of better accommodations, if we prefer that, which we should.

    Alas, our current regime only serves oligarchs. We peasants who fly commercial (yes, even the mere millionaires who buy First Class are relatively still ‘poors’) can get bent. Anyway, back to the culture war… to distract us from actual making anything better. *sigh*

  7. For AA, if you have an Admirals Club membership and there’s an open club go to the club. The staff can provide a hotel room if warranted and they usually will have a list of open properties versus the gate you’re going to get what the gate agent gives you, like it or not.

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